An illustration, in navy ink on yellowed newsprint, of a fist raised in protest punching through a tiered cake. Across the illustration the words “Gender Resistance” appear in magenta. The cake is decorated with flowers and the symbols for female and male, two each, linked together in a chain. The illustration is from the cover of the Detroit Gay Liberator, February 1971.
Gender Resistance
Saturday, December 11, 2021 from 1-5 PM
A.I.R. Gallery and/or Zoom*
*More information will be forthcoming about location/format as we assess participants’ needs and comfort levels.
To RSVP for this workshop, please fill out the form linked here.
“Gender does not need to organize social arrangements, including social sexual arrangements. [And] gender arrangements need not be either heterosexual or patriarchal. They need not be, that is, as a matter of history. . .”
—Maria Lugones, The Coloniality of Gender
Facilitated by 2020-2021 A.I.R. Fellow Sky Olson and sára abdullah, this workshop approaches the question “why are there two genders?” from a historical and decolonial perspective.
We will begin by discussing María Lugones’ essay The Coloniality of Gender, which presents a framework for understanding modern gender as part of a larger system of power that also manifests as racism, settler colonialism, and capitalism, among other things. This workshop also draws from Malcolm Shanks and khari jackson’s zine Decolonizing Gender and the curriculum they developed, and is deeply indebted to Shanks’ and jackson’s brilliance, generosity, and labor.
Jumping off from Lugones’ text, we will discuss several historical examples of non-binary, non-patriarchal gendered social roles, expressions, and identities in order to emphasize the long historical timeline that we are working with and to focus our attention on both structures of oppression and forms of resistance.
Prior knowledge or experience with this material is not required, but participants are asked to come with a willingness to challenge conventional understandings of gender and sex and to explore the intersections of these categories with racist and imperialist oppression. We will also be turning inwards and towards each other to build our awareness of our gender embodiment and share our experiences.
Suggested Reading:
María Lugones, The Coloniality of Gender.
Malcolm Shanks and khari jackson, Decolonizing Gender.
Sky Olson is a white queer trans femme film and installation maker and multidisciplinary artist, a racial justice facilitator, and a data scientist. In her work, she focuses attention on minor gestures, hidden trends, tactile points of contact, and ideological forces, and draws on the choreographic, the gender-fuck, and the quietly and deeply personal as tools in the fight for individual and collective agency and dignity.
Sky received an MFA from The New School, a degree in physics, and performed as a postmodern dancer in the US and internationally for over a decade. She has been in residence or a fellow at A.I.R. Gallery, the Jan Van Eyck Academie, the Art & Law program, Mass MoCA, the Atlantic Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and NARS Foundation. She is a data analyst at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a racial justice trainer and facilitator with Race Forward. Her films and installations have been exhibited in group shows and festivals in the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia. skyolson.xyz
sára abdullah (they, she) is an indigenous SWANA/Pinxy non-binary femme Muslima animist dyke descended from nomadic dreamweavers, kitchen witches, tricksters, storytellers, land stewards, and sea-faring people. She currently lives in exile from her homelands as a visitor on unceded Canarsee Lenape land.
She has over a decade of experience as a facilitator, educator, cultural worker and organizer curating experiences for relational healing and creative expression. Poetry, ancestral remembrance, trauma informed healing, embodied movement, curiosity, right relationship, and restfulness are guiding principles for her teaching and work in earth stewardship, project management, organizational and curricular development, facilitation, event curation, cultural, reproductive, disability, healing, and environmental justice.
They are an alum of the Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship '14, Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative Public Performance Art Fellowship '17-'18, and Needing It: Solo Performance in Queer Community '18. Her writing has appeared on Autostraddle, and her solo performance work has appeared at Asian American Writers Workshop, JACK Theater, and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She is the Steward of Vision & Possibility of earth seed holistic, a practice providing botanical offerings, herbal consultations, creativity coaching, divination, full-spectrum companionship, and community education rooted in plant medicine, cosmic wisdom, and nurturing the creative spirit. Learn more about their work at earthseedholistic.com.