Last October I was invited by members of Independent Jewish Voices Carleton to speak at the exhibition opening of Silenced by Scholasticide on behalf Faculty4Palestine’s Ottawa chapter. It was an honour to speak alongside Dr. Iyas Salim Abu-Hajiar, Dr. Nahla Abdo, and Dr. Chandni Desai at this profoundly moving event. Despite the sombre mood of collective mourning that this exhibition evokes, I made a point to remind attendees that art can do more than allowing us to bear witness to the atrocity—important in itself, but art can do much more! Indeed, the art of the oppressed can celebrate defiant joy and humour in the face of unspeakable violence and terror.
In late November I attended the Viral Interventions conference held at Vtape in Toronto. I participated in a panel with Lesley Loksi Chan, Em Barton, Conal McStravic and Ken Morrison on working with HIV/AIDS activist/artist video archives. I presented my in-progress work researching queer Canadian HIV/AIDS and sex worker activist Danny Cockerline. I showed excerpts from Our Bodies Our Business, Hot & Safe, and Whore Culture as well as a short audio recording of Danny’s last known public appearance on a panel of sex worker activists at Toronto’s Harbourfront in early December of 1995. It was a pleasure to share this archival footage of Danny that I have been collecting as part of a larger researchproject for Outhistory.org.
I’m putting the final touches on my digital exhibition about Danny as part of the first cohort of OutHistory Fellows. I’ve gathered archival photos, video footage, diary entries, and piles of activist ephemera from Danny’s time working with The Body Politic, the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes, the Prostitutes Safe Sex Project, Maggie’s, and the Sex Workers’ Alliance of Toronto. The full text with images and video clips will be available this spring alongside the work of the other fellows. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s work and getting Danny’s life and work more concretely entered into the historical record of queer, HIV/AIDS, and sex worker social movements in Canada.
For the last four months I’ve been working with a small team of research assistants to locate and review all the sex worker-authored materials held in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive, a unique collection within the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Ottawa. This work is central to my SSHRC Insight Development Grant that provides funding to develop an alternative finding aid for these materials spread across dozens of fonds within the CWMA. Over the winter I’ll be finalizing the ethics protocol so that next summer I can interview some of the old pros whose materials are found within the CWMA—often to their complete surprise!
Lastly, just days ago I finished up what has been one of the busiest teaching semesters I’ve ever had. With 150 students across three courses, this falls has been a lot to manage. During the coming winter semester I’ll have a greatly reduced course load. Going down to a single course on Human Rights & Sexualities will make it so I can focus on research, writing, and helping my union prepare for bargaining a new collective agreement after the current one expires in the summer.