Queeribbean Crossings: Building Communities of Care

In recognition of 16 Days of Activism to End Gender-Based Violence and Human Rights Day, join us for "Queeribbean Crossings: Building Communities of Care" conference at The Center, Manhattan.

In 2022, Caribbean Equality Project launched Queeribbean Crossings, a community-centered transnational conference fostering conversation surrounding queer and trans Caribbean histories and contemporary lived realities of marginalization, struggle, resistance, and liberation. Hosted annually in December in recognition of 16 Days of Activism to End Gender-Based Violence and Human Rights Day, Queeribbean Crossings focuses on confronting Gendered and Racialized Violence within the Caribbean LGBTQ+ communities in the Caribbean region and the diaspora, particularly Caribbean-centric neighborhoods in New York City.

Hosted and organized by the Caribbean Equality Project, in partnership with the CUNY LGBTQIA+ Consortium, the conference focuses on confronting gendered and racialized violence to foster critical conversations and community-driven solutions. The conference will feature the NY book launch for "Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean" by author, professor, and activist Dr. Nikoli A. Attai.

The mission of this one-day conference is to generate momentum around the queer and gender liberatory projects in the Caribbean and throughout the Caribbean diaspora by fostering deeper connections across generations, citizen and non-citizenships, ethnicities, and gender and sexual practices and identities, as well as across the academic, artistic, and activist communities that center LGBTQ+ Caribbean people's experiences in their respective work. Following critical conversations during these initiatives, Queeribbean Crossings centers the intersections of cross-racial solidarity and intimate partner violence on themes of liberation, social justice, immigration, trans equity, decriminalization, mental health, HIV care, and other pertinent issues impacting Black, Asian, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ Caribbean communities.

Queeribbean Crossings provides critical and safe spaces to discuss, reflect, engage, and question our relationships as queer and trans Caribbean folks to our history, place, community values, and politics. In this space, we will think collaboratively about the multiplicities of care – within both the mundane, and the spectacular, amidst institutions and community organizing, and across multiple vectors of queer and trans Caribbean experience in the US. As we are caught in a challenging and precarious time of ongoing and colliding pandemics, we bring queer and trans Caribbean communities across the region and its diasporas to think collaboratively about what wellness, safety, healing, and care can feel and look like, particularly as we are caught up in the colliding forces, or crossings of violence.

In particular, the conference is built upon these key subject areas for workshops and panels:

• Building Trans Resilience: Trans Community Organizing and Resistance to Transphobias and Gender-Based Violence

• We Have Always Existed: On Asylum, Human Rights, and Cross-Racial Solidarity

• Express YuhSelf: Centering Joy and Artistic Practices

Queeribbean Crossings is grounded in multiple expressions of queer and trans Caribbean knowledge-making that include mainstream and dominant forms of communications, as well as art and aesthetic practice, storytelling, and other forms of alternative knowledge production. Annually, the conference brings together high school, college, community members, and academics to develop community-driven solutions to combat gender-based and intimate partner violence through a culturally responsive and racial justice lens.