Event Date: Wednesday, January 16, 2019
"On these bones: Queer regenerations of the Toronto Gay Village"
Wednesday, January 16th - 4:30 to 6 pm
Location: SSC 3014
Dr. Jin Haritaworn,
Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Toronto, ON
As the case of serial killer Bruce McArthur, many of whose victims were gay men people of colour, hit the mainstream news, the following questions once again arose: Whose lives will be missed? Whose disappearances from spaces imagined as gay or LGBT are worth reporting and investigating? How are notions of innocence and violence, and horizons of redress and transformation, complicated when the perpetrator is both a gay man associated with the degenerate/regenerating urban space of the “Gay Village,” and a white cis-man whom dominant voices in the village, and to some extent the media and police, register as “one of us”? And how do our activist scholarly practices of archiving, curating and programming serve to unmap or reinscribe these practices?
This talk draws on the work of the Marvellous Grounds collective, a queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour mapping and archiving project coming out of York University. In this archive, the successful territorialization of the “Gay Village” becomes apparent as an effect of a carceral city that is not only neoliberal, but also racial and colonial, and that treats low-income trans women of colour in particular as excessive. To queer urban justice in a lethal environment that is fluent in the languages of diversity, and to prefigure futures that go beyond these murderous inclusions, means to remember differently, and to step into the unfinished legacies of those who are rarely missed, and whose removal has been constitutive of urban and academic spaces designated “gay,” “LGBT” and, increasingly, “trans”.
Part of the 2018-10 Women's Studies and Feminist Research Speaker Series