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.