The Q21 Conversation Café is an important fixture in our Linked Oppressions event series that we're excited to help host with the Sexual & Gender Diversity Office (SGDO) again this year.
Linked Oppressions was born out of the realization that our individual lives and identities continue to be shaped by the intersectionality of multiple types of discrimination. The ways in which we are racialized and marked by gender, sexuality and dis/ability impact how we occupy certain spaces, negotiate personal relationships and encounter everyday realities.
An annual tradition of the Equity Studies Student Union, Linked Oppressions is a month-long event series that examines how various forms of marginalization, (with an emphasis on racism, homophobia and transphobia), are articulated, experienced and resisted.
Our Conversation Café will be themed around Sex Positivity. We are surrounded by so many ideas about sex: taboo and omnipresent, intimate and casual, morally significant and without meaning, precious and freely given, fantasy and ‘real-life’, ‘too much’ and ‘too little’, soul sustaining and superficial.
As a culture, our relationship with sex and the ideas surrounding and attached to it are… complicated. How do these ideas affect our relationships with our partner(s) and ourselves? How do these ideas about sex regulate what we can and cannot do, what we want and are not allowed to want, what we say and do not dare to say? On top of this, how do our various intersecting identities (self-identified and imposed) further complicate these questions? Join the conversation and share your experience, your musings, and your warmth.
This discussion will be facilitated by Cassandra Dang Nguyen, Women’s Education and Outreach Program Coordinator at Asian Community AIDS Services (ACAS). She is passionate about all matters social justice, but is currently investigating the intersection between interracial relations and intimacy. She is a graduate of UofT, Equity Studies and Social Cultural Anthropology.
The following questions have been designed to help guide our discussion:
- What do you think of when you hear “sex positivity”?
- Is there such a thing as “normal” sex?
- How comfortable are you when it comes to talking about your desires and your pleasure?
Visit the Q21: A Conversation Café website for more information on the series.
this is an accessible space | refreshments will be served | all bodies welcome
** Please contact us with any accessibility concerns and/or dietary restrictions before Monday, November 17. **