Mx Sahibzada Mayed1
1Pause And Effect, Burnaby, Canada
Biography:
Mayed is a decolonial researcher and designer, committed to dismantling oppressive systems and cultivating pathways for collective liberation. Through genderful fashion, they create spaces to celebrate the beauty of diverse gender expressions and disrupt the gender binary.
Mayed's identity is shaped by their background as a Muslim immigrant of Afghan, Indian, Pakistani, and Persian heritage, as well as lived experiences of queerness, disability, and neurodivergence.
Abstract:
Colonialism operates through a matrix of power based on the foundations of violence, control, and domination. This paper maps connections between gender-based and land-based violence, critiquing how the formation of nation-states tied to colonization separates Indigenous peoples from their lands and disrupts relational ways of being. Settler-colonial frameworks often rely on rigid binaries to justify the domination of land as property and the control of (gendered) bodies within hetero-patriarchal norms.
Drawing from queer/trans feminist perspectives, this paper explores possibilities for Indigenous resurgence to dismantle these colonial logics, offering relational frameworks that reconnect bodily autonomy with land sovereignty. We need to uproot the colonial logics of ownership, separation, and construction of identity, emphasizing how the liberation of peoples and ecosystems is intertwined. It is important to reclaim ancestral practices rooted in care, reciprocity, and interdependence.