Bianca Beauchemin - Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, York University

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Bianca Beauchemin, who teaches in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her work seeks to disrupt the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, exploring how embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance, and alternative sexualities and genders re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. In this conversation, we explore the particularities of Black Studies in a Canadian context, the place of gender and sexuality studies in work of Black study, and the complexity of thinking Canadian blackness.