Women and Gender Studies

Dystopian ‘fissures of disaster’ intensify our own world

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 18:55:16 +0000

Dystopian ‘fissures of disaster’ intensify our own world Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 12:55

Rachel Sauer

In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, CU Boulder’s Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds

Nathan Alexander Moore was thinking about the end of the world—not how to survive the apocalypse or overcome it, necessarily, or even how to fix it, but rather the decisions we make when the world collapses around us.

“Who do you become?” asks Moore, an assistant professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Women and Gender Studies. “What choices do we make in this new world? How do we understand ourselves, and understand ourselves in community, in the larger context of a world that is ending or starting anew?

“For me, as someone who loves all things speculative fiction, dystopias are so interesting because these worlds become dystopic because of who the events are happening to. And the largest impacts, in fiction and real life, often happen to people who are marginalized. Dystopia largely impacts people who are Black or Brown, in places that are underdeveloped and underfunded.”

Nathan Alexander Moore, an assistant professor of Black trans and queer studies in the CU Boulder Department of Women and Gender Studies, explores issues of identity in her newly published dystopian story collection The Rupture Files.

From that end—or beginning—of the world was born The Rupture Files, Moore’s newly published story collection. Touted by publisher Hajar Press as “supernatural stories of life in the fissures of disaster,” Moore’s tales actually plunge deeper into the ruined Earth, with Black and queer and trans characters exploring who they are and who they might become.

“I’m very aware of all of the history and the many cultural representations that have shaped Black people, and specifically Black queer people,” Moore explains. “I feel so much in our culture and in representations in film and television and literature, that Black characters and Black queer characters either become paragons or, on the opposite end, they’re kind of the worst of the worst, the villains, the despicable ones.

“For me, it’s about telling a story about a person who is nuanced. Some will see them as the hero, some as the villain, but at the core they are a person who is learning and growing and struggling. I want to show them—to show us—as beautiful, nuanced, complex characters, and that whatever their experience is, it’s a real experience. To try to be universal would strip us of what makes it interesting.”

Becoming a writer

Moore, who identifies as Black and trans, was a reader before she was a writer, finding motivation to finish her homework so she could crack open an Anne Rice novel. One of the first stories she wrote and shared with other people was called “Midnight and Nocturnes”—“I was using big words,” Moore recalls, “I thought I was so cute in high school”—about a vampire who was turned in ancient Egypt.

The vampire wakes at dusk “and she’s like, ‘I’m gonna go eat some people, I’m hungry.’ Then she runs into a vampire hunter, and for the first time she pauses at killing because he has the exact eyes of someone she knew in life. She says, ‘I remember when I was human, I loved you. You broke my heart, and I loved you’ and it ends with her making a big choice whether she’s going to live or die.”

Moore wrote it when she was 16 or 17 and submitted to a contest on Facebook and ended up winning third place. “It was the first story where I very much remember writing it and thinking, ‘OK, I think I’m writing, I think I might be a writer.’ And then when I came in third, I was like, ‘Oh, she’s on her way!’ It also helped that I wrote that story when Twilight/True Blood/Vampire Diaries was of the moment, and I was reading all of those books.”

Through graduate school, she focused on creative writing and Black literature and cultures, delving deeper into speculative fiction through a lens of feminism and collective memory. Her PhD, earned at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on contingency and Black temporal imaginations, and included a chapter titled “From Catastrophe to the Cataclysm: Black Speculations on the Limits of the Anthropocene & the Temporality of Disasters.”

In fact, writing The Rupture Files wasn’t completely Moore's idea. An editor at Hajar Press saw a presentation she gave for Black Women Radicals about writing Black geopolitics through speculative fiction and asked Moore if she wrote her own speculative fiction.

As it happened, there were some people she’d been living with for a while…

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaoC1JgHnE&t=680s]

‘The world we’re living in’

“The first story (in The Rupture Files) is called ‘Sequela,’ and it’s about this far-future dystopia where the world is mostly ocean and everything is transient,” Moore says. “There were portions (of that story) I had written as series of prose poems, and they had been kind of living in my head. With the other stories, I had characters who weren’t fully realized—I had a snapshot, a photograph, they were peering over the fence and I was like, ‘Hmm, what are you doing?’ For a long time, they were thought experiments, and in writing them they became real.”

