This event requires registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dli-the-history-of-queerness-tickets-151083606133

Workshop Title: A Sense of Healing: A Relational Meditation in Queer (and Trans) of Color Worldmaking

José Esteban Muñoz taught us to see queerness as a horizon, a becoming—the utopic reach of which was located not in a want for rights or bids of inclusion but, rather, in relationally-derived survival against a white supremacist machine designed to destroy. Later, he clarified, locating the political brunt of queerness in a sense. For example, queer and trans folks of color may never experience white colonial fantasies of “freedom” but may experience a sense of freedom in a shared laugh, a late night drunken dance with a stranger, a dissociative tangent, or in a long silent embrace between friends. In this talk, and informed by Muñozian queer utopias, Dr. LeMaster reaches for and imagines a sense of healing within queer and trans organizing, teaching, and scholarship. To do this, LeMaster invites to revisit a moment in US queer history when the notion of “gay power” was eclipsed by the allure of US (white) nationalist inclusion. The result of which was a rupturing of racialized and classed gender non-conformity from the respectability of an emerging white cis gay and lesbian bourgeoise formation—what LeMaster conceptualizes as an unaddressed racialized wound in US queer mythmaking. In turn, LeMaster, a mixed-race Asian/white queer and non-binary trans femme explores this rupture and wound, using their own queer and trans body as a site of interrogation, to imagine a sense of healing within queer and trans spaces.