Decolonizing Gender and Sexualities Conference

Conference organized by The Department of Gender & Women's Studies (Paola Bacchetta, Professor and Vice Chair for Research)

Cosponsored by the Haas LGBT Citizenship Cluster and the Institute for South Asia Studies

For event questions, please contact Gillian Edgelow
(gilliane@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail)) or 510-643-7172

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative
media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact Gillian Edgelow at gilliane@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail) or 510-643-7172 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 business days
in advance of the event.

PANELIST BIOS

Maisnam Arnapal is a PhD Candidate in Feminist Studies with an interdisciplinary emphasis in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He studies queer/trans lifeworlds and peacebuilding under the shadow of protracted armed conflict with a focus on Manipur, in the India-Myanmar borderlands. Maisnam is also affiliated with UCSB Orfalea Center for Global Studies, UCSB Center for Taiwan Studies, the Center for Global Indigenous Futures at Macquarie University, and the Institute for Research in Male Supremacism. Maisnam has worked with AMANA, Manipur’s apex transgender association, and Ya_All, an LGBT Youth NGO in Manipur. He serves on the advisory board of ARC Community Library and Archives in Manipur organizing feminist and disability studies work. Maisnam is a survivor of armed conflict, state violence, and domestic/intimate partner violence and he truly believes in the healing and transformative power of academy, advocacy, and art.

Michaëla Danjé, born in the north of France, is of Afro-Caribbean descent. She is a co-founder and a member of the black collective Cases Rebelles. She is an independent researcher, writer, essayist, poet and multidisciplinary artist. She holds a MA in Gender Studies and a MA in Modern Literature. She is editor and a contributor of the book AfroTrans, published in 2021, the first francophone book on black trans identities by black trans people. Her current research focuses on queer and trans presences in traditional Guadeloupean music from the post-World War II era to the 1980s. She recently accepted the invitation to become a Member of the Advisory Board of the Decolonizing Sexualities Network. She is also pursuing other work on visual culture. In 2017, she co-directed “Dire à Lamine,” a documentary film about police violence.

Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso is an Afro-Caribbean theoretician, researcher, teacher, and popular educator. She is one of the precursors and main exponents of anti-racist and decolonial feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is co-founding member of the Latin American Group for Feminist Studies, Education and Action (GLEFAS) and is director of the Caribbean Institute of Decolonial Thought and Research. Her main contributions move towards a critique of the coloniality of feminist reason. In 2021 she held a CAPAS-funded research residency at the University of Heidelberg. She is the author of many key publications on decolonial feminism, and her texts have been translated into English, German, Portuguese, French and Italian. Her most recent titles are: Decolonial Latin American, Caribbean and Latin Feminism: Contributions and Challenges, co-edited with María Lugones, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022); and Why Decolonial Feminism is Necessary (Icaria, 2022).

Chris Finley is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes located in what is now called Eastern Washington state.  She received her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and is a co-editor and contributor to Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics and Literature (University of Arizona Press, 2011).  Currently, she lives on Tongva land and is an Associate Professor of Teaching in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Santa Khurai is a gender rights activist, scholar, writer, artist and Secretary of All Manipur Nupi Maanbi Association (AMANA). She works with various national and international organisations, including United Nations for the protection and promotion of LGBTIQ+ human rights and delivered a statement on the Rights of Indigenous People, Food and conflict and Water and Sanitation in New York and Geneva. She is a poet and author of The Yellow Sparrow, a powerful and poignant memoir that explores the complexity of gender pluralism, community and resilience. Some of her other published works include: Pheida - Gender at Periphery; Gaining Full Citizenship of Manipuri Indigenous Transgender; The Forbidden Prophecies; The Dwindling Identity, and the published poems "My Father" and "Nupi Maanbi Thabal" in The World Belongs To Us by HarperCollins, and "Looming" in the South Asia Queer Assemblage by Routledge. Her book The Yellow Sparrow was shortlisted in the Asia largest Rainbow Award 2024, Goenka Literary Award 2024, and Valley of Words 2024.

Tarek Lakhrissi is a French artist and poet with a literary background, working across installation, performance, film, text, and sculpture. His practice centers on political and social issues, exploring transformative narratives through the lens of language and codes. Deeply influenced by feminist and queer writers such as Elsa Dorlin, Kaoutar Harchi, Monique Wittig, and José Esteban Muñoz, Lakhrissi infuses his work with a romantic atmosphere and poetic, melancholic sensibility. He has exhibited his work in many prestigious spaces like Palais de Tokyo (FR), 22nd Sydney Biennale (AU), Migros Museum (CH), Hayward Gallery (UK), Kanal Pompidou (BR), and Julia Stoschek Foundation (DE).

Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed (PhD, The Pennsylvania State University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. She is co-editor of the book, African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora (2023). She is an activist-scholar whose research focuses on feminisms, decolonization, and social movements. Her scholarship has appeared in Communication Theory, the International Journal of Communication and the Howard Journal of Communications. She has done organizing work around ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the feminist space in Ghana. She serves on the editorial boards of Feminist Media Studies and Communication, Culture and Critique. She is the book review editor for Cultural Studies.  She has worked as a radio journalist in Ghana for several years and has done some public scholarship on Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The Guardian and several Ghanaian media platforms including the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation.

Kwame Edwin Otu is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Dr. Otu is a cultural anthropologist with interests ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, technological citizenships, and public health, and their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. His first book, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (2022) is an ethnography of queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sasso. The book draws on African philosophy, African/Black feminisms, and African and African Diasporic literature to explore how sasso navigate homophobia and the increased visibility of LGBT human rights politics in neoliberal Ghana. Dr. Otu’s current/ongoing project, The Salvage Slot: Technology and the Ecologies of the After-Afterlife, investigates the global politics and bodily impact of e-waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana as a paradoxical site of extraction and deposition. Dr. Otu also wrote and starred in the award-winning short film Reluctantly Queer.