How Queer Are You? - Bradford Literature Festival

LGBTQ+ is a constantly evolving movement, and understanding how these umbrella terms have come to encompass the identities within them is becoming increasingly prescient.

Historically, and still sometimes today, the word ‘queer’ has been used as a slur, until the 1990s saw a change in meaning to a self-identification as ‘not straight in a traditional sense’. The term was as divisive then as it is now.

This event brings together three speakers to consider what it means to identify as queer from a cross-cultural perspective: Dibyesh Anand will reflect on being queer within the South Asian community; Claire Heuchan talks about her experience as a black radical feminist living in Scotland; and Sea Sharp discusses identifying as a non-binary, Afro-Native American “refugee of Kansas”.



Chair

Paul Burston

@paulburston

Paul Burston is the curator and host of award-winning literary salon Polari at London’s Southbank Centre, and founder of The Polari First Book Prize for new writing. In 2016 he was featured in the British Council’s Five Films 4 Freedom Global List, celebrating “visionary people who are promoting freedom, equality and LGBT rights around the world”.

Photo by Krystyna FitzGerald-Morris

Speakers

Claire Heuchan

@ClaireShrugged

Claire Heuchan is the award-winning blogger Sister Outrider. She is an essayist and feminist theorist, her work explores themes of power, identity, and liberation politics. Claire has essays featured in a growing range of books – including the feminist anthology Nasty Women.

Dibyesh Anand

@dibyeshanand

Professor Dibyesh Anand is the Head of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster in London. He is also an author and has published on varied topics including the Tibet, China-India border dispute, Hindutva and Islamophobia, identity politics in Tanzania, and nationalism.

Sea Sharp

@SeaThePoet

Sea Sharp is a 2017 Pushcart Prize winner and author of the 2015 Prairie Seed Poetry Prize winning book, “The Swagger of Dorothy Gale and Other Filthy Ways to Strut”. Their work has been presented at events sponsored by Apples and Snakes, Hammer and Tongue, Brighton Dome, Pighog and Polari.