The Pleasure Project
Jordache Ellapen
Faculty Lead, Assistant Professor and Program Director of WGSS, Department of Historical Studies, UTM and WGSI, UofT.
Jordache A. Ellapen is assistant professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media and the Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He is an anti-disciplinary Black Studies scholar interested in the specificities of South African Blackness and its formation within an Indian Ocean world, characteristic of various overlapping regimes of coercive labor practices (slavery, Indian/Asian indentureship, African migrant labor schemes). He teaches and researches in the following key areas: African and Black gender and sexuality studies, Queer Diaspora Studies, Visual and Performance Studies, and Afro-Indian studies.
Elliott Tilleczek
Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and The Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies, UofT.
Elliott Tilleczek (they/them) is a visual artist and Phd candidate in the Anthropology and Sexual Diversity Studies departments. Elliott’s research, artistic, and personal interests intersect broadly at the point of digital media and queerness. In their dissertation project “Engaging Influential Politics: Queer Invention and Affective Activism on Social Media”, Elliott asks: how do platform politics, algorithms, and other opaque programs interact with and shape activism? how are queer activists affected by these multiple processes of mediation, and how do they make sense of their online activism? Elliott’s visual art can be found here.
Ferdinand Lopez
Ph.D. candidate in the Women and Gender Studies Institute, UofT.
FERDINAND M. LOPEZ was an Associate Professor in Literature at the University of Santo Tomas- Manila. She was the Vice-chair of the Cultural Education Committee of the Sub-commission on Cultural Dissemination of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (Philippines) and a Faculty Council Member of the Philippine Cultural Education Program. In 2015, she was cited by 8 List Philippines as one of the 8 Iconic Teachers Students Love in College. She is a PhD candidate at the Women and Gender Studies Institute of the University of Toronto.
M. Nicole Horsley
Assistant Professor of African Diaspora Studies and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Screen Cultures at Ithaca College.
M. Nicole Horsley is an assistant professor of African Diaspora Studies and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Screen Cultures at Ithaca College. Interrogating feeling good, Black ontologies, disease, organs, sex and intimacies, disability, taste cultures, and the senses through visual and sonic cultures, and the politics of pleasure.
Cornel Grey
Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Western University.
Cornel Grey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Western University. His research focuses primarily on the health of black queer men. Grey is concerned with the intimate practices that shape black queer sociality, specifically the ways that men seek out and engage in different forms of skin-to-skin contact. He recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health where he examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the social and sexual lives of gay, bisexual, and queer men. His current projects include a qualitative study examining the impact of positive touch on the health of black queer men.
funded by the Queer and Trans Research Lab.