This summer, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) Publishing Workshop to support her Mellon Publicly-Engaged Humanities project, Malflora, a forthcoming multimedia platform dedicated to publishing and preserving Latina/e lesbian stories. In the workshop, she learned from a wide range of speakers who work in book, magazine, and multimedia publishing and helped produce Issue 7 of the online magazine, PubLab. As an art director for the magazine, she curated a portfolio of Anel I. Flores’ paintings focused on lesbian intimacy, bodily autonomy, and queer liberation, which you can access here.

On June 23, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon led a community teach-in at Alienated Majesty Books entitled “No Pride in Genocide: A Teach-In on Zionist Pinkwashing.” The teach-in focused on defining and dismantling pinkwashing, or the process of promoting LGBTQ+ rights to appear progressive while simultaneously upholding oppressive systems that directly harm LGBTQ+ people, such as settler colonialism and occupation. The teach-in was part of a larger series of educational events in Austin focused on Palestinian liberation, which enabled a broader public to engage in critical dialogue informed by activist-oriented scholarship.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated on a panel entitled “Atravesades Igniting through Art, Community, and Place-Making” with co-panelists Anel Flores and T. Jackie Cuevas at El Mundo Zurdo Conference in San Antonio. She presented her paper, “Somos Lesbianas: Chicana Lesbian Place-Making and Place-Taking En Comunidad,” which examines how Chicana lesbians take up art and writing as vessels for challenging oppressive forces and building coalition in the 1991 anthology “Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About.” edited by Carla Trujillo. In her paper, Solomon examines how Chicana lesbians integrate and redefine cultural customs in their creative expressions of self, spirituality, and familia that push back against the heteropatriarchal logics of Chicano nationalism. Underscoring the anthology form as a critical source of feminist coalition, she asserts that the voices featured in Chicana Lesbians intervene in dominant discourses on Chicana lesbian life toward a shared state of conocimiento - a spiritual and activist consciousness that tasks us with imagining and enacting new worlds.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated in the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship Conference in Los Angeles, CA, from February 15-18. With co-discussants X’andrí and Alexandra Salazar, she presented on a roundtable entitled “The Pleasures and Intimacies of Jotería Spacemaking Within and Beyond the University.” Their roundtable focused on the necessity of cultivating spaces to exist and commune as jotería (queer Latinxs) against continued assaults on our humanity. As politicians and their constituents continue to target and alienate LGBTQ+ folks, this roundtable asserted that jotería spacemaking is an act of survival.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon attended the American Studies Association Conference in Montreal last week, where she chaired and participated in a roundtable entitled “Community Knowledge and Solidarity Work as Public Scholarship and Collective Healing.” She presented her collaborative zine project with Ruba Akkad (TCU), situating zines and zinemaking as forms of community-accountable scholarship and healing.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon published an essay entitled “Ana Castillo: A Multigenre Author” in the collection Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers, edited by Dr. Norma E. Cantú and published by the University of Arizona Press. Dr. Solomon’s essay examines the central themes of feminist friendship, queer intimacy, and women’s spirituality in a selection of Ana Castillo’s essays and novels, including Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994), The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Sapogonia (1990), and So Far From God (1993). Released this month, you can find the collection here.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon published an article, “Beyond Sexual Deviance: Elevating the Expansive Intimacies of Chicana Lesbian Life in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About” in the Journal of Lesbian Studies. In this article, she expands popular readings of Chicana lesbianism focused on sexuality by tending more deeply to the affective terrains of love and kinship represented in the 1991 anthology Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About,edited by Carla Trujillo. Countering the (il)logics of white supremacy and Chicano nationalism, which reduce Chicana lesbians to symbols of sexual deviance, she argues that Chicana Lesbiansembodies an expansive matrix of intimacies that reconstruct the Chicana lesbian figure from a one-dimensional symbol of sexual deviance to a multi-faceted figure who redefines what it means to love one’s people and culture beyond colonial paradigms that privilege heterosexuality. The article can be read here.

