ruins, queer and otherwise…

Sexuality Studies Association

A panel convened by Dr. Ricky Varghese featuring Canisia Lubrin, Fan Wu, Concetta Principe, sam sax, Trish Salah.

Organized for the <a href="https://www.conftool.net/ssa2022/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">2022 Sexuality Studies Annual Conference</a> by Dr. Ricky Varghese, recipient of the 2020 Academic Leadership in Sexuality Studies Award.The philosopher Walter Benjamin famously suggested that “allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.” What kind of ruin is the thing or figure that is queer? Is queerness synonymous to the ruin? What might it mean to queer the ruin or think of it as foundationally queer at its core? If as Benjamin suggested, in the ruin, there are allegories for thinking itself, can queerness be a thought experiment requiring us to think differently, or otherwise, about difference and otherness? As the ellipsis in the title suggests – the ellipsis, itself a way to signify a sort of ruin in and of a text – this panel of poets attempts to initiate a conversation regarding what it is that leaves us in ruins, how we may find forms of redemption amidst these ruins, and what may be precisely queer and otherwise about this redemption.Event is professionally live captioned.Caption, photo below: Portraits of the organizer and the five panelists, clockwise from top left: Ricky Varghese, Canisia Lubrin, Fan Wu, Trish Salah, sam sax, Concetta Principe.

Panelist BiosRicky Varghese is an art writer and a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto. He is also the inaugural Tanis Doe postdoctoral fellow in Gender, Disability, and Social Justice at X University (formerly known as Ryerson University). His areas of research are suicidology, madness and the body in psychoanalysis, the history of the AIDS crisis and critical sexology at the intersection of queerness and disability, and questions of memory, mourning and melancholia as it pertains to Jewish eschatology. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Last Rites for the Self: Sexual Difference and the Death Drive, a cultural study of self-killing in the present.Canisia Lubrin is an acclaimed poet, editor, and writer. Her books include The Dyzgraphxst (M&amp;S, 2020) and her debut Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak &amp; Wynn, 2017), named a CBC Best Book and listed for the Gerald Lampert award, the Pat Lowther award, and the Raymond Souster award. Lubrin's other honours include the prestigious Windham-Campbell prize for a body of work, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize, Canada Council’s Joseph S. Stauffer prize for literary achievement, and finalist for the Governor General’s Award and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She completed her MFA at the University of Guelph, where she also teaches.Fan Wu is currently delving into the entanglement between Daoism and anarchy; mystical practices of limit-experience that stretch from Bataille to Philip K. Dick; and what to do with the ruins of collectivity in the 21st century. You can reach him at fanwu4u@gmail.com for correspondence or other psycho-erotic solicitations.Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry, creative non-fiction, and scholarship on trauma literature. Her most recent CNF project is Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide which came out with Gordon Hill Press in 2021. Her collection of prose poems, This Real, published by Pedlar Press, was long listed for the Raymond Souster Award in 2017. Her next book is a creative non-fiction experiment, Discipline n. v.: A Lyric Memoir, to be published by Palimpsest Press (2023). She teaches literature and creative writing at Trent University.sam sax is a queer, jewish writer and educator. They're the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. sam's received fellowships from The NEA, Poetry Foundation, MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda Award-winning poetry collection, Wanting in Arabic and of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1,and co-editor of a special issue of Arc Poetry Magazine featuring trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit writers. Recent poems are out in Room Magazine and in Mizna’s “Experimental Issue”; a selection of her poems appear in Greek translation in Teflon magazine, and the anthology Arab Divas. An associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, she also edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry. She lives in Tkaronto in the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit River, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples.

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