Tonight our partners in Student Affairs are hosting Critical Interactions, an interactive program where students will join INTERACT Program peer facilitators to explore how they each make meaning of ‘home.’

But what is INTERACT?

A collaboration between the Division of Student Affairs and the Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication Department, INTERACT aims to provide first-year residential students with specific training in intercultural communication and authenticity.

As a university focused on innovation and ground-breaking research, it is the hope of this collaborative to enhance incoming students’ confidence and competence in diversity and inclusion in order to prepare them for their time at UMBC and beyond.

Critical Interactions will be held tonight (Oct. 24th) from 7:30-9pm in University Center 310. 

For a full list of Critical Social Justice: Home events, click here.

A weekly round-up curated by Women’s Center staff member, Michael Jalloh Jamboria

In the spirit of my friend, who gave us the glorious name ‘Slaying on the Weekly’, every week I will be bringing you some interesting, funny or thought-provoking content from the internet! Be sure to join us next week for more and continue to slay!

October 20th was the last of the Presidential Debate series. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, and soon it’ll be time to vote. While it’s too late to register online, you can register in person (if you live in Maryland) on November 3rd.

Critical Social Justice is NEXT WEEK! Be sure to join us, and our campus partners, during the CSJ events happening from October 24th- 28th. Also, check out our series on the Women’s Center Blog on things you need to know about our Keynote Speaker, Disability Justice and Residential Segregation.

Equally important, I want to make sure we are all taking care of ourselves. Engage in whatever self-care practices make you feel the best. Express and allow yourself to feel the emotions you have! The Women’s Center, The Mosaic Center, the Queer Student Lounge and the Counseling Center are campus resources that are here to help with that process.

Until next week!

A blog reflection by Joe Levin-Manning, Graduate Coordinator for LGBTQ Programs

When I was little, I used to draw maps of my neighborhood. Once I was done with my neighborhood, I’d move onto creating maps for make believe neighborhoods including everything I thought a community should have – homes, trees, a playground and hospital, a library.

When the Critical Social Justice planning team picked the theme of Home this year, just a few short weeks later, the City Paper published its “Maps” issue. The front cover immediately caught my attention and took me back to my childhood of my own map making days.

As our intro blog post to this year’s theme states: “In honor of UMBC’s 50th Anniversary, this year’s CSJ theme of Home recognizes UMBC as a home to many of us.  As we celebrate and contemplate UMBC as a home for learning, activism, and social change, we embrace the opportunity to invest ourselves in creating meaningful change here on campus in addition to taking our newly gained insights and knowledge with us back home, wherever that may be.” With this in mind, as we read through the City Paper maps issue, we wondered what it would be like to create our own maps of UMBC.

Since the fall semester began, the Women’s Center Advisory Board and student staff have all made their own campus maps. This week all of the Women’s Center discussion groups will also be creating their campus maps. When creating our maps, we asked each person to consider specific prompts such as: What is your favorite place on campus? Where can you can find others in your community or get your needs met? What is something you want to change? 

It’s been fascinating to see the ways in which home has shown up in each of our maps and the ways in which challenges and complexities of home present themselves as well. Each person’s map tells a different story about who they are and what their experience is like at UMBC. It had allowed for us to have conversations of belonging and mattering, discussions of accessibility, environmental justice, and activism, as well as reflections on ways to bridge our home at UMBC with our other homes to include Baltimore.

What would your campus map look like?

Stop by Main Street this Wednesday, October 19th from 11:30-1:30pm to create your UMBC map and pick up a Critical Social Justice: Home events calendar.

Campus maps will be displayed at the “Who Gets a Home on College” CSJ event on Thursday, October 27th which will take place on Main Street from 11:30-1:30pm.

Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Home with our “What You Need to Know” series. The keynote lecture with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, titled “Body/ Land/ Home: Disability Justice, Healing Justice and Femme of Color Brilliance,” will be held on Tuesday, October 25th at 6PM in the University Center Ballroom (event details here).

by Auroura Levine Morales, Patty Berne and Micah Bazant

Disability justice is the continuation and expansion of disability rights, a movement that sought equal rights and access for disabled people, but was often constrained by its focus on mostly white and male individuals. Disability justice uses an intersectional lens to bring a more nuanced and active approach to the movement. By challenging assumptions about ability and embracing all kinds of bodies, the disability justice framework looks beyond the commonality of disability to incorporate other identities. 

Many people continue to be marginalized within conversations and activism around disability, despite its existence across all communities and populations; to counter these troubling hierarchies, disability justice centers the experiences and needs of queer people and people of color. Emphasizing the interconnectedness of oppression and people, disability justice demands the same integrated approach between all movements for liberation. 

