Trans & Queer Resistance: 9th Annual Queer Directions Symposium

Queer Directions is an annual symposium at The Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies addressing pressing issues in queer and trans studies, politics, and culture. This year’s theme is Trans & Queer Resistance with speakers Karma Chávez, Charlene A. Caruthers, Sayan Bhattacharya, and Emi Koyama. This symposium focuses on creative, intellectual, activist, and grassroots organizing traditions and social justice and movement work that both addresses the ongoing harms and material violences of everyday life, but also organizes toward and imagines the possibility for queer, trans, black, brown, and indigenous lifeworlds. Our esteemed panelists will join us to raise similar questions, press on other ones, and bring their own work to bear on what it means to do this work now.
If you have any accessibility needs or requested accommodations, please email [email protected].

This event will have ASL interpreters and live transcription available.

Speaker Bios

Karma R. Chávez is Chair and Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. She is author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019); and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021). She is a cofounder of her campus Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

Charlene A. Carruthers (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer, and Black Studies PhD Candidate at Northwestern University. Her work spans more than 20 years of community organizing across racial, gender and economic justice movements.

A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her work as an artist is to honor ancestors across the diaspora and interrogate ongoing work towards collective liberation. Charlene wrote and directed The Funnel, a short film, which received the Queer Black Voices Award at the 35th Annual aGLIFF Prism Film Festival. Charlene also directed La Salida, a short film co-written by Deivid Rojas and produced by Full Spectrum Features. She is an inaugural Marguerite Casey Presidential Freedom Scholar, 2024 Northwestern University Presidential Fellow, and 2024 Center for Racial Justice Fellow at the University of Michigan.

She is the founding National Director of BYP100, a national organization of young Black organizers working through a Black queer feminist lens. In addition to being a highly sought-after speaker, educator, and facilitator, Charlene is author of the bestselling book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (Beacon Press). She is an enthusiastic global traveler and believes that food is the best way to learn about people and culture

Sayan Bhattacharya is an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland, College. Their current manuscript in progress is an archival and ethnographic exploration of of various improvisatory and innovative strategies that Indian trans communities deploy to make life in an environment saturated by violence. Sayan stages conversations between anthropology of violence, trans, queer and critical disability studies scholarship on care and anti-caste literatures to study the efforts needed to reproduce an everyday that can be inhabited. Their research has appeared in Cultural Studies, Radical History Review, Global Public Health, Transgender Studies Quarterly, South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, QED and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Anthropology and Humanism among others. Sayan is the recipient of the 2023 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies for their essay "Inhabiting the State Subjunctively: Transgender Life-making alongside Death and a Pandemic". Sayan also volunteers with community-led trans and disability rights organizations in West Bengal in India.

Emi Koyama is a multi-issue social justice activist and writer synthesizing feminist, Asian, survivor, dyke, queer, sex worker, intersex, genderqueer, and crip politics. Koyama has written and presented extensively about these issues, and is especially known for her critiques of the anti-trafficking movement and mainstream survivor support services. She is the author of "The Transfeminist Manifesto,” a founder of the advocacy group Intersex Initiative, a former board member of the Survival Project (a now-defunct organization serving intersex and transgender survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence), an advocate for the decriminalization of sex work, and a member of the Coalition for Rights and Safety for People in the Sex Trade.

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