SSA’s Annual Conference Begins This Friday!

This Friday marks the 10^th anniversary of our annual conference!  While we are meeting virtually once again this year, we are looking forward to the potential return to in-person events next year.  In the meantime, we’ll celebrate our accomplishments and our members’ research successes via our conference website.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s free to register and peruse the brilliant papers submitted by our 2022 presenters. Each paper has a discussion function that creates an interactive dimension to our asynchronous paper presentations.  We’ve also got four synchronous events that we hope you’ll join us for: a keynote by Dr. Ann Cvetkovich, a plenary panel convened by Dr. Ricky Varghese, a meet and greet networking session, and our Annual General Meeting where are award recipients will be announced. Please find details for our synchronous events below.  We hope to see many of you there!

–     –     –

Grappling with Care: Femme Emotional Labour, Somatic Politics, and the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus
Keynote address by Dr. Ann Cvetkovich
Friday May 20, 2022 6:00pm – 7:30pm EST
Free and open to the public, register here
*event will be professionally live captioned*

This talk will explore the proliferation of discourses of care – including self-care, collective care, and radical care – as well as critiques of those discourses, both of which have gained additional momentum and urgency in activist and academic contexts during this time of pandemic. Taking up Eli Clare’s notion of “grappling with cure,” I “grapple with care,” including its use in addressing the mental health crisis in academia and its use by activists, especially queer feminists of colour working for racial, gender, sexual, and disability justice.  Drawing on the work of adrienne maree brown, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, I explore organizing and facilitation as forms of femme emotional labour or care, the somatic politics of reclaiming the body from collective histories of trauma, and creative approaches to practices of care.

Dr. Ann Cvetkovich is Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University.  She was previously Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and founding Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012).  For additional info, see www.anncvetkovich.com.

–     –     –

ruins, queer and otherwise…
Plenary panel convened by Dr. Ricky Varghese featuring Canisia Lubrin, Fan Wu, Concetta Principe, sam sax, Trish Salah.
Saturday May 21, 2022 2:00pm – 4:00pm EST
Free and open to the public, register here
Organized by Dr. Ricky Varghese, recipient of the 2020 Academic Leadership in Sexuality Studies Award.
*event will be professionally live captioned*

The philosopher Walter Benjamin famously suggested that “allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.” What kind of ruin is the thing or figure that is queer? Is queerness synonymous to the ruin? What might it mean to queer the ruin or think of it as foundationally queer at its core? If as Benjamin suggested, in the ruin, there are allegories for thinking itself, can queerness be a thought experiment requiring us to think differently, or otherwise, about difference and otherness? As the ellipsis in the title suggests – the ellipsis, itself a way to signify a sort of ruin in and of a text – this panel of poets attempts to initiate a conversation regarding what it is that leaves us in ruins, how we may find forms of redemption amidst these ruins, and what may be precisely queer and otherwise about this redemption.

Dr. Ricky Varghese is a freelance art writer and psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto. He received his PhD in the Sociology of Education from the University of Toronto in 2014 and completed his training to become a psychoanalyst through the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis in 2021. He has also held the inaugural Tanis Doe postdoctoral fellowship in Gender, Disability, and Social Justice at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly known as Ryerson University). His areas of research are suicidology, madness and the body in psychoanalysis, the history of the AIDS crisis and critical sexology at the intersection of queerness and disability, and questions of memory, mourning, and melancholia as it pertains to aesthetics, art, and curatorial practices. He will be returning to the Toronto Metropolitan University as a senior research fellow in the fall, during which he will continue working on the manuscript for his first book titled Last Rites for the Self: Sexual Difference and the Death Drive, a cultural study of self-killing in the present.

–     –     –

Meet and Greet: Structured Networking Session
Open to all conference attendees
Sunday May 22^nd, 2022 1:30 – 3:00pm EST
This structured session is designed to give conference attendees time to meet others with similar interests within the field. The session is hosted by SSA Chair Ryan Conrad and will involve introductions in a large group, and self-determined break outs into smaller, thematic discussions. Check conference website for zoom link.

–     –     –

10^th Annual General Meeting of the Sexuality Studies Association
Open to all members of the Sexuality Studies Association
Sunday May 22^nd, 2022 3:30 – 5:00pm EST
You must be a member in good standing to participate as a voting member at the AGM. If you have not paid your annual dues, you can do so here.
Check conference website for zoom link and meeting materials.