Many in diasporas belong to the LGBTQIA+ community, including those who were forced to emigrate due to their gender identities and expressions and/or sexual orientations. This program discusses whether the LGBTQIA+ community can be considered its own diaspora and how their intersectional identities affect their experiences.
Speakers
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Anja Limon, Senior Program Manager, Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration (ORAM)
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Rajiv Mohabir, Assistant Professor, Emerson College
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Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Artist and poet
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Ruben Zecena, Assistant Professor of English, Texas State University
Moderator: Ari Shaw, Senior Fellow and Director of International Programs, Williams Institute, UCLA (Tovaangar)
Image: María Inés Taracena, "Joseling, left, and Estefany stand in front of the border fence, before walking to the DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, on August 10, 2017"
About the Speakers
Anja Limon is Senior Program Manager for the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration (ORAM) and is based in their Berlin office. She holds a Bachelor of Law from the University of Ljubljana and an LLM in International Law from the University of Bristol, where she focused on migration law and policy. Before joining ORAM, Anja worked at a law firm in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She joined ORAM in Tel Aviv in 2017, during which time she also volunteered for Amnesty International, working with Eritrean and Sudanese refugees in Israel. In September 2017 she moved to Berlin, where she helped register ORAM in Germany.
Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Taxidermist’s Cut, Cowherd’s Son, and Cutlish; a book of translation, I Even Regret Night; and his hybrid memoir, Antiman. He is winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, finalists for the 2017 and 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry. Mohabir has received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. He is currently a professor at Emerson College.
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is a fa'afafine artist and poet from Sāmoa i Sasa'e (American Samoa). Their artist book The Healer's Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia was published by Pu'uhonua Society and Tropic Editions of Honolulu for the 2022 Hawai'i Triennial, and is available through Printed Matter New York. Their book of poems Coconut Milk was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. Their work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Honolulu Museum, Kathmandu Triennial, and Venice Biennale. Their film Sinalela won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award; and their film 100 Tikis was the opening night film of Présence Autochtone 2016 in Tiohti:áke.
Ruben Zecena is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University. He specializes in contemporary Latinx literature and culture, which he engages through the frameworks of queer migration studies, border studies, queer of color critique, and women of color feminism. His scholarship appears in the journals WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Diálogo, an Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, amongst others. He is currently working on a monograph about the cultural productions of queer and trans migrants in the US.
Ari Shaw, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow and the Director of International Programs at the Williams Institute, specializing in international human rights, LGBTI politics, and U.S. foreign policy. He was previously on the senior staff at Columbia World Projects and has worked on human rights, global governance, and LGBTI issues for the Open Society Foundations, the Gill Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the United Nations Association of the USA, among others. Shaw was a visiting researcher at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He was also a Multirights Fellow at the Norwegian Centre on Human Rights in Oslo. Shaw holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University, an M.Sc. in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a B.A. in government from Harvard College.
Sponsors
UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies; UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration; UCLA International Institute; UCLA LGBTQ Campus Resource Center; UCLA School of Law Williams Institute