The story “Sequela” is about a woman named Shalomar, who lives in one of a series of stations in this new ocean world—“I imagine the stations like metallic squids, though I never said it in the story, and they kind of hunker on land and then jump around,” Moore explains—and whose job is station archivist. Whatever the station pulls out of the ocean, it’s her job to analyze it and think about its historical value. As a Black woman, Shalomar had been trying to document Black history before the apocalypse, and after it she discovered that the water wanted her to tell a different story, as did the mermaids.

In a story called “Ashes for Your Beauty,” Moore tells the story of a woman who is the consort (read: food source) of a vampire in a bombed-out, post-nuclear world, who discovers that she has power, and she can make power. “So, she has to decide, ‘Am I going to stay in this life that’s very scary and terrible but stable, or burn shit down?’” Moore says.

Writing the four stories in The Rupture Files was a different experience from the novel manuscript Moore wrote while earning her master’s.

“I was thinking about narrative arcs, about character development, who is the main person, whose perspective feels the most interesting,” Moore says. “I was balancing the expansiveness of living in a brand-new world that even I didn’t know all the rules of and also making it containable in short form. It was a steep learning curve but really fun.”

It also, she says, allowed her to more deeply consider the world as it currently is: “What’s always interesting about dystopias is they are projected as far futures, but any time someone’s writing a dystopia, they’re writing about the present—expanded and intensified, but the present. Dystopic writing is really about looking out at the world we’re living in today.”

Top: Background dystopia image by Daniele Gay

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In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, CU Boulder’s Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds.

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Ghost stories: understanding a present haunted by the past

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:49:15 +0000

Ghost stories: understanding a present haunted by the past Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/07/2024 - 11:49

Blake Puscher

A CU Boulder poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts is not a typical history book.

To write it, Julie Carr delved not just into archives and manuscripts, but also into her own family’s history—specifically, the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem, a People’s Party politician who served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Nebraska between 1891 and 1897. Kem’s story weaves everything from populism to eugenics to spiritualism, and represents a broader narrative of a particular time, place and people in the American West.

Subtitled “Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West,” the book, through Kem, tells the story of how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the region and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.

Julie Carr, a CU Boulder professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, plumbed her family's history to write Mud, Blood, and Ghosts.

In crafting the book, which was published last year, Carr, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, blended historical exposition with poetic language, a way of writing that she says is essential for expressing complex emotions. Because of the personal nature of the subject, Carr says, she was interested in speaking from her own perspective in the present as well as from Kem’s perspective in the past, demonstrating the idea that history is always with us.

In this sense, the reference to ghosts in the title has a double meaning, not just refering to 19th century spiritualists, but how “we are haunted by our pasts. They are with us all the time, and they are directing what we do,” Carr says.

“To acknowledge that is to take responsibility for it, to think, ‘Given all of that, what is my responsibility to the future and to the present?’”

A farmer’s populism

Omer Kem was born in 1855 in Hagerstown, Indiana, to an itinerant and largely unsuccessful farmer who often moved his family to find better work. Kem’s family was ravaged by disease and continuing financial instability, so he set out on his own, ultimately moving to Nebraska. As a young man, he farmed through government programs like the Swamp Lands Act and the Homestead Act, but failed due to infertile conditions. Many farmer settlers in Nebraska were in a similar situation, falling into debt as the seeds they sowed blew away in the hot winds of the region’s 1889-1899 drought.

When Kem ran for and won a seat in Congress, his experiences inspired him to join the populist movement of the time along with many rural farmers and other people living in poverty. The movement was a response to the economic and social conditions of the Gilded Age, according to Carr:

“Both urban laborers and rural laborers were left in the lurch,” as the former lacked protections like the eight-hour workday and the latter faced unregulated crop prices and railroad rates, among other issues. Meanwhile, with no graduated income tax, the people at the top did not pay more, and there was no significant social safety net at that time.

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts details how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the American West and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.

