Indigenous Lands, Resisting Sexualities in Abiayala
Thursday, April 18, 1–7:30 PM & Friday, April 19, 9 AM–6 PM
Texas Union Eastwoods Room, UNB 2.102 (main floor)
THIS CONFERENCE WILL ENGAGE CONVERSATIONS at the intersections between indigeneity, bodies, and sexualities as they interweave into struggles against ongoing land dispossession and colonialism in what is known today as the Americas or Abiayala—a Kuna term to name the region as well as its North/South continental linkages.
Free and open to the public | No registration necessary
Although issues of land and sexualities are often considered separately, our conference will focus on how they may intersect and can enrich discussions on non-heteronormative sexual politics, Indigenous land liberation, and decolonization.
Indigeneity in relation to land is a widely debated topic. We build from this important foundation but center on Native LGBTQI+ individuals and communities who are often dismissed in hegemonic “Indigenous” politics, and vice versa. The conference will also include invited artists, activists, and senior scholars from different nations of Abiayala and across the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
We will gather to imagine the possibility of a liberatory, non-compulsory sexual politics as a critical dimension for any horizon of decolonized life.
From a transtemporal and transnational perspective, it is our hope that this interdisciplinary conference generates intersections among Critical Indigenous Studies, LGBTQI+ studies, gender and sexuality studies, environmental and/or earth studies, the creative arts, and the multiple Indigenous activisms on non-heteronormative and anti-patriarchal sexual and cultural politics in Abiayala as a transhemispheric Native or Indigenous notion of space/continent.
The conference is methodologically organized and arranged engaging Indigenous principles of conversation, collaboration, and communal relations. Within this framework, the event will be organized as a series of panels, workshops, circles of conversation, and artistic presentations followed by open, interactive dialogues.
Conference schedule to come
Conference Organizers
Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese; Director, Native American and Indigenous Studies Program (NAIS)
Enzo E. Vasquez Toral, Assistant Professor of Performance as Public Practice, Department of Theatre and Dance
Coordinator
Paloma Diaz-Lobos, Asst. Director of Scholarly Programs & Faculty Liaison, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies