Thursday March 7th - 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. @ Blue Cat Boxing Club - FREE!

Academics, artists and other free-thinkers occupy the boxing ring to discuss and reflect upon sport, art and gender politics. Please join in the discussion in English or in French. Whisper translation available. Coordinated by Danielle Barkley, with assistance by Caroline S-Laurent and Asieh Harati. Hosted by Rébecca Lavoie.

Schedule

10 a.m. - coffee, fruit & croissants

10:30 - SPORTING MARGINALITY

Janaya Khan / Fighting from the Margins

Kris Grey / Out of Bounds: Sporting Beyond the Binary

11:45 - PLAYTIME: FROM THE RINK TO THE RING

Nicole Land / Bodies do Something : Materiality, Embodiment and Female Adolescents

Meg E. Wink / The Making of Hockey Dyke In Canada

Anna Sarkissian & Ameesha Joshi /With This Ring: Women Boxers in India

1:15 - LE CORPS À L’EPREUVE

Isabelle Mathieu / Prise de parole, prise de bec

Caroline St-Laurent / art contemporain + sport

2:15 - EMBODYING AGGRESSION

Savoy Howe / The Flower Garden

Maria Kefirova / Gold Meat

JANAYA KAHN *FIGHTING FROM THE MARGINS*

Competitive boxer, anti-oppression champion and genderqueer activist Janaya Kahn will use boxing as the entry point for talking about performativity and the gendered expectations of competition. This facilitated discussion will challenge heteronormativity and heterosexism through the scope of trans* identities in sport by using an anti-oppressive and anti-racist lens.

KRISTIN GREY/JUSTIN CREDIBLE *OUT OF BOUNDS; SPORTING BEYOND THE BINARY*

Kristin Grey/Justin Credible, a genderqueer artist and storyteller will deliver Out of Bounds, a performative lecture about sporting bodies in the media and public eye.

MARIA KEFIROVA*GOLD MEAT*

Bulgarian-born, Maria Kefirova will offer her performative lecture Goldmeat, a three-month experiment on conditioning the mental perceptions and emotional states to physically incorporate her three idols — Mike Tyson, Grace Jones and Mickey Rourke — into her body.

SAVOY HOME *THE FLOWER GARDEN*

Boxer and “theatre chick” Savoy Howe will combine her two vocational loves by performing The Flower Garden, a 10 minute performance piece about planting the seeds of female aggression. She is the head coach and owner of the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club, Canada’s only all-female and trans-positive boxing association.

NICOLE LAND * MATERIALITY, EMBODIMENT AND FEMALE ADOLESCENTS*

This presentation will argue that if we no longer hold athletic materiality subordinate to biology, we can begin to conceptualize the body as a transient event; a “slice of forces that have specific qualities, relations, speed, and rates of change” (Braidotti, 2003, p. 57). Nicole Land is a MA student in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria. Drawing on her BSc Kinesiology, Nicole is interested in complicating conventional conceptions of the female athletic body, focusing specifically on the entangled, affective, and transient materialities that come to matter in the events of young, athletic bodies.

MEG E. WINK  *THE MAKING OF HOCKEY DYKE IN CANADA*

A personal talk charting one hockey dyke’s journey from unhappy figure skater to professional hockey General Manager.

ANNA SARKISSIAN & AMEESHA JOSHI *WITH THIS RING : WOMEN BOXERS IN INDIA*

Anna Sarkissian is an independent filmmaker and writer with interests ranging from representation and gender, to citizen engagement and identity. Her work has been screened at the Canadian Parliament, festivals, and on national television. She has a BFA from Montrealʼs Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and an MA in anthropology from the University of Oxford.

Ameesha Joshi has a B.A. in psychology from the University of Waterloo and worked in the software industry for several years. In 2001 she directed her first short film, The Red Glove, about a female boxer, and developed a real appreciation for the sport. She recently completed an MFA at Concordia University.

CAROLINE ST-LAURENT *ART CONTEMPORAIN + SPORT*

Anciennement gymnaste, Caroline St-Laurent a progressivement transposé dans sa pratique artistique plusieurs notions liées à la pratique de la gymnastique, telles que la mise à l’épreuve du corps, la recherche d’équilibre et de perfection, la compétition, le spectacle et la répétition. Caroline aborde sa pratique artistique comme une réflexion sur l’entrecroisement des disciplines de l’art et du sport, en jumelant leurs notions de performance, leurs espaces de pratique, leurs règles et leurs contraintes. Elle poursuit actuellement ses recherches sur le détournement artistique de la performance sportive et a complété une maîtrise en arts visuels et médiatiques à l’Université du Québec à Montréal en 2012. Son travail a été présenté dans différentes expositions collectives au Québec, ainsi que lors de nombreux festivals de création vidéo au Canada et à l’étranger.