2022 FIVE COLLEGE QUEER GENDER & SEXUALITY SYMPOSIUM

The Five College Queer Gender and Sexuality Conference is coming out all over again in a special symposium format for 2022.

The Five College community is invited to participate in-person or join online programming on Saturday, April 23, with additional events for LGBTQ+ Five College students beginning on Friday, 4/22 and continuing throughout the weekend.

Register for the Five College Queer Gender and Sexuality Symposium from 4/21/22-4/24/22!

Check out this year's conference website for information and links, access notes, and more!

Schedule Highlights
(Check back here for full schedule and be sure to register for locations and links!)

4/21 Thursday | Live (Queer Noise) Music!
Roos-Rohde House
IRL Concert, Open to All, Face Masks Required
Doors 7:00pm, Music 7:30pm
Featuring Nat Baldwin/Stella Silbert, Weston Olencki/Laura Cocks, Precious Metal Lady, Sunshine

4/22 Friday | "You Have to Be Willing to Totally Fail": Queer Collaborative Methods
With charles theonia + Sol Brager
3:30PM-5PM at R.W. Kern Center, Room 202
In-Person Workshop, Open to All, Face Masks Required
This visual art and creative writing workshop will consider queer collaborative projects from pairs and collectives. During our session, there will be an opportunity to find a collaborative partner and make work together (bring any materials you may want to use!). We’ll explore questions including: How can we mutually apply the methods of collective organizing and collaborative art? How can we lovingly collaborate across difference? How can we find the inner and outer resources necessary to take risks alongside our collaborators, especially when they’re our idols, friends, lovers (or, best of all, all three)?

4/22 Friday | Live Outdoor Music!
Doors 7:00pm, Music 7:30pm
IRL Concert, Open to All, Face Masks Required Indoors
Community Garden (behind the Roos-Rohde House)
Featuring Sadurn, Amelia Cry Til I Die, Stoner Will & The Narks, Pinko, Antonio Zenobia

4/23 Saturday | IRL and Online Symposium + Workshops
10:30AM-5:30PM with Pizza Lunch
Join us in-person at Franklin Patterson Hall, Hampshire College and/or on Zoom!
Register online in advance or in-person at the Franklin Patterson Hall Lobby on 4/23
Open to All, Face Masks Required

Keynote by: Dr. Jina B. Kim, "The Mourning After: On Disability, Queer Friendship, and Grief"
4/23 at 1:30PM in Franklin Patterson Hall, Main Lecture Hall + on Zoom
Description: "This talk reflects upon and makes space for the vital work of mourning, particularly within a death-phobic, queer-phobic, and ableist culture unable to contend with loss, sorrow, and sickness en masse. Looking to queer-of-color and disability justice life writing, as well as my own lived experiences, I consider how multiply marginalized queer communities create our own infrastructures of grief, memorialization, and belonging when little else in the world will hold us.
In particular, I highlight how queer-of-color and disability justice life writing can function as infrastructural support, holding container, and conduit for queer-of-color and crip mourning, and describe how such writing held me through a time of almost unspeakable grief—the terminal illness and eventual death of my queer best friend. Throughout, I emphasize queer and disabled friendship as a sacred relational form worthy of grief and reverence, as well as the political importance (and primal necessity) of honoring sickness, sorrow, and mourning during a mass disabling event (the COVID-19 pandemic)."

Saturday Symposium Schedule

10:30AM | Coffee and Tea, Pastries
10:45AM | Welcome, Opening, Land Acknowledgement

11:00AM-12:30pm | BLOCK ONE
+ Panel: Queering Behavioral Neuroscience
with Annie Ehler and Jae Purnell (IRL and Online)
Open to All
The neural basis for non-heterosexual and non-cisgender sexual identities. Dive deep into the modern and antiquated research into queer identity. The goal? Find more queer informed paradigms for queer focused health measures.

+ Workshop: "That's So Gay - Microaggressions and Interpersonal Violence"
with Janeen Mantin (IRL)
This is a closed session for Hampshire and Five College students
In this workshop, students will explore microaggressions and the impact on how we understand and respond to interpersonal violence. Hosted by Hampshire College's Office of Prevention & Education

12:30pm-1:30pm | Pizza Lunch, FPH Faculty Lounge
Vegetarian, Vegan, and MWG Options Available

1:30pm-2:30 PM | Keynote
Dr. Jina Kim, "The Mourning After: On Disability, Queer Friendship, and Grief"

2:30pm-4pm | BLOCK TWO  
+ Conversation: "Politicking from my Intersection(s)"
with José Maldonado Velez, Holyoke City Councilor At-Large (IRL)
Open to All
Come learn about Jose Maldonado Velez's journey in politics while honoring his different intersecting identities as a gay Brown man born and raised in Holyoke, MA. Listen to how that impacted his run, and what his win this past 2021 election may mean for local politics overall. This will have an interactive component, as you will have an opportunity to journal your own journey, and the power your identities have in the public arena.

+ Workshop: "What's Trauma Got to Do with It? Creative Self-Soothing for the Modern Queer"
with Kelli Dunham (IRL and Online)
This is a closed session for LGBTQ+ participants, all ages session
Calling all queer and trans trauma survivors! If you've gotten this far, you've developed some amazing self-help strategies for dealing with post-trauma symptoms, most of which probably involve some form of self-soothing. But you might have found that in particularly stressful situations: seeking healthcare, going through TSA, dealing with families of origin,  negotiating the dominant culture's limited view of gender, etc you could use some more tools. In this workshop nonbinary nurse, comedian and all-around gentlenurturer human Kelli Dunham will lead participants through brainstorming new and novel ideas for self-soothing activities and strategies and we'll also experiment with some of the strategies. You'll leave with downloadable worksheets to help you develop your own self-soothing toolkit even further, and a downloadable / printable coloring sheet Kelli created just for this event!