“Disability exists in every sector of society: in immigrant communities, in prisons, in religious and spiritual communities, among veterans and homeless folks, among children and elders and everyone in between, so every movement has to advance disability justice, and vice versa. A movement that sees some people as disposable or able to be sacrificed is not disability justice.” – Nomy Lamm, This Is Disability Justice

More than just a theory, disability justice is a movement-building practice that calls upon people to actively protest, perform, and speak out against oppression and injustices globally.

Want to learn more about disability justice?

• This Is Disability Justice by Nomy Lamm
• Sins Invalid, a performance project celebrating artists with disabilities
• Changing the Framework: How our communities can move beyond access to wholeness
• Pick up Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book of poetry Bodymap from the Women’s Center’s lending library!

A Women’s Center Blog post and reflection by student staff member Daniel

On September 22, 2014, I published my first Women’s Center blog post, titled “Male Privilege in Women’s Spaces.”  In it I shared my anxieties about joining the Women’s Center staff and reflected on my male privilege. I thought about what my role or place might be and how I could manage my privilege in a healthy and productive way.

I want to begin my last year at the Women’s Center the same way I began my first year here. I want to think about and complicate my male privilege and how I show up in the Women’s Center and other women-centric spaces.

Fall 2014 Women’s Center Staff

A lot of things have changed in the two years since I published that first post. After serving my terms in student org leadership, I’m now much less involved; I’ve watched freshmen and sophomores step forward and take positions I once held and do a better job than I or my predecessors did. My trans identity has evolved and my understanding of my relationship to the world has changed. My perspective on privilege is different now and I’ve learned that reflecting on my privilege makes me a better leader. I’m a third-year staff member and I often find myself in leadership and mentor roles, meaning this self-reflection is even more important than it was when I first started.

2016-17 Women’s Center Staff

When I wrote my original blog post, I had been on testosterone for nearly a year and solidly identified as Male. I wrote from the perspective of someone who identified with a privileged group and I was reconciling male identity with feminist identity; I felt like I needed to make up for seeming like a traitor who joined the patriarchy. Plus, I had a lot of unprocessed feelings about losing the camaraderie I shared with women and learned that some spaces just weren’t for me anymore.

Now, things are more complicated. It’s been three years since I started medically transitioning. I’ve legally changed all my documents and had surgery. I’m more male-passing than ever, but this is the least I’ve identified with maleness since I came out.

It would be easy to deny my male privilege by claiming a queer, non-binary identity. It would be easy to say I don’t experience male privilege because I don’t identify as male, but it wouldn’t be true. I still exist in this world as a male-passing individual and the world treats me as such. I still benefit from male privilege when I’m awarded more authority on a subject in conversation or more time to talk than my femme- and female-identified counterparts. I don’t get interrupted and I’m given more space. My queerness doesn’t change this and it doesn’t excuse me from perpetuating sexism or ignoring the ways male privilege has advantaged me in life. Trans men and masculine trans people are equally as responsible for perpetuating and participating in transmisogyny as cis men. We don’t get a free pass just because we may have once identified as women.

Of course, it’s important to understand how being queer and trans and fat and mentally ill have disadvantaged me in life, but they don’t negate the impact of the privilege I receive from being male and white. And while this self-reflection is important and necessary, it doesn’t excuse me from having to do something about my privilege.

I’ve been guilty of this. I’ve been guilty of letting others’ praise of me as “a good guy” in queer or feminist circles be enough proof that I’m not one of Those Guys. I’ve also been guilty of patting myself on the back just for acknowledging that I have privilege.

I hope my friends, classmates, and coworkers feel like they can call me on my shit, but that’s not their job. It’s my job to be actively combatting my privilege. It’s my job to be mindful of interrupting people, taking up too much physical and conversational space, giving credit where credit is due, and never concluding that my work is done. It’s my job to say, “This issue it important to me. How can I be of help to you?”

It’s also my job as a masculine trans person to be aware of (and do something about) how my passing privilege (as well as the economic and healthcare advantages that made my transition possible) makes me safer than gender non-conforming and non-passing trans people, how being trans masculine is safer than being trans feminine, and how race and white privilege are major factors in the safety of trans people.

Being a third-year staff member at the Women’s Center means I’m in a leadership and mentoring position, and I feel it’s important to think about privilege when I’m collaborating and working with other student staff. I think about how my coworkers might approach a problem or a project differently because of their experiences (and the things I might miss because of mine) and how working here for longer than my coworkers doesn’t mean I know more than anyone else. I’m wary of how my maleness and my whiteness puts me in a position of power and authority, so purposely taking steps to create a non-hierarchical relationship with my peers is a priority.  