“All of these things combined with the problem of weather and climate in the Plains states,” Carr says. Many poor farmers had moved to states in the Great Plains region during the mid- and late-19th century following the Homestead Act, but in dry climates, the land couldn’t produce without massive irrigation. In the South, where climate was not the issue, “we’re looking at a totally different dynamic having to do with the end of Reconstruction, and poverty among Black farmers especially.”

What unites the People’s Party with today’s populists might be its criticism of the societal elite, Carr says, “coupled with the demand for greater representation in politics. I think a lot of people would say that many contemporary American populists, on the right or the left, are people who for various reasons have not felt included in the political system.”

American eugenics at the turn of the 20th century

Kem also was influenced by the racial segregation and fear of “mixing races” that was both commonplace and largely unchallenged for several generations after the Civil War. Along with large swathes of the American public, Carr says, Kem came to believe in the ideology of eugenics, a term coined to describe attempts at increasing the number of people with “superior” mental and physical traits through the human equivalent of selective breeding. It grew, in part, from elements of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the heritability of traits.

“The science itself was not very detailed,” Carr explains. “It was the beginning of an understanding of how genetics works. That science got married to criminology, ideas around welfare, the problems that came with urbanization, the first wave of the Great Migration and the huge numbers of immigrants coming in during the beginning of the 20th century.”

These major demographic and political changes made some people afraid, especially members of dominant groups, Carr says. Because of the widespread belief that many traits and behaviors were inherited, eugenicists justified ostracizing or marginalizing people who were Black, poor, disabled, criminals and immigrants, insisting they would “taint” the gene pool.

“Many people who believed in ‘progress’ believed in eugenics,” Carr says, including those who might be considered left-wing. “That’s important to say because it points to the ways in which white supremacy and fascistic thinking can bleed into different political mindsets or belief systems.” Even prominent feminists of the time like Margaret Sanger espoused eugenic beliefs, though she never fully bought into forced sterilization as Kem did, Carr says.

The spiritualist movement

In addition to eugenics, Omer Kem believed in spiritualism, a movement centered around the idea that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Carr notes in her book that spiritualism was common in Midwest Populist circles as well as among the general public; there were an estimated 5 to 6 million adherents by the 1860s, according to a historian cited by Carr.

A number of scholars document spiritualists’ involvement in progressive political causes. For example, the Bland family, Washington, D.C., activists whom Kem met when he moved to the capital after being elected to Congress, were populists as well as the founders of the National Indian Defense Association, a reform organization that opposed the forced assimilation of Native Americans.

CU Boulder Professor Julie Carr focused on the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem to explore the history of spiritualism, populism and eugenics in the American West and the United States.

At a dinner that Kem had with the Blands after he had been placed on the House Indian Affairs Committee, the Blands’ niece Maggie, a purported medium, described the ghosts of Kem’s mother and beloved sister Ellen as glowing orbs hovering near his head. This led to a series of encounters with his dead family members, including his son Bert.

Carr suggests that the Blands might have been using their spiritualism as a form of lobbying, as after these encounters with his dead relatives, Kem became very close to the Blands and did, in fact, advocate for their cause in Congress. Later, Kem’s spiritualism took another turn when he began to “see” a Native American “spirit guide” who he believed had entered his body.

Historians understand the prevalence of Native spirit guides differently. Some interpret it as yet another form of removal, reducing Native Americans to spectral presences, while others argue that spiritualists were generally sympathetic toward Native Americans, and sometimes used the “voices” of Native spirits to advocate for reforms (though these generally involved coerced assimilation through institutions such as the Indian schools). While this may have been a form of social justice work, it was a distorted one, according to Carr, based as it was on both appropriation and projection.

“In my great-grandfather’s case,” Carr says, “he started having visions of the ‘spirit’ of a ‘Native American healer’ entering his body in the 1890s when he was in Congress. He maintained this imagined relationship with this ‘spirit’ for the rest of his life. I think there’re some interesting psychological dynamics going on there, one being a desire to identify with Native Americans because of the way that he understands Indigenous people as having a legitimate right to the land.

