Celebrating Pride & Organizing Communities in Disability, Gender, Queerness
On July 25, 2022, in honor of Disability Pride Month, AWN collaborated with The Curve Foundation and Beyond the Rainbow in a conversation with Jamila Hammami and Bridget Liang about the intersections of disability, gender, and queerness. The panel explored how disabled queer people imagine liberation, and what the LGBTQ movement can gain from actively centering disabled voices and leadership.
Event Description
July is Disability Pride Month, and part of celebrating pride is to honor the intersections of disability, gender, and queerness. These three parts of identity intertwine and inform each other to make us who we are. In this panel discussion, we amplify the experiences of those at the margins of these identities: disabled queer folks and women. Join us in conversation with The Curve Foundation, Beyond the Rainbow, and panelists Jamila Hammami and Bridget Liang, as we explore what these intersections mean.
Moderator: Lydia X. Z. Brown, AWN Director of Policy, Advocacy, and External Affairs
About The Curve Foundation
The mission of the Curve Foundation is to empower lesbians, queer women, trans people, and non-binary people to share our culture and stories, connect with each other, and raise visibility.
About Beyond the Rainbow
Beyond the Rainbow, a project of The Curve Foundation, is a groundbreaking conversation series that seeks to create an intersectional, multi generational space touching on gender, queerness, race, ability, and activism of yesterday and today. Beyond the Rainbow seeks to challenge the possibilities and limits of queer representation as a path towards liberation.
Corrected transcript coming soon.
Presenters
Jamila Hammami
A Sundance Creative Change and an Opportunity Agenda Communications Institute alum, Jamila Hammami is a proud Texan ruckus-maker. For nearly 20 years, they have been a grassroots cross-movement organizer, receiving international recognition for their work. Jamila holds an affection for educating the masses, direct action, writing, art, research, creative strategies, and solidarity as resistance. They are a consultant and an educator of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas as well asAfricana Studies, LGBTQIA* GNS Communities, Community Justice, and Community Organizing. Jamila has several publications, with several forthcoming in 2023. They are the founder of Dispatches from the Struggle: Accounts from the Ground, Steering Committee member of the annual Open Borders Conference, and Vice President of the Board of Directors of Free Migration Project. Jamila’s pronouns are they/them/theirs. They live on occupied Lenape territory (“Brooklyn, New York”) by way of occupied Kiikaapoi and Tawakoni territories (small-town and rural east “Texas”) and U.S. mini colonies.
Bridget Liang
Bridget Liang is a mixed race, queer, transfeminine, neurodivergent, disabled, fat fangirl. They came into their queerness in Hamilton Ontario. They’re a PhD candidate in the Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies Program at York University, a community researcher, workshop and group facilitator, performance artist, and fiction writer. Their work is on autistic trans folks and their experiences with family.