Unity Conference: Southeast Regional Conference

The Unity Conference is coming up (April 9-11)! It promises to be a lot of fun, and an opportunity to engage in critical, academic, activist conversations centering on the theme: Intersecting Identities: Politics, Power, Performance. They describe the theme on their website (http://unityconference.webs.com/theme.htm) as follows:

What account of ourselves and each other must we give to build a social movement? How can we use our unique and collective experiences to inform visions of social justice? Does the alphabet soup of LGBTQIA encompass any one of us? Can we be served by any political action that is waged on the fault lines of a single identity category?

People have been grappling with these and similar questions for a while now.  Sometimes we attempt to smooth the contradictions and risks that come in trying to answer these questions with words like “diversity,” “inclusivity,” and “multiculturalism.” But what can these words really mean if they remain static ideas on a piece of paper? We all hail from multiple and fragmented communities. Our differences are real, deep, and difficult.  If we don’t poke and prod at those differences, we risk alienating our actions from the transformative change that we demand and espouse.

The 2010 Unity Conference, “Intersecting Identities: Politics, Performance, Power” will take up intersectionality as an ethic of activism and theorizing.  Intersectionality has always been a primary value that guides the organizing of the Unity Conference, but this year we wanted to shake things up a little and get that ideal off the paper and onto center stage.  This year’s conference will explore the possibilities of using the contentions of difference as a major site of power, play, and visioning.  We want to examine the multiple intersections and collisions that inform the ways in which we take up— and refuse—  identity and identification in our everyday lives as movers and shakers.

We have developed three organizing subthemes to focus our discussion:

1.       How do we perform and theorize our intersecting identities?

2.       How do assimilationist and anti-assimilationist politics operate within LGBTQ communities?

3.       How do we build and sustain diverse committed to social justice?

In exploring these questions we hope to bring an array of artists, performers, speakers and activists together to organize and vision with a difference.  Once again, we’ll take up performance and art as primary tools and sites of transformative political engagement. Performance will be seen not only as an action that is limited to a defined time and place, but an orientation that we can use to queer the questions that we seek to ask and learn. We will also explore the experiences of local activists and organizers that use other frameworks to inform their action.  We hope that this unique combination of academics, performance artists, lobbyists, bloggers, and general rabble rousers will help us explore the multiple ways in which we are all able to move power towards a different kind of politics that is committed to the stubborn possibility of social justice.

We fully welcome and anticipate your critical participation and enthusiasm.  We can’t wait to see you on the weekend of April 9th!

SOOOO, Faces of Feminism is loading up and heading to Chapel Hill! The school provides vans free of charge. We just have to pay for gas, registration ($20 low income, but no one is turned away), lodging and food. Faces of Feminism is interested in reimbursing people for their registration and lodging if possible. So, please let us know if you are interested in registering, have registered, or are interested in a ride. Details will be finalized once we have an idea of who is/how many are interested in going. Comment here or send FOF a message or e-mail.

Thanks!!! Can’t wait!

Elyse

February 24, 2010. Uncategorized. 4 comments.