Keynote & Plenary Panel for 2023 Conference

chicken: a queer, visual ecohistory
Keynote lecture by Dr. Andil Gosine

Monday | 29 May 2023 | 6:30pm
@ 519 Church Street Community Centre, Toronto
Free and open to the public! Refreshments and beverages served!

This event is co-sponsored by the Federation’s Open Programs Fund

How to figure oneself and one’s choices in the currently unfolding global ecological crisis? How might we contend with longstanding tensions about we humans’ varying and simultaneous recognition and denial of our animality, and the complex imbrications of these actions with desire and death in the context of an ecological emergency? And what might we learn from other animals’ own experiences with the disciplining and liberation of their wildness?

In this keynote presentation, Professor Andil Gosine elaborates key contentions in his recent book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean, including his call for rejection of complicity with the historical onus put upon marginalized subjects—including queer, poor and non-white people—in the Americas to prove themselves “human, not animal.” Drawing upon artistic representations of the chicken and related interdisciplinary scholarship—e.g. on the entwinement of anxieties about bestiality and sodomy in law—and integrating autobiography that references his own experiences with chickens (as well as his own artwork), Dr. Gosine will weigh the tensions and choices we experience and face about our “wildness” in the midst of global ecological crisis, through discussion of visual artworks that have sprung from his text and which centre an interdisciplinary analysis of the chicken and its genetic precursor, the Sri Lankan junglefowl. Some of these works will make their public debut at the keynote, including Dr. Gosine’s textile tapestry “Chicken,” and his collaborative diptych completed with London-based painter Angie Quick.

Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University. His research, teaching, artistic and curatorial practices pursue consideration of the imbrications of power, ecology and desire, as reflected in his co-authored book Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada, and in his essays that have appeared in scholarly anthologies like Queer Ecology, Queer Youth Cultures, Queering Online and Queerly Canadian, as well as in journals including Topia, Canadian Woman Studies, Sexualities, Art in America and Wasafiri. Dr. Gosine’s artwork has been exhibited at various venues internationally, and recent curatorial projects include Wendy Nanan at the Art Museum of the Americas, the acclaimed everything slackens in a wreck at Ford Foundation Gallery, the forthcoming Unfinished Work at the Leslie-Lohman Museum and as-yet-untitled solo show of new works by the artist with whom he has worked most closely, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, at Aicon Gallery in New York. In 2021, Duke University Press published his Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean, a text which has become the catalyst for several artistic collaborations and is the subject of three critical essays in current edition of the journal Small Axe.

Queer Histories, Queer Struggles: Beyond the Neo-Liberal Queer
A pre-launch plenary for the 3^rd Edition of The Regulation of Desire convened by Dr. Gary Kinsman, the SSA’s 2022 Academic Leadership in Sexuality Studies Award Recipient

Wednesday | 31 May 2023 | 10:45am – 12:30pm,
@ York University, Curtis Lecture Hall G

This fall Concordia University Press will publish the third edition of Gary Kinsman’s The Regulation of Desire, first published in 1987, with an expanded edition in 1996. This plenary will be a preview of what is coming in the 2023 edition focusing on both the emergence and resistance against the white Neoliberal Queer. The third edition includes a new Introduction, a revised chapter on the colonization and resistance of Indigenous peoples, an updated chapter on what has taken place since 1996 including the emergence of the Neoliberal Queer, and a revised conclusion based on abolitionist hope and revolutionary love.

Speakers include Gary Kinsman (also co-author of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation) who will refer to sections from the Introduction and Conclusion of the third edition; OmiSoore Dryden, of #GotBlood2Give, who has written the Forward for the third edition and is the James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie; Beverly Bain, Black Radical Queer anti-capitalist feminist revolutionary who teaches in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga; River Rossi whose research resides in the fields of critical disability studies, Mad studies, critical trans studies, sexuality studies, settler colonial studies, and anti-capitalist social movements; and queer historian Tom Hooper who has written the Afterword to this edition. This sets the stage for an engaged discussion on how we can move beyond the Neoliberal Queer.