“The other complexity is that, even as he’s making speeches on the congressional floor advocating for at least some level of Native sovereignty, he is also legislating for the further removal of Native people from land. In that split, you can see a kind of crisis. If nothing else, it has to be a crisis of conscience. Creating for himself, in a sense, an imaginary friend in this spirit guide he calls ‘Fleet Wind’ is a way, I think, to respond to that crisis of conscience. Perhaps this is true of many forms of appropriation and projection.”

Kem’s “complex history of bad and good luck, of power struggles, and of property,” as Carr describes them, highlights how the past haunts the present like a ghost, despite the flaws of its actors. Carr finds stark contrast between the past and the present in the People’s Party platform: “This Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other.”

“Though this word love, like the phrase the people, has so often been cheapened, distorted and mobilized for violent ends,” Carr writes, “I still want to ask: What if we took them at their word?”

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A CU Boulder poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family.

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In historic first, Mexico is poised to elect female president

Anonymous — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:38:06 +0000

In historic first, Mexico is poised to elect female president Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/31/2024 - 08:38

Pam Moore

However, CU Boulder scholar Lorraine Bayard de Volo notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a more feminist mode of governing

Editor's note: On Monday, Claudia Scheinbaum is the presumptive winner in what is being called a landslide victory.

While Americans follow a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election, it’s also an exciting and historic election year in the country’s southern neighbor.

On June 2, Mexico’s election day, and for the first time in the nation’s history, a woman will almost certainly win the presidential election.

The election is significant not only for the more than 127 million people living in Mexico, but for the Mexican diaspora and those of Mexican heritage throughout the world, including in Colorado’s Front Range.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a CU Boulder political scientist and professor of women and gender studies, notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a feminist mode of governing in Mexico.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a political scientist and University of Colorado Boulder professor of women and gender studies, has been a scholar of Latin American politics—focusing on gender as it interacts with and informs war, revolution, political violence and social movements—since her undergraduate studies. She has closely followed Mexico’s presidential election, noting that even though Mexico trails several of its Latin American counterparts in electing a female president, the event still is historic for a country that has traditionally identified with macho culture.

Bayard de Volo recently spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about what this presidential election could mean for Mexico and for those around the world watching.

Question: How did you become interested in this area of study?

Bayard de Volo: As an undergraduate in the ‘80s, studying political science and economics, I was very interested in the various ways in which the U.S. was funding the wars taking place in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In graduate school, I became increasingly interested in the growing field of gender studies. As a political science PhD student specializing in gender studies, I was able to combine my interests. While studying Latin American politics, particularly war, revolutions and social movements, I was hearing about how women were getting involved, yet there was very little understanding of how gender informed political violence and social mobilization.

I became very intrigued with trying to fill the gap in the research, and I’ve been fascinated by this field of study ever since.

Question: Can you give a quick overview of the upcoming Mexican presidential election?

Bayard de Volo: The Mexican president is in office for a six-year term and cannot run for reelection. Of the three candidates running to take the place of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) when his term ends on Oct. 1, the two leading contenders are Claudia Scheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez.

Scheinbaum represents the Morena coalition, which is a newer party, but also the same party as AMLO, who won in a landslide and still has very high approval ratings. She’s leading in the polls right now, at least in part due to AMLO’s popularity. Although she identifies as a feminist, if she were to win, she’d inherit her predecessor’s antagonism toward Mexico’s growing women’s movement. Scheinbaum’s experience includes working in the AMLO administration and having served as the Head of Government of Mexico City.

Xóchitl Gálvez represents the Frente Amplio, the broad front, a coalition party that includes three formerly very powerful parties (and formerly mutually antagonistic parties). She was a senator until her nomination as a presidential candidate and has organized for indigenous rights and also served as mayor in a borough of Mexico City.

Interestingly, it’s not only their gender identities but also their ethnicities that represent a departure from the norm. Scheinbaum is of Jewish descent while Gálvez has indigenous roots.

People at an opposition rally in the Zocalo, Mexico City's main square, May 19 to encourage voting in Sunday's presidential election. The sign reads, “We are all the same Mexico." (Photo: Ginnette Riquelme/AP)

No matter who wins this election, AMLO will continue to have a lot of influence due to his overwhelming popularity. There are concerns that his political capital could be used to pressure his successor.

