Naming (In)Justice

“We cannot live without our lives.” — Barbara Deming

These words written by Barbara Deming blazoned the banner used in a protest in 1979. In the wake of the killing of twelve Black women in the Boston area in four months, a grassroots mobilization rallied through the city streets in outrage and protest. Almost forty years later, Deming’s words are just as relevant and fierce in the context of today’s militarized borders, state and corporate containment and dispossession, and the disappearing of lives.

Recent acknowledgments that LGBTQ rights are human rights have increased the visibility and legitimacy of queer claims to asylum and citizenship, but the precarity and disappearing of queer migrant lives have not ended. Similarly, immense social and political concern for human trafficking has shed light on forced labor, but solutions to the structural violence of capitalism and settler colonialism have not emerged with this surge of interest for human rights.

The symposium Naming (In)Justice: Rights and Resistance Across Queer Migrations and Trafficking will foreground the sites of solidarity across queer migrations and critical anti-trafficking studies. Topics that cross-pollinate both of these academic and activist fields include the policing of mobility and sexuality, structural racial and gendered violence, colonial dispossession, and the struggles for the abolition of borders, prisons, and colonialism today.