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Stragizing Queer Isurgency!: Re-centering marginalized queer issues
Workshop & Discussion to be presented as a part of the 10th Annual
Montreal Anarchist Bookfair - Sunday May 16th 2009
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*** Hello! This post is to solicit your feedback, contributions, and collaboration for the planning and development of this workshop. We are hoping to gather as much ideas and input from members of our communities as possible over the course of the next month, in the interest of making this workshop/discussion and strategizing session relevant to our struggles as folks doing queer activism, organizing, or community work; or as queers doing organizing work in other struggles.
This email is to briefly outline the rough framework of the workshop as it was initially envisioned, as well as to outline some questions to consider in responding to this call out.
*** THE WORKSHOP
We proposed this workshop as members of different queer organizations with the intention of taking advantage of the opportunity offered to us by the Bookfair to hold a discussion and strategizing session among other groups and queers from across Quebec, the US and Canada.
We identified four key obstacles or barriers we face in our struggles which we hope to foreground in these conversations:
(1) French/English divides
(2) Generational divides between older and younger queers
(3) The US/Canada border
(4) Rural/urban divides.
We especially wanted to focus on these barriers as one's we continue to face despite attempts by gay assimilation to push these off the agenda, and to collaboratively develop concrete solutions and strategies to work against these obstacles.
*** QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. In what ways have you encountered these obstacles (french/english divides, generational divides, the US/Canada border, and rural/urban divides) in your organizing or community work?
2. How have you seen these obstacles play our in other kinds of organizing or work you do?
3. What kinds of strategies, if any, have you put in place or seen put in place to counter these obstacles?
4. What kind of workshop structure do you think makes the most sense given the topic and themes? (a) branch into smaller discussion groups and report back, (b) large facilitated group discussion, or (c) another format altogether
5. Is there any specific feedback you would like to give us about the way we've laid out this framework? Is there anything you would like to foreground, or specific ways you hope to see the workshop unfold?
*** PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO YOUR CONTACTS, FOLKS THAT MIGHT BE COMING TO THE BOOKFAIR, AND IN PARTICULAR FOLKS WHO WOULD HAVE IDEAS TO CONTRIBUTE ON THE THEMES OUTLINED ABOVE.
*** PLEASE SEND ALL CONTRIBUTIONS AND FEEDBACK TO:
queer.insurgency@gmail.com
Thanks for your feedback and ideas. Hope to see you in May!
- Anonymous queers / workshop organizing committee
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The workshop is co-presented by members of: Naughty North (Maine), the Prisoner Correspondence Project (Montreal), and Q-Team (Montreal).
Qteam is a radical queer collective whose work focuses on creating anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-assimilationist queer spaces and events in Montreal.
The Prisoner Correspondence Project is a Montreal-based collective that supports gay and trans folks and queers inside prisons across the US and Canada through a penpal program, programming, and a resource library on writing about queer survival behind bars.
Naughty North is a radical queer direct-action collective based in Maine committed to resisting the devastating violence inherent in the consumer driven assimilationist gaystream!