Question: To what extent has the rise of Mexico’s women’s movement contributed to the likely election of its first female president?

Bayard de Volo: It’s hard to say. The women’s movement is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Many Latin American countries—including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica—have already elected female presidents, so Mexico is actually behind the curve in that regard.

Meanwhile, there’s been a vibrant, burgeoning women’s movement in Mexico in recent years, which has focused its efforts on reproductive rights and femicide. While efforts were underway to overturn Roe v. Wade here in the United States through two different Supreme Court decisions, Mexico decriminalized abortion within certain parameters.

Although the government has done little to address the high rates of femicide, and despite being a nation known for its macho culture, Mexico’s government has adopted gender quotas with the goal of achieving gender parity in politics. Right now, 50% of Mexico’s lower house is female, women are governors in about a quarter of Mexico’s states and there are some states where women outnumber men in elected office.

The rising women’s movement might be reflective of increasing acceptance of gender parity, but I’m not sure it’s fair to say it’s had a huge influence on the election. Women in Mexico take many different political positions. There’s no clear agreement on what constitutes ‘women’s interests,’ and the election of a female president wouldn’t necessarily guarantee a more feminist mode of governing.

Question: What can the United States learn from Mexico?

Bayard de Volo: That’s a hard question because we are such different countries with different electoral systems. It would be very difficult to implement a gender quota in the U.S. because we don’t have proportional representation. Trying to do something like that here would be controversial, to say the least. That said, it is interesting that a nation that has been identified as quintessentially macho is prepared to elect a woman.

Top image: left, Claudia Scheinbaum (photo: Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto/Getty Images) and right, Xóchitl Gálvez (photo: from Gálvez's Facebook)

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However, CU Boulder scholar Lorraine Bayard de Volo notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a more feminist mode of governing.

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Honoring the diversity in two distinct but linked communities

Anonymous — Thu, 16 May 2024 22:35:48 +0000

Honoring the diversity in two distinct but linked communities Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/16/2024 - 16:35

Samira Mehta

Asian Jewish Americans have a double reason to celebrate their heritage in May

May is both Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month. Two entirely separate commemorations for two entirely separate communities, right?

Think again. Not only do Asian American Jews exist, but we come from a variety of places and come to Judaism in a range of ways.

Centuries of history

Some Asian American Jews come from long-standing Jewish communities in Asia. The two most famous of these are the Kaifeng Jews of the Henan Province in China and the Jewish communities of India.

Samira Mehta is director of the Program in Jewish Studies and an assistant professor of women and gender studies at CU Boulder.

Today, the Kaifeng Jews are a tiny number of people to which very few, if any, Chinese American Jews trace their heritage. The community likely arrived in China from India or Persia around 1000 C.E. and probably had about 5,000 people at its peak.

Indian Jews, however, are another matter. In fact, they consist of three separate communities: The Bene Israel, the Jews of Cochin and the Baghdadi Jews. Each arrived in India at different moments – with the Baghdahi community being the most recent – and therefore their traditions sometimes differ. For instance, the Jews of Cochin are known for their musical traditions, and the Bene Israel give particular importance to the Prophet Elijah.

In 2020, there were about 4,800 Jews in India, but almost 85,000 Jews with Indian roots live in Israel and a few hundred in the United States.

Indian Jewish communities have distinct cultures that come from living in a majority Hindu and Muslim society. Indian American Jewish artist Siona Benjamin, for example, creates art that fuses her American and Jewish identities with her Indian childhood – “inspired by both Indian miniature paintings and Jewish and Christian illuminated manuscripts,” as the Brooklyn Museum described her work. Figures in her paintings are often blue, reminiscent of Hindu depictions of incarnations of Vishnu, and they include images of lotus flowers.

Multiple heritages

Many other Asian American Jews are children of one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish Asian parent – like Angela Buchdahl, the Korean American rabbi of New York City’s Central Synagogue. Buchdahl has an Ashkenazi Jewish father, meaning that his ancestors came from Central or Eastern Europe, and a Korean Buddhist mother.

Raised in a synagogue that her Jewish grandparents helped to found, Buchdahl has written and spoken publicly about the pain that she experienced as a teen and young adult when she was the only Asian person in Jewish spaces. At other times, she was not recognized as Jewish – for instance, by the Chabad rabbis on her undergraduate campus.

