Ryan Persadie

Ryan Persadie 

PhD Candidate, Women and Gender Studies & Sexual Diversity Studies
University of Toronto

Ryan is a performance artist, educator, and PhD Candidate in Women and Gender studies and Sexual Diversity studies at the University of Toronto. He also holds a MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. His aesthetic and scholarly work investigates queer Indo-Caribbean diasporas, performance, post-indenture feminisms, and Afro-Asian intimacies. His current doctoral work specifically explores how Anglophone Caribbean music, dance, vocality, and embodiment offer salient archives to pursue critical erotic place- and self-making practices for descendants of Indian(-Caribbean) indenture. Exploring these embodied archives compels him to think about how such important feminist and decolonial methods of making erotic space work to transgress, disrupt, and re-imagine Indo-Caribbean geographies beyond hetero-/homonormative paradigms of sexual citizenship, home/land, belonging, desire, pleasure, community, and “Pride.” His writing can be found in MUSICultures, the Canadian Theatre Review, the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies as well as Gay City News, Thaenpot, and the Stabroek News. Outside of academia, Ryan is a community organizer with the Caribbean Equality Project and Queeribbean Toronto, and performs as a drag artist where he goes by the stage name of Tifa Wine.