Ryan Conrad
Ryan Conrad is an Adjunct Research Faculty member at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. From 2019-2022 he was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Cinema and Media Studies Program at York University where he was working on a manuscript entitled 'Radical VIHsion: Canadian AIDS Film & Video.' Previously he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University with the AIDS Activist History Project. He earned a PhD from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University and an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts from the Maine College of Art.
Conrad is the co-founder of Against Equality (againstequality.org), a digital archive and publishing collective based in the United States and Canada. He is the editor of the collective's anthology series that are compiled together in Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion (2014). He has also contributed single-author and co-authored chapters to several anthologies including: Queer and Trans Migrations (2020), Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (2016) The Gay Agenda (2014), Queering Anarchism (2013), and After Homosexual (2013).
His written work has appeared in scholarly and activist publications including: American Quarterly, Women Studies Quarterly, Auto/Biography Studies, JumpCut, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, e-flux, Aparté: Arts Vivants, QED: A Journal of LGBTQ Worldmaking, Scholar & Feminist, Socialism & Democracy, Gay & Lesbian Review, We Who Feel Differently, Little Joe, UltraViolet, In These Times, and Fifth Estate.
His work as a visual and performing artist has exhibited internationally in Europe, Asia, and North America.
Address: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Conrad is the co-founder of Against Equality (againstequality.org), a digital archive and publishing collective based in the United States and Canada. He is the editor of the collective's anthology series that are compiled together in Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion (2014). He has also contributed single-author and co-authored chapters to several anthologies including: Queer and Trans Migrations (2020), Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (2016) The Gay Agenda (2014), Queering Anarchism (2013), and After Homosexual (2013).
His written work has appeared in scholarly and activist publications including: American Quarterly, Women Studies Quarterly, Auto/Biography Studies, JumpCut, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, e-flux, Aparté: Arts Vivants, QED: A Journal of LGBTQ Worldmaking, Scholar & Feminist, Socialism & Democracy, Gay & Lesbian Review, We Who Feel Differently, Little Joe, UltraViolet, In These Times, and Fifth Estate.
His work as a visual and performing artist has exhibited internationally in Europe, Asia, and North America.
Address: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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Books by Ryan Conrad
Toronto Living With AIDS is published by PUBLIC Books and distributed by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. For a complete copy: https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/T/Toronto-Living-With-AIDS
“Equality” is a concept inextricably linked to positive social progress, but as the authors collected here suggest, it’s a concept that often functions as a smoke screen to hide a world riddled with systemic injustice. Take marriage, for instance: is the right to marry whomever we want really a worthy goal for the queer community? What if this perceived “right” is actually a wrong? Against Equality suggests that seeking inclusion in a system that’s based on institutional and economic exploitation is an unacceptable path forward.
This exhibition catalog documents a cultural project done in response to the government's ill thought out project and reactions to it.
Prisons Will Not Protect You, a compilation of archived work, is located at the difficult and traumatic point where the violence of the state against queer and LGBT people colludes with the violence we are always trying to escape. The pieces here question the gay community’s fealty to the prison industrial complex, arguing that hate crimes legislation, which enhances penalties and can even be used to bring in the death penalty, only serves to funnel massive numbers of people into prisons with increasing lengths of time served and the use of tortuous methods like solitary confinement. This has significant racial and economic implications in a country that houses five percent of the world’s population but nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners and where prisons have become, for many impoverished area and people, the only source of livelihood.
Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars provides hitherto unavailable set of critiques on a subject that has rarely been approached with as much candor and nuance. Defying the prescriptive logic of “gay is good” that permeates mainstream gay politics, it seeks to interrogate the place of the military in a queer imagining of the world and simultaneously challenges the mainstream left to question its signing on to the damaging militarism of contemporary gay politics.
