Convergence 9

a sexy crip manifesto
by seeley quest

1 sometimes I want to rip
Sometimes I want to rip out my bands of body pain to hurl—

I fight harsh wind and words all day, muscles set and edge on numb, and even if I’ve slept enough, I resist feeling how my back will again resist relaxing all today.

Yeah, I know I have to try Feldenkrais or yoga or visualization techniques or a salt bath, but again broke, my attention so focused on survival and hustling each day, I simply stumble into and out of my sleeping pad.


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Art by Chloe Gordon-Chow

Musings of a Pansexual Muslim Stoner
by Fadwa Bahman

Ramadan just ended
Breathe it all in
The first breakfast in a month feels like a new chance at life
like I’ve put on rainbow-colored glasses
Sucked back into a version of reality where
I am sipping iced coffee from a glass jar on my balcony,
browsing a psychotherapy office in Westmount
Capitalism exists again
I want to be a part of society again
I can ingest and inhale again


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Queer: “ of, relating to, or being a person whose sexual orientation is not heterosexual and/or whose gender identity is not cisgender ”

Not Queer Enough is dedicated to anyone who feels like they do not fit under a single gender or sexual label.

This series sheds light on a very real stigma within the Queer community, that of rigid exclusivity. Although the LGBTQ+* have historically been discriminated against, the
community itself also perpetuates structures of oppression within their own members. Strict definitions based on heteronormative systems have created divisions that exclude more than they include.


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The Empire of Racism: Dismantling and Resisting the Colonial Violence with/in Academia through an Auto/Ethno/Graphical Narrative
by Shyam Patel

The corpses of academic trauma live in the bodies of people of colour. They exhaust — almost burning, rupturing — our existence limb by limb. As I trace — painfully extracting and exhuming — my own experiences and stories with/in academia, I am overcome by a sense of hardship and loss. Knowing that others like me, too, have similar travels with/in academia does not provide me with any form of solace. It only reminds me how treacherous and vile the culture of dominance, even with/in so called progressive and radical spaces, happens to be. Despite this, I still hold onto this notion of hope — perhaps even radical love — when I embark on dismantling and resisting colonial violence,  finding ways of bringing my own voice from the margin to the center. 


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Voluntourism and the Conflation of Compassion with Colonialism
by Gaby Novoa

Voluntourism “at its best” can open opportunities for cross-cultural exchange of skills, knowledge and experience (Devereux 2008); however, the work of Western volunteers and organizations within “developing” countries, while veiled as compassion, also functions as a continuation of colonialism. Every year, more than 1.6 million youth from the “global North” spend over $2 billion to volunteer in countries of the “global South,” with these young volunteer tourists being predominantly white women (Bandyopadhyay and Patil 2017). The imbalance of power dynamics upheld by voluntourism is further perpetuated through its visual dissemination on social media platforms such as Instagram (Sin and He 2018).


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Convergence is a project by QPIRG Concordia and QPIRG-McGill

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