Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies associate director Che Gossett will give a talk from their manuscript in progress, focusing on the remarkable life of Philadelphia-based AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya, queer archives, and life-writing. Gossett argues that abolition — from closets to cages — is the thread that sutures together Kuromiya’s participation in Black radical, queer/trans liberationist, and AIDS activist movements. Gossett considers how Kuromiya’s history shifts and transforms the image of AIDS activism and science, and how Kuromiya radicalized and democratized his collaborator Buckminster Fuller's techno futurism with the use of technology and the internet for HIV/AIDS activism, through the establishment of the Critical Path AIDS Project. Gossett ends with a discussion of how blackness, as a critique of the subject, provides a critical opening to other forms of life-writing.

Please join the zoom meeting here, and below are log-in details.