Reportback from the First US LGBTQ Delegation to Palestine

Creating Solidarities: A Conversation with Members of the First US LGBTQ Delegation to Palestine

April 11th, 2012
7:30 p.m. @ Brecht Forum, 451 West Street
New York, NY 10014
(212) 242-4201

In January 2012, several prominent LGBTQ activists/scholars/cultural workers from the United States traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories as part of the first delegation of its kind. This panel, comprised of six of the delegates, will focus on: the experiences of the delegates; critical analyses of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and its intersections with gender equality and the queer struggle for liberation; and developing and maintaining transnational solidarities.

Katherine Franke is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. She is also on the Executive Committee of Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and works closely with the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation's leading scholars working at the intersections of feminist, queer, and critical race theory. In addition to her scholarly research she writes regularly for a more popular audience in the Gender & Sexuality Law Blog and is on the Board of Directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to write a book on the curious role of the right to marry in larger civil rights struggles, comparing African Americans in the immediate post Civil War period with same-sex couples today.

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz is the principal of intersections/intersecciones consulting. She is a community organizer, capacity builder, writer and speaker who has worked across movements for social and economic justice for twenty years. Her writings can be found in an anthology entitled Colonize This! Young Women of Color and Feminism, through an online writing project entitled Busting Binaries which she co-author with Ana Maurine Lara and on the Bilerico Project Blog. For five years she served as the Director of Capacity Building for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Prior to her work with the Task Force, she was an organizer and capacity builder for the National Organization for Women, Mid-West Regional Organizer for Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, Pension Plan Organizer for the National Organizers Alliance and Interim Director for the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is a lecturer on History and Literature and on Public Policy at Harvard University, where he is also Core Faculty and Director of the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. A historian of social movements, media culture, and the American radical tradition, Dr. McCarthy has published three books: The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (New Press, 2003); Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New Press, 2006); and Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism (New Press, 2010). His fourth book, The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the People’s Historian, will be published in April by the New Press. Dr. McCarthy is a frequent media commentator, appearing on NPR, BBC, Air America, Bloomberg Radio, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, and Big Think, and his writings have appeared in The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Boston Globe, and The Nation.

Darnell L. Moore is the Director of Educational Initiatives at the Hetrick-Martin Institute (HMI). He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University, part-time lecturer in the Women and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, and a Fellow of the Global Justice Institute. He was appointed by Mayor Cory Booker as the inaugural Chair of Newark’s Advisory Commission on LGBTQ Concerns. He is the co-coordinator of the Queer Newark Oral History Project facilitated by Rutgers-Newark.

Pauline Park (paulinepark.com) is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) (nyagra.com), a statewide transgender advocacy organization that she co-founded in 1998, and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House (queenspridehouse.org), which she co-founded in 1997. Park also co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997 and served as its coordinator from 1997 to 1999. Park led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and she served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2010, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by that body. In 2005, Park became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. She was the subject of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman,” a 32-minute documentary about her life and work by documentarian Larry Tung that premiered at the New York LGBT Film Festival (NewFest) in 2008.

Jasbir Puar is Associate Professor of Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; South Asian cultural studies; and theories of assemblage and affect. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Professor Puar has also authored numerous articles that appear in Gender, Place, and Culture, Social Text, Radical History Review, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Feminist Legal Studies. Most recently she edited, with Julie Livingston, a special issue of Social Text on "Interspecies" (Spring 2011). Professor Puar is also a contributor to the Guardian and The Huffington Post, as well as Bully Bloggers (bullybloggers.com) and Oh! Industry (ohindustry.com).

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