“FAGGOTS GALORE. WHIRLING LESBIAN DERVISHES. OUT COME THE FREAKS.”

So begins Fuzz Box Vol. 2 No. 5, a zine edited by Nicolas Jenkins in Montreal at the height of the queer anarcho-punk scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s. In an era shaped by the AIDS epidemic and its ensuing culture wars, violences, and oppressions, zinesters waged queerness as a weapon against bigotry and boredom. Join Nat Pyper for an erotic close reading and page-turning performance of Fuzz Box, the At War issue: an intimate encounter between publishing and desire.

In sixteenth-century Europe, interest in so-called ‘monstrous births’ was rife. Infants with congenital abnormalities were displayed at fairs, outside churches and in their homes. The causes of their physical deviance were considered in medical and ethnographical works, as well as sermons, autobiographies, and a host of other texts. The tradition of interpreting infants in this way was, of course, not new. But in the early modern period, the discourse entered print for the first time. In this lecture I will reflect upon the consequences of this material fact, focussing my discussion on a small group of ‘broadsides’: cheap, mass-produced, single-sheet texts which were intended for a general readership. How did these texts articulate and transmit ideologies of bodily difference? What was the relationship between their form and content? How did they shape public notions of normalcy and deviance?

Walking along a the uneven accountabilities of trans* feminist technoscience and critical pedagogy: Feeling out T*FTS (Trans*FeministTechnoScience) will be a lecture based in a not emerged (non-linear and between) timeline. Based in queer theory, trans* studies, feminist technoscience and disability justice the lecture will be a remixing of different theoretical texts and artistic and design projects that have impacted me as an artist and researcher. Feelings will be prioritised and omissions are promised.

Taking the lead from Fred Moten and Harney’s criticism of academia and call for dissident forms of knowledge production, this presentation will explore the lives and the work of a group of 20th century figures that enacted forms of fugitivity avant-la-lettre. We will adopt a notion of fugitivity intended both as a breaching of the institutional frame, as well as a desire to trespass the boundaries between theory and practice, different media, literary genres and ultimately art and politics. We will first examine how critic Carla Lonzi’s decision to leave the artworld and embrace separatist feminism, was paralleled by a transfiguration of her mode of writing, aimed at challenging the artifice of language. We will then move to the erratic literary production of 70s gay activist Mario Mieli, which we will examine in light of his political attempt to replace identity with a world of erotic abundance.

Dr. Bess Williamson will share some key moments in historical and current practices of design that addresses disability. From origins in the post-World War II decades, to recent creative efforts, disabled people and their allies have identified the potential for design to align with ideas of social change and justice—but that this means confronting biases and resistance on local and global levels.

Museums are places that are set up to out-survive us. They serve the public and are seen as important places in which a society can define itself and present itself. Museums solidify and legitimate culture…. this is why they have been such important stages of activism! The battle against the supposed neutrality of the Museum has been an ongoing artistic and political investigation. This talk will explore questions that art activism in New York City has raised about identity and the social politics of representation and appropriation in the museum. We’ll consider artistic practices of solidarity though a Black feminist lens, listening to images of protest in order to think through what a radical practice of coalition building might look like in art spaces.

Through listening moments, readings and sharing stories from projects developed over the last decade, we will think about how histories of radical pedagogy and practices of listening play a role in community practice and collective imagining. What are the ways that collective imagining can create alternative spaces for contesting power and advocating for new forms of relation? As an artist, organiser or designer how do you ground your practice in supporting collective desire? The challenge of including the arts and pedagogical practices meaningfully in research, organising and community initiatives is not new, but has grown more important in these crisis-ridden times. There is a need for more collaborative work embracing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and action.

Shapeshifters and tricksters are folkloric figures living at the intersection of different realities and universes — human and non-human animals, the living and the dead. They incarnate multiple ways of being and acting in the world, challenging hegemonic, colonial narratives of universality, scientific neutrality, and homogeneity, and compelling us to think instead in terms of metaphors, contradictions, and borderlessness. Feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa wrote extensively about the necessity for the non-conforming subject to acquire abilities akin to those of the shapeshifter as a form of survival. The colonized subject, she contends, is a shapeshifter in nature, living and speaking from the borders of different languages, identities, and knowledges.

Starting from an engagement with feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist theories, in this lecture we will critically examine questions of positionality, objectivity, and universality design research, and how they relate to the cohesion of Western-centric systems of knowledge. Building upon these reflections, we will then speculate on the anti-colonial and counter-hegemonic possibilities offered by approaching the role of the design researcher as akin to that of the shapeshifter, and by understanding knowledge as composed by a multitude of lived experiences, ontologies and epistemologies between systems.

In 1925, Alain LeRoy Locke was asked to be guest editor of an issue of Survey Graphic, the richly designed periodical covering sociological and political issues of the day. The issue, titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro”, was Locke’s first publication wherein he connected an emerging generation of young black writers, poets, and artists, to what would be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The infamous issue became the basis for the seminal 1925 anthology The New Negro, which marked a shift from a focus on Black bodies to Black consciousness and Black thought.

The following year, a collective of young, black, and some queer artists would write, design, and self-publish FIRE!!, a publication devoted to younger Negro artists. FIRE!! was conceived by Langston Hughes and Bruce Nugent, both of who had work featured in The New Negro. They enlisted Wallace Thurman to edit the publication, and commissioned other black artists to contribute to its pages. The magazine’s varied content contained diverse genres, including essay, design, illustration, plays, and poetry. Tragically, the headquarters of FIRE!! burned down after the completion of the first issue, but not before its content made equally fiery controversy.

In this book talk drawn form Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke, 2020), I outline how lesbian feminists in the U.S. and Canada approached publishing as an information practice key to establishing a foundation for their movements, and building more livable lives for lesbians. Focusing on newsletters, bibliographies and indexes, I show how activists created and circulating information as a world-making process when access to information was otherwise precarious.