Name Viviane Namaste | ||
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Dr. Viviane Namaste is a Canadian feminist scholar, author, researcher and professor, whose work focuses on health and transsexualism, more specifically HIV/AIDS and being seropositive. Namaste's research focuses on health, sex work, transsexuality, transgenderism, bisexuality, and swinger communities.
Contents
- Viviane namaste president s conference series understanding desire
- 5e conf rence francophone vih sida casablanca 2010 entrevue avec viviane namaste
- Biography
- Published work
- Awards
- References
She has commented that research that maintains the gender binary can exclude communities. Her research examines the involvement of public health in HIV prevention among swinger groups in Montreal. Namaste has been noted for criticizing Judith Butler in her work Undoing Gender by discussing how transsexuality intersects someone's identity and how it attributes to the treatment of transsexuals and more specifically their murder.
The feminist journal, Hypatia, has called Namaste's work, "extremely important" because she "excels at focusing readers' attention on the most marginalized of transsexuals, at analyzing the ways in which different systems of oppression work together." Namaste considers activism more important than work within the humanities.
5e conf rence francophone vih sida casablanca 2010 entrevue avec viviane namaste
Biography
Namaste graduated from Carleton University in 1989 with a BA and continued her education at York University, earning an MA in Sociology. She then completed her doctoral at Université du Québec à Montréal in Semiotics and Linguistics. She worked within CACTUS-Montreal, where she co-founded ASTT(e)Q (Action santé travesties et transsexuel(le)s du Québec), a community-based health project working with marginalized trans people on issues including HIV, sex work, and access to health care, and ACT UP Paris. In 2001, she received the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for her book entitled, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. That same year, Namaste was also a director in the documentary Madame Lauraine's Transsexual Touch which deals with transsexual sex workers as well as sexual health and clientele.
She joined the Simone de Beauvoir Institute (SDBI) in 2002 as a full-time faculty member and in 2006 took over as principal of SDBI. By 2009, Namaste was an associate professor and the Research Chair in HIV/AIDS and Sexual Health at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In 2009, she was awarded the "Canadian Award for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights", which is awarded jointly by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and Human Rights Watch.
In 2012, Namaste led a strike with SDBI faculty in order to protest tuition increases. In 2013, she was called as an official intervenor in a hearing at the Supreme Court of Canada on whether the ban on solicitation, prohibition of brothelss and criminality of making a living from prostitution violate the Charter of Rights.
Published work
Invisible Lives evaluates the erasure of transgender individuals by medical psychiatry. It also draws on the daily lived-experiences of transgendered individuals and describes how their identity permeates every facet of their life from obtaining housing to health care. The Library Journal wrote that Invisible Lives has "broken new ground with one of the first sociological studies of the TS/TG community."
This book utilizes case studies as a means to analyze elements such as Human rights and Prostitution in looking at transsexual politics in Quebec and Canada. Namaste asks what makes someone a woman and whether male to female transsexuals should be included in women's spaces. Namaste also explores how gender and sex are defined in our culture and discusses the everyday manner in which transsexuals face discrimination. In the end, she recommends that feminists "integrate transsexual politics and theory into their work." One criticism that the journal, Hypatia, makes of the writing in Sex Change, Social Change is that Namaste is "at times antagonistic towards transsexual and transgender activists and theorists who work within gay, lesbian, or queer frameworks." Canadian Dimension writes that her book makes the subject matter "accessible to those unacquainted with the current body of work on transsexuality."
This book explores the lives of fourteen transsexual cabaret dancers. It discusses how transsexuals and transvestites were largely responsible for Cabaret's culture. Looking at the social changes that occurred in the 60's and 70's in Quebec, this book examines working conditions for these cabaret dancers as well as police abuse of power.