She has also talked about moments when her family blended their heritages. During Passover, for example, the traditional plate for the Seder meal includes “maror”: bitter herbs to remind Jews of the pain of slavery. Many families use horseradish, but one year, Buchdahl’s mother swapped in kimchee.

When the rabbi appeared on the PBS program “Finding Your Roots,” she talked about the resonances that she sees between Jewish and Korean Buddhist culture, such as respect for elders and education.

It is this type of experience – growing up the child of an interfaith, interracial marriage – that sociologists Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt focus on in their 2016 book “JewAsian,” the first major study of Asian American Jews.

‘You’re Jewish?’

Other Asian American Jews were adopted into Jewish families, most of whom are white and Ashkenazi – an experience studied by the Adoption and Jewish Identity Project. Many families raising Asian American Jewish children face challenges that are shared with other transracial adoptive families, such as adoptive parents not knowing much, at least initially, about their child’s culture of origin.

A Jewish man lights a lamp inside the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue in Mumbai, India, after restoration work in 2019. (Photo: AP/Rajanish Kakade)

Some challenges, however, are more unique, such as the reality that Hebrew School and Chinese School are often at the same time. In fact, in my hometown when I was growing up, they were at the same time and in the same place, such that there was a Hebrew School-Chinese School car pool – but also such that no one could participate fully in both programs.

In addition, Asian Jewish adoptees and other Jews of color face assumptions from many white Jews that Jews of color are not Jewish or are converts. Usually, children adopted into Jewish families do undergo a formal conversion. They grow up in Jewish homes, as familiar – or not – with Jewish traditions as people born into Judaism.

Converting to Judaism

Some Asian American Jews are adult converts to Judaism, like SooJi Min-Maranda, the Korean American executive director of Aleph: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a movement that trains and ordains Jewish leaders from a range of Jewish backgrounds. So am I, a half-South Asian scholar of American Jewish religious history.

I usually do not look for ways to combine my Indian heritage and my Jewish religious life, but every now and then I find myself doing so – as at Hanukkah, when I have celebrated with deep-fried Indian food, and during the festival of Sukkot, when I have imagined making the holiday’s signature booths out of Indian bedspreads.

As with all people who choose to live Jewish lives, Asian Americans convert to Judaism for many reasons. After conversion, we often find ourselves fending off the assumption that either we are not Jewish or that our conversions were motivated exclusively by marriage.

In fact, there are enough Asian American Jews out there that several organizations serve them. For instance, the Lunar Collective “cultivates connection, belonging and visibility for Asian American Jews.” They host Seders and Friday night Shabbat events for Asian American Jews, along with a range of other programming. Other organizations, such as the Mitsui Collective, founded by Chinese American Jewish activist Yoshi Silverstein, address a broader range of the Jewish community but carefully include and make space for Asian Jewish experiences.

Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month come every May. They offer us a moment to remember that both of those communities are far more diverse than one might initially imagine, that they overlap, and that in their overlap, there is truly amazing diversity.

Samira Mehta is director of the Program in Jewish Studies and an assistant professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Asian Jewish Americans have a double reason to celebrate their heritage in May.

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¡Sí, ella puede!

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 19:09:18 +0000

¡Sí, ella puede! Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/29/2023 - 13:09

Rachel Sauer

In newly published chapter, CU Boulder researcher Celeste Montoya demonstrates how social movements have influenced Latina legislative leadership in Colorado

Betty Benavidez strove to improve access to better education in her west Denver neighborhood. She worked in her local schools and founded action centers, belonged to the Hispanic Education Leadership Program and the West High School PTA, and was district captain for the Democratic party to mobilize Mexican-American voters.

When she was elected to the Colorado General Assembly in 1970, her occupation was listed as “housewife.”

Benavidez was considered one of the madres del movimiento—mothers of the movement—in not just her Westside neighborhood, but in Chicana involvement in Colorado politics. She was the first Latina elected to the Colorado General Assembly, which happened during a turbulent time in not only Colorado politics, but in shifting gender roles and social movements focused on racial and ethnic identity.

