Vectors for Change Lecture Series

The Centre for Gender and Diversity (CGD) is pleased to invite you to the next lecture in the Vectors for Change series, featuring Dr. Wigbertson Julian Isenia, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. This talk, titled Trans Lives in Curaçao: Rethinking Sovereignty, Language, and Identity*, offers a critical engagement with dominant Euro-American paradigms of gender, identity, and political belonging.

Trans Lives in Curaçao: Rethinking Sovereignty, Language, and Identity*
Dr. Wigbertson Julian Isenia (University of Amsterdam)
Tuesday, 14 May 2025 | 15:30–17:30
FASoS – Grote Gracht 76S, Room 1.02

Dr. Isenia’s research investigates gender and sexuality in postcolonial contexts, with a particular emphasis on the Dutch Caribbean. Their work has been published in leading journals including Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Feminist Review, and in the Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism. In 2024, their doctoral dissertation received an Honorable Mention for the Caribbean Studies Association’s Best Dissertation Award.

This lecture challenges the widespread application of Eurocentric and U.S.-centric gender frameworks by centering the specific cultural and linguistic dynamics of Curaçao. It explores how local understandings of language and identity complicate dominant binaries of gender and sexuality, and how processes of translation and vernacular expression offer alternative conceptualizations of trans* lives and experiences. Through this perspective, Dr. Isenia invites us to reflect on the politics of sovereignty, the role of language in shaping gendered subjectivities, and the potential of Caribbean epistemologies to unsettle normative understandings of identity and resistance.

This event is open to all students, staff, and members of the public with an interest in gender studies, postcolonial theory, Caribbean studies, anthropology, or queer theory.

We look forward to welcoming you to this timely and thought-provoking lecture.