4pm- 5:30pm | BLOCK THREE
+ Performance and Q&A with Noa Coffey (IRL and Online)
Open to All
In this musical performance and talk-back, Noa will perform original songs, as well as songs that have transformed their songwriting. They will offer insight and analysis of their experiences as a young Black musician in the folk music space-- from playing talent shows in an white town, being the only Black singer in most every choir, and navigating whiteness and patriarchy in the recording studio. Participants will gain insight into the Black legacies of rural folk music, and why queerness has always been a part of this music, as a vehicle against the white supremacy of traditional and status quo music-making. We'll ask one another questions about what it means to be a creative today, to lean into independent and DIY makers spaces, and to bring songwriting technique into all writing, creative and academic alike.

5:30PM | Closing (IRL and Online)

Presenter Bios

Solomon JB Brager is a cartoonist and teacher living on Lenape land in Brooklyn, NY. They have published comics most recently at The Nib, Jewish Currents, and World War 3 Illustrated, and are currently the first year course director at Rutgers University Douglass Residential College. Sol holds a PhD in Women’s & Gender Studies from Rutgers University New Brunswick and a B.A. in American Studies with a certificate in LGBT Studies from The University of Maryland College Park. Their scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Communication, The Holocaust in History and Memory, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry. Their first book-length project, Heavyweight, is forthcoming from William Morrow in 2023.

charles theonia is a poet, enthusiast, and transsexual without direction. They are the author of artist book Saw Palmettos (Container, 2018) and chapbook Which One Is the Bridge (Topside Press, 2015).

Annie Ehler is a Div 3 at Hampshire College, studying behavioral neuroscience and computer science. She currently lives on the west coast working closely with the LGBT Center of Los Angeles as well as the EMBARC center at Cedars Sinai. She says, "I myself am a pansexual trans women on a quest to understand myself down to the molecular level. Join me as we look deep into the queer mind and uncover the hidden secrets behind our consciousness."

Jae M. Purnell is a doctoral candidate in Neuropsychology; he is one of the only queer and trans doctoral fellows practicing neuropsychology in the United States.

Janeen Mantin (She/Her), has a M.S. in Urban affairs from CUNY at Hunter College and is currently working on a M.A. in Women Studies and Gender Studies from Utrecht University and University of York. She is the Director of Prevention & Education Office at Hampshire College and focuses on the areas of Sexual Violence and Substance Misuse/Harm Reduction. She is passionate about issues related to the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality within the context of overlapping oppressions and gender based violence.

Dr. Jina B. Kim is Assistant Professor of English Language & Literature and of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College. She received her doctorate in English and women’s studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her bachelor's in studio art and English from Agnes Scott College. She specializes in feminist disability studies, women-of-color feminisms/queer-of-color critique and contemporary ethnic U.S. literatures with an emphasis on feminist-of-color writing and cultural expression post-1968. Prior to joining Smith College, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity postdoctoral fellow at Mount Holyoke College in the program in critical social thought. Kim has published on the topics of disability studies and ethnic U.S. literatures, furthering a critical framework she terms crip-of-color critique. In 2012, she received the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies from the Society for Disability Studies.

Jose Luis Maldonado Velez is a artivist, organizer, and most recently elected Councilor At Large in Holyoke. In all his roles he hopes to spread a message of how important the power of the individual is within the collective. When we all bring our unique powers to the collective, the possibilities are endless. He has a Bachelors in Sociology from Bryant University and a PhD in his own lived experience.

Kelli Dunham is the ex-nun nonbinary storytelling author nurse nerdcomic ubiquitous in modern Brooklyn and has appeared on Showtime, the Moth Mainstage and the occasional livestock auction. Queer Eye's Jonathan VanNess once called Kelli's hair "everything" and former NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio once called Kelli "a show off." To Kelli's face.

Noa Coffey (they/them) is a Black, genderfluid folk-rock musician, writer and organizer living in West Philadelphia. They are a multimedia artist, shapeshifter, time traveler, and chronic pain survivor. Their music is grounded in Appalachian folk music, country & blues, and indie-folk traditions. Trained in both classical & jazz vocal traditions, their music is in deep conversation with rural queer legacies. They’ve shared the stage with Rachael Price (Lakestreet Dive), Mal Devisa, Heather Maloney & And the Kids. They are regionally acclaimed in Western Massachusetts as well as New England at large. They studied creative writing social justice education, and devised theater at Hampshire College.

In their words, "Growing up in a small rural town in Massachusetts, I learned very quickly, the art of resilience. Living in this country during this time, I am practicing daily, the art of freedom. These are my love songs. These are my survival songs. These are my healing torches”.

Marley Balasco, M.A. received her master’s in mental health counseling from New York University and currently interns as a pre-doctoral candidate with Hampshire College’s Health and Counseling Services. She developed a love for the outdoors while spending time with her grandparents in the White Mountains of New Hampshire as a kid. The outdoors, existing once for her only as a place for thoughtful reflection, also facilitated her process of self-discovery. Marley is dedicated to creating opportunities for marginalized groups to get outside and make community. 

The 2022 Five College Queer Gender and Sexuality Symposium will include options for participants to join virtually on Zoom, or in-person on Hampshire campus on Saturday, April 23, 2022. Please register for more information on in-person schedule, and to recieve links to join the virtual program.

This year's Five College Queer Gender and Sexuality Symposium is hosted by the Queer Community Alliance, Center for Feminisms, and Community Advocacy Office of Hampshire College, with support from the C.A.P.E.S. team. Please contact Community Advocacy Coordinator Teal Van Dyck at tvdDO@hampshire.edu with questions and accessibility support requests.