Against Equality speaker discusses queer theory

The Feminist and Queer Theory Reading Group hosted a conversation on Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion as one of its biweekly talks of feminist and queer theory texts on Monday at the Greenhouse.

Ryan Conrad, a Ph.D candidate at Concordia University and author of four novels presented the talk.

“[I’m] an outlaw artist, terrorist academic and petty thief who divides his time between Maine and Montreal,” Conrad said.

Crossing the link between academia and activism, Conrad began the discussion with an introduction to Against Equality, an “online archive, publishing and arts collective focused on critiquing mainstream gay and lesbian politics,” as stated by the website.

“[We aim] for inclusion in the system’s rights for gay marriage, the U.S. military and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation,” he said.

Against Equality began in 2009 as a personal response to gay marriage legislature. After receiving positive feedback from other people, Conrad began expanding the blog to what it is today.

“The project morphed from a personal, ‘pissed-off’ blog to a larger archiving project,” Conrad said. “We’re a ragtag group of people. We all have other jobs; we’re all activists in our own communities.”

Against Equality strives to publish an annual anthology based on its existing archive. Its books in the series include Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You!, Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars and Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage. The latest book, Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion — on which Conrad presented — is an edited amalgamation of the preceding three books with an introduction from the Against Equality collective.

“It was important that the idea to have Ryan speak was hatched outside of Hopkins, in conversations among folks engaged with queer issues in Baltimore,” Chris Westcott, event organizer and sixth-year graduate student in the English Department, wrote in an email to The News-Letter.

“The nature of Against Equality in some ways reflects this: It is an anthology of online writings originally collected as a series of three zines that archive radical queer responses to the issues of gay marriage, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and hate crime legislation,” he said.

During the talk, Conrad stressed the importance of having a non-organization, despite there being undesired repercussions in addition to benefits.

“[I share that] today is because I want to be transparent, to show how it has evolved,” he said.

He also delineated the geographical origins of Against Equality — all members are not from major queer-centric urban centers, such as New York or Philadelphia. He also marked the significance of retaining not only textual work, but also the gravitas of visual work, such as performance art.

“We try to include visual culture in the archive. It is harder because some is performance documentation... The inability of gay rights movements to have structuralist thought without the sob story is very difficult,” Conrad said.

“Although it is very personal, the personal narrative disregards the last 50 years of feminist thought. The structuralist movement, which some organizations miss, offers something new and different that isn’t part of the conversation.”

This sentiment was echoed by Westcott.

“Popular discussions of rights and equality have a way of setting aside or erasing such perspectives, and I think they are sometimes also obscured in what we call queer theory. It seems to me that, whatever else it does, Against Equality reminds us that these perspectives have played an important role in the history of queer struggles and that they are a particular source of energy today, not just online and in books but also in the street,” he wrote.

When asked what his opinion was on current sites of activism, Conrad’s reply was bleak.

“These are dark times of capitalism,” Conrad said.

The talk was generally well-received.

“Just as the book is about seeing the timeline of queer issues as not simply linear or unidirectional, nor amounting towards one apex, the presentation was a full-pictured and multi-angled glance at issues that aren’t simply ‘queer’ as well,” freshman Christian Cholish said.