The Southeast Regional Unity Conference
APRIL 9 - 11, 2010
Last year's theme:
Sweet T:
Transgressing, Transforming, and Transcending Gender and Sexuality in the South
The gender binary is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of oppression in our society. It affects us in the most intimate elements of our lives. In our bedrooms, in our kitchens, in the workplace, on the streets, in bathrooms, and in the places where we need support most - even our schools or in the hospital - the gender binary forces us into individuated static identities.
Our gender identities influence how we feel about our bodies, who we form relationships with and how, and what kinds of expectations people have for our behavior. This is true for folks who identify as straight women or men as well as for folks who identify as queer.
This year's conference will focus on exploring a vast range of gender identities and expressions. We chose this theme because too often issues of gender (and trans issues in particular) get tacked onto the queer movement as an afterthought - if they are not left out entirely. We want to create spaces to talk about how gender identity and sexuality are different things, but also to examine the multitude of ways in which they relate.
Transpeople, gender queer, intersex, and gender non-conforming folks fuck with the binary. We don't fit neatly into one or the other category, but instead shed light on a spectrum of gender possibilities. This opens up space for all of us to step outside the binary boxes or to explode those boxes completely.
Most of us transgress gender in some way or another throughout our lives. From the clothes we wear to the jobs we take, we are constantly pressing against gender's limits. We transform gender; we modify our bodies or our names and pronouns or we enact gender presentations that complicate traditional notions of woman/man. We seek to transcend normative understandings of gender and sexuality. We eschew labels or make new ones up, we choose pronouns that fall outside the binary, and we play with gender presentation in ways that are fluid and not able to be pinned down.
This conference is about honoring the radical possibilities we all have to enact a multitude of gendered or non-gendered selves. It is about creating a community of people who respect each other's chosen identities from moment to moment and who value difference and deviance as a challenge to the corporate homogenization of global heteronormative culture. This conference will celebrate the many intersecting identities that make us layered humans, too deep to examine through a lens of gender and sexuality alone. We will collectively struggle with issues of power, examining ourselves and our movement first and foremost, as we address race, ethnicity, class, ability, faith, citizenship, culture, and more.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these themes.
Unity's History
The Unity Conference was founded in 2001
by UNC student, Trevor Hoppe. Hoppe, then a sophomore at UNC-Chapel
Hill, was inspired by The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Annual
Creating Change conference, and wanted to bring something to the
Southeast that was more accessible to students and community members.