Dr. Bianca Beauchemin

Bianca Beauchemin obtained her BA with a summa cum laude distinction from York University in Women’s Studies and attended Queen’s University Master’s program in Gender Studies. She is currently a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at UCLA, where she was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship. Her dissertation research re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. Indeed, beneath the surface of the Bois-Caïman ceremony, the burning of Le Cap, the implementation of French slavery abolition laws, and post-independence literature, reside opaque, yet ingenious, formulations of Black liberation and resistance that unsettle Western discourses of archives, modernity, “humanness,” and freedom.

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