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.”