This event brings together four speakers to discuss the relationship between sexuality, gender and social justice in the city.
Understanding ‘the city’ (in this case, with a particular focus on London) as a space that both provides conditions for political action and constitutes an object of political struggle, it seeks to explore the distinctive ways that LGBTQ+ people have produced and claimed a range of spaces in the city.
What kinds of spaces are being created by LGBTQ+ activists today in London? To what extent are ‘the master’s tools’ being adopted or reframed? What historical shifts can be observed? As LGBTQ+ rights have been instrumentalised to sustain racial capitalism, and LGBTQ+ culture has been commodified to feed gentrification, these questions lie at the heart of social justice in the city.
Speakers:
Prinx Silver (they/them) is a Drag King, gender transcender, and community organiser. They came to the UK with one mission in mind: to destroy the norms of the cis-heternormative world! They're famous for their dramatic faces, political messages and for getting naked on stage... (you're welcome!) Prinx Silver is part of Friends of The Joiners Arms, a group campaigning to open the first community-run LGBTQI+ pub on the site where the legendary Joiners was. While fighting for the space, FJA has been organising events to raise awareness and fundraise for the campaign, as well as to support marginalised queer artists. They launched Lèse-Majesté in 2018, a regular drag King/Thing cabaret night hosted by Prinx Silver, which centres trans+ people, queer womxn and QTPOC.
Liv Wynter is a live artist and writer from SEL. Liv has been performing internationally since 2015, making live art that centres around radical action, community, rage, and power, and is currently working on their ACE funded live art show ‘the rise//the refrain’. With successful residencies at Project Indigo, Wysing, FACT (and a less successful one at Tate), exhibiting at WORM Rotterdam, Wysing Arts Centre and Centre Régional d'Art Contemporain Occitanie, and even supporting Kate Nash a couple of times, Liv has gone on to cause chaos through both their personal practice and their commitment to antifascist, antisexist, and anticapitalist organising. Liv is a peer support coordinator at Hearts & Minds, and spent COVID19 doing support work at The Outside Project, an LGBTIQ+ homeless shelter. Liv has been selected for the Royal Court Scriptwriting course 2020/21, and is the host for Queer House Party. Liv’s debut poetry collection, ‘Don’t Let It Go To Your Head’, was released in Nov 2020. Liv stands in solidarity with all groups organising against oppression. Quit your job, join a band, start a gang.
Emma Spruce is a Teaching Fellow in Gender, Sexuality and Human Rights at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. Embedding an intersectional, transversal and empirical approach, their research crucially argues for an analysis of the colonial sexual politics of rights, elaborates a queer-feminist critique of urban inequality and injustice, and provides a unique account of the contested meanings and practices that surround LGBTQI claims to space. Recent publications include (2021) The Place of Transversal LGBTQ+ Urban Activisms. Urban Studies; and (2020) LGBTQ Situated Memory, Place-making and the Sexual Politics of Gentrification. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(5): 961-978.
Milo Bettocchi (he/they), formerly of the House of Brag (a south London queer squatting collective active between 2012 and 2014) recently completed a PhD focused on the intersection of squatting with feminist, decolonial and queer projects in Brixton from the 1970s to the mid-2010s. Milo has co-led walking tours of Brixton’s queer squatting histories along with members of the London Rebel Dykes, and currently works at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics (but lives in Nottingham).
Chaired by:
Jacob Breslow - Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality at LSE Gender. His primary area of research is on contemporary U.S. social justice movements, and the ways in which the idea of childhood operates within and against them. Specifically, this work interrogates and thinks with Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements. His second line of research is on transnational and local sexual politics, and the conceptual and lived effects of ameliorating sexual harms. In this body of work, he has written on social media’s outsourcing of content moderation and the production of the digital life of coloniality; and on the relationship between #MeToo and homonationalism. He is also working on a new project titled Queer Accommodations and Displacements, which combines analyses of local and everyday acts of making or denying spaces for queer subjects, with examinations of the political and psychic landscapes of these spatial politics.
This online public event is free and open to all but pre-registration is required. Click here to register for this event. The event will be held on Zoom.