Refusing Despair: Building LGBTQ+ Solidarity and Resistance
Monday, November 10th
5:00pm - 6:30pm
A.D. White House (Hybrid)
Light reception following.
Feeling overwhelmed by the state of the nation? Unsure about how to maintain hope and take action? Join us for a roundtable discussion of strategies for defending the rights of LGBTQ+ people and sustaining opposition in current times. Trans and queer scholars will offer concrete suggestions for building solidarity and fighting back against authoritarianism.
Participants:
Teagan Bradway, Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow, 2025-2026, Associate Professor of English, SUNY Cortland (on leave)
Teagan Bradway (she/her) is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator of English at SUNY Cortland. She is a queer theorist and scholar of LGBTQ+ and experimental literatures. Her work examines how queer kinship takes shape and endures through aesthetic and affective labor. She is particularly fascinated by the ways LGBTQ+ people sustain social worlds through storytelling and other narrative practices. She is the author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading (2017) and co-editor of Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (2022) and After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century. Bradway is also the guest editor of Unaccountably Queer (2024), a special issue of differences, and Lively Words: The Politics and Poetics of Experimental Writing (2019), a special issue of College Literature. Bradway’s articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, GLQ, MLQ, Textual Practice, ASAP/J, The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, the Routledge Companion to Literature and Politics, and The Nation. In 2024, Bradway was a Hunt-Simes Visiting Junior Chair of Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney. Currently, Bradway is completing a book on queer engroupment and co-writing “Endless Love” with the late Elizabeth Freeman. Bradway has designed and taught 28 different courses at all levels. Her favorite courses to teach include Queer and Trans Narrative Theory, LGBTQ+ Literature, Reading for Form, Vibe Shifts in Contemporary Fiction, Psychology in Literature, and the Politics of Horror Cinema.
Jason Ezell, Head of Research and Learning Services, Olin and Uris Libraries
Jason Ezell (he/they) is an LGBTQ+ movement historian and academic librarian, now the Head of Research and Learning Services at Cornell University's Olin & Uris Libraries. Recent research interests include the role of affect in movement dynamics, archival research, and information activism. They have also taught university seminars on the history of US gay liberation and mentored LGBTQ+-related capstone and thesis projects. His first book—released in October 2025—is For a Spell: Sissie Collectivism and Radical Witchery in the Southeast, a history of 1970s radical collectives and nonbinary gender expression in response to the rise of New Right terror.
Mat Fournier, Associate Professor, World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Ithaca College
Mat Fournier (he/him) is an Associate Professor of French and an affiliate member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. His research focuses on trans studies, with a particular interest in the articulation between queerness and political theory. Fournier's essays have been published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing; Simone de Beauvoir Studies; L'Esprit Créateur; Transgender Studies Quarterly, and in edited volumes such as Deleuze on Children and Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on the Environment. His book, Dysphoric Assemblage: Writing Gender in the Interwar Years, looks at French modernist literature to explore the emergence of modern gender. Before pursuing an academic career in the US, Mat worked as a freelance author and journalist in France for National Geographic France (Paris)and Milan Presse (Toulouse). In French, he has published Quand la Nature inspire la science [When Nature Inspires Science],a book on ethnobiology.
Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Queer Studies, Cal State Chico
Claudia Sofía Garriga-López (they/elle/ella/she) is an associate professor of queer and trans Latinx studies in the Department of Multicultural and Gender Studies of California State University, Chico, with a PhD in American studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis of New York University. She is currently revising a book manuscript based on her dissertation, Gender for All: Transfeminism in Ecuador, and serves on the editorial board for Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press) and Women's Studies Quarterly (CUNY University Press). Garriga-López conducted long term participatory research with trans, feminist, and queer activists and artist groups in Ecuador and Puerto Rico, and has considerable work experience in community health and advocacy organizations in New York City. Her scholarship and visual art have been featured in a number of publications, including the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019) and Latinas: Struggles and Protest in Twenty-First-Century USA, as well as the Social Science Research Council’s Items blog. Garriga-López is the author of “Transfeminist Crossroads: Reimagining the Ecuadorian State” published in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2016), and is also one of the coeditors for the “Trans Studies en las Américas” issue of TSQ (2019). Her scholarly work is grounded in a critical engagement with activism, public policy, and public health, as well as trans, feminist, and queer performance art and cultural production in Latin America, the Caribbean, and within people of color communities in the United States.
View the event online here.
