‘YOU IMPROVISE TO SURVIVE’: SEXUAL “SAFETY FOR QUEERS INSIDE & OUTSIDE OF PRISONS
Tuesday, April 7th @ 6pm
2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy – 2110 Rue Mackay (Metro Guy-Concordia)
This workshop will feature statements from gay, queer and trans prisoners across the US and Canada on what sexual “safety” means when condom access is restricted and when queer sex is criminal. The workshop will draw specifically on the development of a resource series called Fucking Without Fear that has been underway with the Prisoner Correspondence Project for the past six months, as well an anthology of writings by our penpals on the inside on how they negotiate risk, safety, and survival against a prison landscape. The workshop seeks to forge dialogue about how anti-prison struggles, and queer anti-prison struggles in particular, can work more closely with HIV/AIDS prevention work and the histories of queer AIDS and prison organizing that precede us. We hope to use this as a point of departure to start dialogue about how we can support one another, and each others’ struggles for control over our own sexual lives, as trans folks and gays and queers across prison walls.
The Prisoner Correspondence Project is a collectively-run gay, trans and queer prisoner support initiative based out of Montréal, Québec. We coordinate a penpal program for gay, lesbian, transsexual, transgender, gendervariant, two-spirit, intersex, bisexual and queer inmates in Canada and the United States, linking these inmates with people a part of these same communities outside of prison. Through the development of resources for our incarcerated penpals, coordination of a resource library about trans and queer survival inside prisons, collaborative writing projects, workshops, and programming, we aim to confront the ongoing targeting, policing, and criminalization of trans and queer communites, inside and outside of prisons. The project is a working group of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at Concordia University.
The workshop will take place in English with whisper translation towards French available. Free childcare also available with 48 hours notice (email queertrans.prisonersolidarity@gmail.com). The 2110 is a wheelchair accessible and scent-free space.
http://prisonercorrespondenceproject.wordpress.com
