Keynote 1, 22.11. at 14.00-15.30 (Edu 1)
Mel Y. Chen

Keynote 2, 23.11. at 9.30-11.00 (Edu 1)
Kim TallBear: Decolonial Sex and Relations for a More Sustainable World

We live in an era of global decimation dubbed by some the “anthropocene.” Settler-colonial states including the US and Canada disproportionately consume the world. As we reconsider violent human practices and conceive of new ways of living with our relations—both human and other-than-human—in the face of a feared apocalypse, we must interrogate settler sexuality and family constructs that make both land and humans effectively into property. Post-apocalyptic for centuries, Indigenous peoples have been disciplined by the state according to a monogamist, heteronormative, marriage-focused, nuclear family ideal that is central to the colonial project. Settler sexualities and their unsustainable kin forms do not only harm humans, but they also harm the earth. I consider how expansive indigenous concepts of kin, including with other-than-humans, can serve as a provocation for moving into more sustainable and just relations.

Keynote 3, 23.11. at 14.00-15.30 (Edu 1)
Alyosxa Tudor: Im/Possibilities of Refusing and Choosing Gender, or: Epistemologies of Contradiction, Uncertainty and Transit

Looking at sites like transphobia in feminism; rigid cis/trans binaries in some approaches on transgender; nationalism in migrant communities; and ‘sexual violence feminism’, this paper grapples with questions of contradiction, ambivalence and transit in critical knowledge production.
In particular, relying on theories that identify ‘ungendering’ as effect of racial violence (e.g. Spillers 1987, Lewis 2017, Snorton 2017), it attempts to think gender-nonbinary from a perspective that centres analyses of racialisation. Building on theories that point out the impact of racism and colonialism for constructions of gender as a binary and heteronormative category, this paper is an invitation to think through what a refusal to do the ‘labour of misogyny’ could mean. It is the complex im/possibilities of refusing and choosing in relation to gender, I want to discuss here. My intervention tries to imagine conceptualisations of entangled power relations that do not rely on fixed, pre-established categories but define subjectivity through risk in political struggle.

How can we think of ‘gender’ in ways that seriously consider sexual violence’s role in its emergence while at the same time avoiding the trap of over-determining ‘gender’ as solely a product of sexual violence? How do we know what ‘gender’ even is and how can we reject certainties on how to best get rid of it? How can we deconstruct gender as a pre-given category and at the same time acknowledge the pleasure of gendering; and reclaim sexuality as politicised location in which trauma and desire meet in ways we cannot escape with fantasies of purity or certainties about the functioning of power? How can we refuse to play power relations against each other and come up with complex transnational politics and knowledge productions that do not take their own transgressive potential for granted?