Levon Karakoyun

Areas of Interest

• Transnational Feminisms
• Queer Diasporas
• Queer and Trans Theory
• State and Subjectivity Formation
• Critical Race Theory
• State Violence, Status and Migration

Biography

Levon Karakoyun is an MA student at the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto. His work examines systemic patterns of state violence operating to reconfigure the lives of trans and gender non-conforming communities who are lower-class, migrants, and ethnic minorities. His interdisciplinary research project looks at state agendas of censorship, surveillance, displacement, and criminalization of “otherness” to question how such projects aim to construct particularly gendered, racialized, sexualized, classed, and status-based positionalities. Throughout his work, Levon is interested in exploring the concept of “recognizable” subjectivities. He aims to map how queerness is conceptualized through capitalist, cisheterosexist, and nationalist frameworks of citizenship and belonging.

Program: MA 2023

Education

BA, University of Toronto: Specialist Degree in Women and Gender Studies

Master’s Research Paper

Supervisor: Robert Diaz

Presentations

(Re)Remembering Internationalist Solidarities: The Role of Student Organizing, Archival Erasure, and Poetics of Resistance, Patching Seas of War: Convivial Culture and the Joy of Defiance, University of Toronto, Canada, December 2, 2022.

Honours and Awards