Public Lecture with Kim Tallbear: 10 Free Tickets for Grad Students
Wednesday, April 24, 7:30–9 p.m.
Room 120, Kane Hall, Seattle campus (Google map)
Contact Molly Mandeltort to get your free ticket.
Featuring Kim Tallbear: Why is Sex a “Thing”? Making Good Relations for a Decolonial World
Settler-colonial states like the US and Canada developed based on theories of what is “natural” and the practice of faith in private property. Both concepts were and continue to be violent toward Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, women, children, the differently abled, queer people, and others. Nature and property are key to how settler society conceptualizes and manages sexuality.
Kim TallBear, also known as the Critical Polyamorist, explains how the very notion of sexuality, like the idea of nature, makes webs of relations into objects to be controlled. She draws on Indigenous ideas to offer alternative ideas for disaggregating this thing we call sex into practices of being in “good relation.” Ironically, a more sex-liberated society is a society in which we create more consensual and better “sex” without necessarily calling it sex at all.
Kim Tallbear is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment and Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta.