Book Chapters by Ryan Conrad
As queer and trans cultural workers, academics and activists, Against Equality ironically embraces the lascivious epithets hurled against us by the religious right as we work towards a world where marriage is no longer a pre-requisite for basic human rights (ie healthcare), where narrow legal definitions based on the fantasy of nuclear family structures (gay or straight) no longer define our varied kinship networks, and where the administrative apparatus of nation states no longer contains our bodies within its confining regulatory borders. This chapter explores the benefits, as well as any potential drawbacks, of embracing the radically conservative notion that queers are pushing a threatening and destabilizing “gay agenda.” This strategy of embracing the religious right’s worst nightmare is a humorous, yet serious component of Against Equality’s critique of both hetero-supremacy and the place of marriage in a radically equitable queer future.
Papers by Ryan Conrad
online at:
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/thinking-queer-activism-transnationally/queer-transnational-activism-a-conversation-on-organizing-solidarity-and-difference/
Toronto Living With AIDS is published by PUBLIC Books and distributed by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. For a complete copy: https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/T/Toronto-Living-With-AIDS
“Equality” is a concept inextricably linked to positive social progress, but as the authors collected here suggest, it’s a concept that often functions as a smoke screen to hide a world riddled with systemic injustice. Take marriage, for instance: is the right to marry whomever we want really a worthy goal for the queer community? What if this perceived “right” is actually a wrong? Against Equality suggests that seeking inclusion in a system that’s based on institutional and economic exploitation is an unacceptable path forward.
This exhibition catalog documents a cultural project done in response to the government's ill thought out project and reactions to it.
Prisons Will Not Protect You, a compilation of archived work, is located at the difficult and traumatic point where the violence of the state against queer and LGBT people colludes with the violence we are always trying to escape. The pieces here question the gay community’s fealty to the prison industrial complex, arguing that hate crimes legislation, which enhances penalties and can even be used to bring in the death penalty, only serves to funnel massive numbers of people into prisons with increasing lengths of time served and the use of tortuous methods like solitary confinement. This has significant racial and economic implications in a country that houses five percent of the world’s population but nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners and where prisons have become, for many impoverished area and people, the only source of livelihood.
Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars provides hitherto unavailable set of critiques on a subject that has rarely been approached with as much candor and nuance. Defying the prescriptive logic of “gay is good” that permeates mainstream gay politics, it seeks to interrogate the place of the military in a queer imagining of the world and simultaneously challenges the mainstream left to question its signing on to the damaging militarism of contemporary gay politics.
As queer and trans cultural workers, academics and activists, Against Equality ironically embraces the lascivious epithets hurled against us by the religious right as we work towards a world where marriage is no longer a pre-requisite for basic human rights (ie healthcare), where narrow legal definitions based on the fantasy of nuclear family structures (gay or straight) no longer define our varied kinship networks, and where the administrative apparatus of nation states no longer contains our bodies within its confining regulatory borders. This chapter explores the benefits, as well as any potential drawbacks, of embracing the radically conservative notion that queers are pushing a threatening and destabilizing “gay agenda.” This strategy of embracing the religious right’s worst nightmare is a humorous, yet serious component of Against Equality’s critique of both hetero-supremacy and the place of marriage in a radically equitable queer future.
online at:
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/thinking-queer-activism-transnationally/queer-transnational-activism-a-conversation-on-organizing-solidarity-and-difference/
By collaging archival footage from ACT UP’s political funerals with portrait images of twenty of my peers, I try to imagine what it would feel like to lose all of them in a few years time to AIDS. I wonder what loss on that scale feels like and whether I would have had the strength and courage to fight back as tirelessly as those whose ghosts I’ve stumbled upon through old reels of AIDS Community Television and DIVA TV footage.
Furthermore, this project reflects on how the feeling of loss has particular meaning and value in connecting queer subjects in a shared affective framework. This focus on loss is not solely fixed to the material disappearance of thousands upon thousands of queer bodies to a deadly disease exasperated by obscene government negligence, but the use of this material loss as a productive historical site to think about how younger generations of queers try to grasp at the incomprehensibility of AIDS as genocide. Without the first hand experience of burying your entire circle of friends and lovers, how could one ever understand what it was like?