2018: TRANSNATIONAL ROOTS/ROUTES OF GENDERED RACIAL VIOLENCE


How is the escalating violence direct at women a racial violence, that is, violence directed at women because they are Indigenous, racialized or Black? What analytics are available to us from women’s resistance? In Canada, there is an inquiry into missing and murdered Indige-nous women and girls. In several parts of the United States, Mexico and Latin America, the death toll of missing and murdered women rises every day and although the murders are de-scribed generically, Indigenous women are over-represented. At borders, a distinct form of sexualized violence prevails against Indigenous and racialized women. States have begun to collapse border zones and zones of prostitution, as in Mexico’s zonas de tolerencia, where Indigenous women migrants are disproportionately the targets of violence while working in prostitution. Black women enduring the high levels of police violence directed towards their communities find their own bodies targeted in specific ways. These forms of gendered racial violence compel us to explore how to understand the historical and transnational roots and routes of violence, and to consider the interconnections between sites of violence. For example, how is interpersonal and state violence related? Where is race in the violence against women generated by militarism in Asia? What does race have to do with sex trafficking?


Opening Keynote

Dr. Monica Muñoz Martinez,

Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University

“Gendering Anti-Mexican Violence”


Panel: The Violence of Labor & Property

Dr. Tiffany King, Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies, Georgia State University

Paper Title: “The Violence of Labor”

Recommended Reading:

Dr. Leslie Thielen-Wilson, Assistant Professor in Gender Equality & Social Justice, Faculty of Arts & Science at Nipissing University, North Bay

Paper Title: “Property’s Time and the Intimate Spaces of Settler Violence”

Panel: Police Violence, Racial Capitalism, & Settler Colonialism

Dr. Terrion Williamson, Assistant Professor of African American & American Studies, American Studies, and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota

Paper Title: “No Humans Involved: Between Liminal Black Life and Serialized Black Death”

Recommended Reading:

Dr. Sherene Razack, Distinguished Professor and the Penney Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies, Department of Gender Studies, UCLA

Paper Title: “The Ghost of Settler Colonialism in the Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine”

Recommended Reading: Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race. Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

Stephanie Latty, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and the Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto

Paper Title: “What is She Hiding?: Black Women, Strip Searching and the State”

Panel: Racial Insurrections

Dr. Dylan Rodríguez, Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies and Media and Cultural Studies

Paper Title: “‘Mass Incarceration’ as Misnomer: Chattel/Domestic War and the Problem of Narrativity”

Recommended Reading:

Dr. Carmela Murdocca, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, York University

Paper Title: “Racial Carceral Violence and the Politics of Redress”

Panel: Girls, Women & Disposability in Settler States

Megan Scribe (Norway House Cree Nation), Doctoral Candidate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto

Paper Title: “Indigenous Girls: Gender Violence, Child Welfare, and Settler Colonialism”

Dr. Shanya Cordis, (Lokono/Warau), Assistant Professor, Sociology & Anthropology, Spelman College

Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa), Doctoral Student, Gender Studies, UCLA

Joint paper title: “Devalued Lives: Violence Against Black and Indigenous Women and the Maintenance of the Settler State”

Recommended Reading:

Panel: Race, Gender, & the Production of Migrants

Dr. Inderpal Grewal, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, Affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program, Yale

Paper Title: “Standing By: Lynching, Violence and the State in Contemporary India”

Dr. Shannon Speed (Chickasaw), Professor of Anthropology and Director of the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA

Dr. Gada Mahrouse, Associate Professor, Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Women’s Studies, Concordia University

Paper Title: “Theorizing Refugee Success”

Panel: Sex Trafficking and Sex Work as Racial Violence

Dr. April Petillo, Assistant Professor in the Department of American Ethnic Studies, Affiliated faculty in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Kansas State University

Paper Title: “Cultural Slaving: Creating Consumable Ethnic Bodies Through Sex Trafficking”

Dr. Rupaleem Bhuyan, Associate Professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto

Margarita Pintin-Perez, Doctoral Student in the Department of Society and Culture, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur

Paper Title: Becoming ‘tolerable’: Tolerance zones and the ‘excluded exclusion’ of Central American migrant sex workers in Mexico’s southern border region

Recommended Reading:

Dr. Grace Kyungwon Hong, Professor in Gender Studies and Asian American Studies, UCLA

Paper Title: “Virtual Violence: Kinesthetic Memory in Gina Kim’s ‘Bloodless/Dongducheon'”

Recommended Reading:

Dr. Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne (Southern Tsistsistas and Hinono’ei), Assistant Professor, English, UCLA

Paper Title: “Anti-Indigenous Violence is/as Gender Violence: Theorizing Settler-Imperial Heteropatriarchy”

Recommended Reading:


RVHub Site Workshop

Dr. Sherene Razack, Distinguished Professor and the Penney Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies, Department of Gender Studies, UCLA

Sarah Montoya, Doctoral Candidate, Gender Studies, UCLA