I’m ready for the new challenges and learning opportunities coming my way this year. I’m excited to meet all the people who use the space and offer our services and resources to the best of my ability. I’m excited to be in a place where I understand the role I play here, and I’m excited to continue to grow and learn from the amazing people and stories I encounter. And, I’m excited to walk away from this place knowing there are newer people with better ideas, fresher enthusiasm, and more drive to enact change ready to replace me.

The Women’s Center has officially kicked off our roundtable series for the fall semester! We call this series Our Bodies, Ourselves, specifically focusing on personal embodiment and the intersections of identity that come along with existing as a body. This event, specifically called Beauty Embodied, introduced the semester-long discussion of diverse embodied experiences.

our beautiful roundtable flyer

Beginning this ongoing series, The Women’s Center invited three panelists to open up the conversation of embodied beauty. Alumnus Crystal Ogar, Dr. Medulene Shomali of the Gender and Women’s Studies department, and our very own assistant director Megan Tagle Adams served as our panelists!

We spent the next hour complicating the notions of beauty, femininity and privileges associated with who gets to embrace ideals of beauty. All panelists spoke about the privilege and racialization of specific beauty standards and stereotypes. We discussed at great length who has access to conventional beauty. Women of color specifically have a lot of challenges associating with conventional beauty, as the hegemonic view of westernized beauty is white, thin and able-bodied. All panelists identified as women of color, and were able to draw upon their various identities to share their experiences with racially exclusionary beauty.

Crystal encouraged us to find the beauty within everyone, to notice the little things that make a person beautiful, and to complicate beauty further by understanding that looks are not the complete picture of a person, as there are so many factors that go into being a beautiful human outside of external appearance.

Our roundtable panelists, photo by jess Myers

Both Megan and Dr. Shomali allowed the group time to deconstruct our definitions of beauty. Beauty and femme identity isn’t inherently a feminist stance to take, and shaving your legs or putting on makeup in the morning doesn’t necessarily have to be a feminist act. No one is more or less of a feminist for the way that they present their bodies. Megan said it best- instead of the feminist manifesto being written in red lipstick, she suggested that it could be written while wearing red lipstick. The act of wearing lipstick is not what makes or breaks a feminist, and the most important thing is to allow personal expression to be encompassed in ideals of beauty.

Dr. Shomali took it even further, proposing the radical notion that beauty isn’t actually necessary. Instead of trying to broaden the term of “beauty” to include all walks of people, we could decide to throw out beauty as an important concept to begin with. Both Crystal and Dr. Shomali posed that ‘ugly’ should not equal “bad”, and that it is perfectly fine to not be beautiful- it does not take away of a person’s humanness to not have access to or even care about beauty.

Overall, Beauty Embodied was a great success, with lots of dynamic discussion from the panelists and the women’s center communities. We questioned and unpacked our notions of beauty and femininity, engaging with our own experiences of living in an aesthetic world.

Want to read more? Below are some links further discussing beauty through a feminist lens:

• What Is Feminism Without The Femme? On Why Are We Scared To Embrace Our Feminine Styles
• Living With Contradiction: Beauty Work and Feminism
• Pretty Unnecessary: Taking Beauty Out of Body Positivity (Bitch Media)

Don’t miss out! The Women’s Center’s next roundtable, Queer (De)Coded, on October 20th! 

Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Home with our “What You Need to Know” series, starting with this primer on our keynote speaker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Her lecture, titled “Body/ Land/ Home: Disability Justice, Healing Justice and Femme of Color Brilliance,” will be held on Tuesday, October 25th at 6PM in the University Center Ballroom (event details here). 

Based out of Toronto and Oakland, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer, disabled femme of color poet, performer, healer, and activist of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Much of Leah’s work focuses on people and conversations that are often underrepresented, including disability justice, queer and trans people of color, and abuse survivors. In addition to her award-winning books of poetry, including Bodymap, Love Cake, and Consensual Genocide, she has also written a memoir titled Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home. 

“Stories create the world. Seeing stories that look like your own, that you’ve never read written down before, or that are stories you’ve never thought of before that change your whole idea of what is possible, are a big revolutionary deal.” †

art by Shira Devorah

Leah is also a co-founder and former director of Mangos With Chili, the longest-running performance art tour featuring queer and trans individuals in North America. She performs pieces with the disability justice collective Sins Invalid and is a co-director of the Toronto disability justice collective Performance/ Disability/Art.

…“[I]t was so inculcated in me that disability is this shameful story. And you know, if there’s not queer people of color space, queer people of color won’t perform. If there’s not disability space that centers queer and trans people of color, sex workers, poor people, all of the above, elders, young people, we won’t know that there’s similar stories.” †

For more on Leah, check out:

• Her blog, Brownstargirl
• This video of her performance in Sins Invalid
• Her interview with Bitch Magazine on disability, representation, and survivorhood