Nathalie Batraville

Assistant Professor, Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Womens Studies

Biography Research activities Teaching activities

Office:	S-ER 613 ER Building, 2155 Guy St.
Phone:	(514) 848-2424 ext. 5867
Email:	nathalie.batraville@concordia.ca

Nathalie Batraville is an Assistant Professor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of Black feminisms, queer theory, Haitian studies, and prison abolition. In doing so, she seeks to generate and illuminate frameworks that challenge both state violence and interpersonal violence. Trained in literary studies, she obtained her PhD from Yale University and also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College with the Society of Fellows. She is completing her first book, Rethinking the Grammar of Consent: Black Feminist Disruptive Agency, in which she rethinks notions of consent and agency from a Black feminist perspective.

To find out more, visit her website: www.nathaliebatraville.com.

Education

PhD, Yale University

MA, Queens University

BA, McGill University

Research activities

Black feminist theory and praxis

Queer of color critique

Prison abolition

Decolonization

Teaching activities

WSDB 291 - Introduction to Contemporary Concerns in Women’s Studies

This course explores a range of current issues and debates within feminism. Using interdisciplinary feminist theories that consider how systems of power such as patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and heterosexism constitute one another, it examines particular local and global topics of interest/concern which may include Black and Indigenous feminisms, feminist archives, body politics, pleasure, policing and incarceration, and environmental justice.

WSDB 498 - Ending Sexual Violence

Examining the intersections of race and gender is key to understanding the function of sexual violence in our society. In this course, we will approach the task of ending sexual violence as one that must be taken on by simultaneously addressing other categories of systemic harm. As we read and reflect on critical theory, community organizing, and supporting survivors, our focus will largely be on the abolition of prisons and criminalization as a way to approach creating a less violent society. Drawing primarily on the work of Black feminist scholars and organizers, we will study theory in the first half of the course and praxis in the second.

WSDB 491 - Feminist Perspectives on Culture

In this course, we will study some of the cultural productions of Black women, while offering some tools for analyzing this body of work. We will engage with history, trauma, identity, spirituality, aesthetics, pleasure, and politics, and learn about some of the major political and aesthetic stakes of Black women’s art and literature. Authors and artists include Dionne Brand, Toni Morrison, Tourmaline, Zanele Muholi, and Alice Diop, while theorists and critics include Hortense Spillers, Afua Cooper, Charmaine Nelson, Dora Santana, and Audre Lorde.

SSDB 492 - Kink

Commonly defined as “unconventional” sexual behaviour, kink represents an open ended set of sexual fantasies, fetishes, practices, rituals and lifestyles around intimacy and connection, which may not be reflected or accepted in dominant culture. In this course, we will examine some of these non-normative desires and practices, while focusing in particular on BDSM and its relationship to race, capitalism, history, agency, and healing. We will study theoretical, literary, and artistic perspectives on bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism, as well as other kinks, in ways that seek to illuminate the complexities, limitations, and possibilities these practices offer.

Nathalie Batraville

Education

Research activities

Teaching activities

Simone de Beauvoir Institute on social media