decoloniality

Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions

Posted November 1, 2016 · Add Comment

Editors: Sandeep Bakshi (University of Le Havre), Suhraiya Jivraj (University of Kent) and
Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck, University of London)
Counterpress, Oxford, 2016

Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions contributes to the critical field of queer decolonial studies by demonstrating how sexuality, race, gender and religion intersect transnationally. The volume maps some of the specifically local issues as well as the common ones affecting queer/trans people of colour (qtpoc). The contributions are not delimited by traditional academic style but rather draw on creative inspiration to produce knowledge and insight through various styles and formats, including poetry, essays, statements, manifestos, as well as academic mash-ups. Queering coloniality and the epistemic categories that classify people means to disobey and delink from the coloniality of knowledge and of being. At this intersection, decolonial queerness is necessary not only to resist coloniality but, above all, to re-exist and re-emerge decolonially.

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Isaac Julien: The Attendant (1993)

Posted July 24, 2015 · Add Comment

The plot revolves around sexual fantasies aroused in a middle-aged black male museum guard — or attendant — by a young white male visitor. Much of the action takes place after closing time. As the guard paces the galleries, a huge 19th-century painting titled “Slaves on the West Coast of Africa”, by the French artist François-Auguste Biard, comes to life, its melodramatic scene of a white master bending over a dying black slave transformed into an up-to-date, leather clad sadomasochistic grouping.

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TROPICAL VIDEO ACTIVISM. Transformative Illegalities & Post-Porning Genders

Posted March 3, 2015 · Add Comment

Curated by Fernanda Nogueira

March 7, 2015, 4-9pm, VBKÖ, Vienna

This screening program stems from the urgencies of a collective body, a body formed by fragments, a mutant, which resists any classification, provocative, unsatisfied, which creates new ways of living by acting in the territory of transgression. Tropical Video Activism presents video productions – either registers of actions or more experimental poetics – as signs to make visible, read and spread social transformations, which are in furious excitement in the public sphere in many Southern geographies.

These processes are not happening just in a single territory. We can map the social effervescence, the networks arising and intensifying the emergence and encounter of new transborder communities capable of sharing activist tools and circulating critical information which in the past could only be found in independent, underground and thought marginal networks. Facing the urgency of action and its various potentialities in these different territories, the modern categories such as “originality” or “authenticity” are turned obsolete. In contrast, a broader notion of “network” is strengthen daily in the configuration of a collective battlefield […]

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Jai Arun Ravine: Tom/Trans/Thai (2013)

Posted February 5, 2015 · Add Comment

Tom / Trans / Thai is a short experimental film that approaches the silence around female-to-male (FTM) transgender identity in the Thai context by addressing tom and trans-masculine identities in Thai and Thai American communities and the transnational relationships between gender and language.

Interviews conducted with Thai and Thai American toms and trans-masculine people are channeled through the moving body in an effort to locate ourselves in the Thai landscape and create a new language for our kind of being.

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Wu Tsang: Wildness (2012)

Posted December 22, 2014 · Add Comment

Directed by Wu Tsang. Wildness is a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic, LGBT-friendly bar on the eastside of Los Angeles that has catered to the Latin immigrant community since 1963. With a magical-realist flourish – the bar itself becomes a character in the film – Wildness captures the creativity and conflict that ensue when a group of young, queer artists of colour (Wu Tsang, DJs NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom) organise a weekly performance art party, called Wildness, at the bar. What does ‘safe space’ mean, and who needs it? The search for answers to these questions creates coalitions across generations.

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Shola Lynch: Free Angela and All Political Prisioners (2012)

Posted May 2, 2014 · Add Comment

Writer/director Shola Lynch follows up her 2004 documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed with this film centered on the struggle of educator and activist Angela Davis, an outspoken UCLA professor whose affiliation with the Communist Party and the Black Panthers landed her on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list while challenging our perceptions of political […]

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Luis F.Bernanza/Margaret Gilpin: Mariposas en el andamio (1996)

Posted April 8, 2014 · Add Comment

by Luis Felipe Bernaza, Margaret Gilpin

After the Revolution, gays were not respected in Cuba, but in the small Havana neighborhood of La Güinera, a few courageous women came to power and encouraged the gay community. Glamorous gowns fashioned from grain sacks and eyelashes made out of carbon paper are the reality of drag in Cuba. In La Güinera, gay transvestite performers have earned respect and status through creative work for the neighbourhood. On stage action and backstage preparation opens out into insightful interviews with community leaders, families, and the performers themselves.

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Kortney R. Ziegler: STILL BLACK – A Portrait of Black Transmen (2009)

Posted April 8, 2014 · Add Comment

STILL BLACK: A Portrait of Black Transmen is brought to life by the stories of six thoughtful, eloquent and diverse transmen. Preachers, teachers, students and activists educate us simply by making their presence known. Each man brings a colorful and complex richness as he describes his relationship to himself, as well as others in his […]

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Dalila Kadri: Lucioles (2004)

Posted April 2, 2014 · Add Comment

directed by Dalila Kadri, 2004 The documentary-alternative film “Fireflies (Lucioles)” is part of a European Commission project called “Lesmigras” (migrant lesbians), whose objectives are to fight racism, sexism and homophobia inside the European space that started in 2001 and closed in 2004. As the producer and the director of the movie, I choose to show […]

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Marlon Riggs: Tongues Untied (1990)

Posted January 28, 2013 · Add Comment

This is the acclaimed account of Black gay life by Emmy Award-winning director Marlon T. Riggs. Using poetry, personal testimony, rap and performance (featuring poet Essex Hemphill and others), Tongues Untied describes the homophobia and racism that confront Black gay men.

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Marina Gržinić/Aina Šmid:  Relations. 25 years of the lesbian group ŠKUC-LL, Ljubljana (2011)

Posted January 28, 2013 · Add Comment

Relations. 25 years of the lesbian group ŠKUC-LL, Ljubljana http://grzinic-smid.si/?p=276 (watch documentary) Authors: Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Zvonka T Simčič Length: 84 min 02 sec, 2012, color, sound Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, with English subtitles Produced by Zavod CCC, Ljubljana. This documentary video film is about the 25 anniversary of the lesbian group ŠKUC-LL (1987-2012) and about the lesbian […]

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Marissa Lôbo: Fuck you queer white supremacy celebration! (2012)

Posted January 27, 2013 · Add Comment

The video performance developed and performed by Marissa Lôbo in collaboration with Nataša Mackuljak, Alessandra do Santos Silva, Xhejlane Rexhepi and Noemi Auer is an intervention on Colonial desire and otherness, sexuality, racialized bodies, contra esthetic, migrant-precarious bodies, sex work, society double moral, and the regime of Western bodies politics. Marissa Lôbo is a migrant black activist and […]