Feminist Studies faculty and students presented their research at the national Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) summer institute. This year’s conference, “40 years of MALCS, Centuries of Activism: La Lucha Sigue for Racial, Reproductive and Decolonial Justice,” took place on July 13-15, 2023, at UC Davis. Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon presented “Reflections on Chicana/Latina Lesbian Feminism from This Bridge to the Digital Dyke Age.” Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo, MALCS chair and conference co-chair, presented on a roundtable titled “Chicana Movidas: Reflections on 50 years of Chicana Knowledge-Making” with her co-contributors to the Chicana Movidas anthology. The following students presented papers under the guidance of Sendejo: Myla Benally “Restoring the Meaning of Hózhó Within a Decolonial Framework: A Return to Balance and Beauty” and sof varnis “Weaving as a Decolonial Practice: Reconciliation, Transformation, and Spiritual Activism Among the Mampujan Weavers.”

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo was invited to participate as a faculty mentor in the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Crossing Latinidades engages cross-institutional and cross-regional comparative research, training doctoral students, and new scholarship in emerging areas of inquiry about Latinos. The initiative serves as the anchor of the consortium of R1 Hispanic Serving Institutions at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Sendejo is among a group of Latino Studies faculty across the U.S. who will be paired with doctoral students through the professional mentorship program.

Southwestern’s Feminist Studies Program was well represented at the annual meeting of WGS South last weekend. Elena Welsh ’22 presented a paper entitled “Slow Pleasure/Slow Death: Rituals of Survival in Queer Media” as part of a panel on LGBTQ Health. Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Jordan Johnson presented a paper entitled “Feminist Science Studies and Multispecies Justice: Responding to Weedy Entanglements” as part of a panel on Multispecies Feminisms.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala attended the El Mundo Zurdo conference for the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa at the University of Texas at San Antonio from November 4-5. The roundtable that Bahrainwala and Sendejo co-organized was titled “Reflections on Radical Love, Care, and Consent: How Anzaldúa Informs Our Liberatory Praxis.” Bahrainwala presented “Pandemic lessons: Consent as anti-Racism,” and Sendejo presented “Movidas of Healing: The Spirit Work of Movement Era Chicanas.” The roundtable was well attended by lead scholars in the field of Anzaldúan Thought.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo attended the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from November 10-13. This year’s conference theme was “Killing Rage: Resistance on the Other Side of Freedom.” Sendejo presented a paper titled “The Spirit Work of bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa: Lessons on Radical Love as Resistance,” which drew from her book manuscript in progress.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Jordan Johnson published the article “Staying with the Trouble with Wilderness: Reworking Nature and Culture in the Plantationocene” in this fall’s issue of The Journal of Posthumanism. The issue is available here.

Associate Professor of Feminst Studies Brenda Sendejo was invited to present her research as part of Mexic-Arte Museum’s  Chicano/a Art Movimiento y Más en Austen, Tejas 1960s to 1980s  exhibit and lecture series. Her paper was titled “The Chicana Movement in Austin: A Legacy of Activism, Feminism, and Intergenerational Encuentros” and drew on themes from the exhibit that intersect with Sendejo’s work on the Chicana/o movement and emergence of Chicana feminist thought in Texas. The lecture series and exhibit were supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo was elected chair of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), a professional organization for self-identified Chicana, Latina, Native American/indígena mujeres and gender nonconforming academics, students, and activists. Sendejo cochaired the program committee for the MALCS 2022 Summer Institute, held July 27–30 in Fort Collins, Colorado. She also organized and served as a presenter on a roundtable about healing and re-membering as decolonial feminist praxis, informed by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Jordan Johnson ’11 will receive a stipend to participate in the Bucknell Summer Institute this June.

Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Feminist Studies Program Sequoia Maner’s coedited book, Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, was published by Routledge Press. The title is available with a 20% discount from the publisher with the code HUM20 at checkout.