Junior Fellow Lecture Series – Gender & Sexuality

Presented by the Junior Fellows, these lectures take place roughly once a month and invite three Junior Fellows to give an after dinner lecture on a chosen topic through the lens of their various fields of study. 

February’s topic is Gender and Sexuality. 

Make this an evening filled with excellent food and wonderful company – register to attend Formal Dinner in advance of the Junior Fellow lecture Series! All are welcome and encouraged to attend.

Narrativizing the Courtesan: A South Asian Perspective 

Significant cultural players during the Mughal period (1526-1857 CE), courtesans (called tawaifs in the Urdu language) were literate and literary women, able to move through society with relative freedom, in an era where most women had little access to an education or social mobility. As the Mughals lost control of India to the British, courtesans lost the client-patron networks sustaining their art. Yet they have remained significant to literary-cultural production in India (and later Pakistan), still appearing in Bollywood films. My presentation looks at the evolving role of courtesans, focusing on their literary-media representations, especially in Urdu literature.  

Labiba Naeem is a PhD student at U of T’s Centre for Comparative Literature, and a SSHRC award-holder. She is a Course Instructor, teaching Introduction to South Asian Studies at the Munk School’s Asian Institute. She has worked as a translator, interpreter, and legal assistant in Immigration and Refugee Law. Her research explores representations of courtesans in Urdu literature, during and after the British colonial period, focusing on issues of language, gender, and literary production. 

Transgender and gender affirming care in North America – past and present

Transgender care is health care. This presentation will include a brief history on transgender and gender-related health care, and will highlight the current role of plastic surgeons in supporting health care access to patients. We will also discuss the current obstacles and recent political events that are impacting gender-related health care across Canada and the U.S. 

Emma Avery is a surgical resident in the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Toronto. Prior to relocating to Toronto, she completed her medical doctorate and Master’s in Science at the University of Manitoba. Her current research areas of interest include regenerative medicine & tissue engineering, as well as improving health equity and health care access for Indigenous communities & gender diverse individuals. 

Hacking Miss Olympia Blak’s Body: A Xenofeminist Performance 

This presentation reflects on the influences and trajectory of Abisola’s performance-based paper titled, “Miss Olympia Blak’s Pharmacoliberation.” The paper theorizes on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and social domination through the voice of a cyborg sex worker whose data body is performed on a dark web livestream server. The lecture-performance proposes that bodily fluids are sexploited by state-capitalist regimes – and also liberated through queer underground networks and platforms. Olympia Blak’s persona was inspired by the possibilities and contradictions posed in Shu-Lea Cheang’s film, Fluidø (2017), and the discourse of the essay follows from a visual analysis of the film. 

Abisola Oni is a candidate for the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies and they are a first year Junior Fellow. Their research and creation interests focus on body politics through artistic practice. Abisola is a performance artist who has screened and performed new media projects in Toronto and places along the Haldimand Tract, and they serve as Chair of the Board of Directors of Pleasure Dome, an artist-run organization focused on experimental media.