In a chapter written for the recently published Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics, Celeste Montoya, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of women and gender studies, demonstrates how social movements and community activism have played a vital role in shaping Latina legislative leadership in Colorado.

CU Boulder researcher Celeste Montoya studies Latina political involvement and how social movements have influenced it.

Even though Colorado has one of the largest and oldest Latino populations in the United States and Hispano legislators were elected to territorial legislatures even before Colorado was a state, representation was slow growing.

Benavidez was the first Latina state legislator in Colorado, but through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the number of Latinas in office remained low. In 2018, however, nine Latinos were elected to the legislature, joining five others already in office and creating the largest Latino caucus in Colorado history. Nine of the 14 were Latinas and eight of the women had been elected for the first time.

“I think there were a lot of similarities between 2018 and what was happening in the early ‘70s—multiple social justice movements, people of multiple marginalities starting to take leadership,” Montoya says. “For many of these women, they’re thinking about the overall wellbeing of their community and that they need to give their community a voice at this state level.”

Montoya further explains that Latina legislative leadership is shaped by their experience and understanding of their social positioning—including race, gender, class and sexuality—which is influenced by social justice movements and translates to legislative practices.

Montoya recently answered questions about this topic, and a portion of that exchange follows:

Question: There’s not a lot of scholarship looking at Latinas in Colorado politics; how did you get into this area?

Montoya: Truthfully, my research initially was on women’s human rights on a global perspective. I wasn’t exposed to a lot of professors who studied Latino politics and I didn’t know there was such a thing you could study. As a grad student, I got involved in the Latino caucus at one of the western conferences and I met all these scholars, a lot of them from California, who are studying Latino politics. Even though my research was in a different area, I kept getting pulled into research areas focused on gender and race in politics.

I’m a Latina from southern Colorado, and I didn’t see a lot written about Latinas in Colorado politics—the literature was more focused on Latinas in Texas and California, maybe Florida. But as I got to reading about the Chicano movement in Colorado, looking beyond Denver and Pueblo at what was happening in the rest of the state, I was finding these amazing stories of women’s leadership. In a lot of the writings, women often were a footnote to men’s stories, but the more I dug into it, I was finding that what was happening in Colorado fit into larger stories of what Latina leadership looks like nationally.

I think that women have such a different path to leadership because in many ways, the traditional paths had been closed to them, and that’s especially true for women of color.

Question: Since they were historically blocked from traditional paths to leadership, what are the paths that Latinas who entered Colorado politics have been taking?

Montoya: Some of patterns we see with women and with people of color in general are that a lot of the reasons they’re running for office are very community-based. They have experiences where they keep hitting walls in terms of seeing what is possible and figuring, ‘If I was in the statehouse, I could make the change.’

There’s a pattern of seeing that need for advocacy and voice, but not so much in terms of having a political agenda. So many were like, ‘That was never the plan, it just sort of happened, I’m surprised that I’m here, but I’m just focused on doing this work now.’ There’s not often this agenda of, ‘I’m going to use this as a springboard to run for the Senate.’ It’s more, ‘I’m here to help my community and do the best I can while I’m here.' Some of them had to be talked into running for office, often multiple times, and often didn’t see themselves as qualified.

Question: It seems that Latinas who run for state office deal with a double whammy of racism and sexism.

Montoya: Some of the Latinas I talked with, when I’d ask them about discrimination they’d experienced, many of them went right to talking about racism first. I don’t think it was because they thought the racism was worse than the sexism, but because the sexism is so normalized and pervasive. Some of them talked about addressing it, but others took more of a “pick your battle” approach, especially when the sexism came when working within the community.

Question: You mention in your chapter that Latinas in Colorado politics have represented multiple marginalities but also worked at the intersection of multiple social movements. Betty Benavidez was in the wave of the Chicano movement and the women’s rights movement, for example. What are some ways that social movements have prepared Latinas for office?

Montoya: I think one important way is helping them see that their experience is just as valid, if not more valid, than the conventional path of you go to law school or business school, although there are definitely some of them taking those routes. Social-justice movements have helped people recognize that representation is supposed to be about the people and the communities. These women of color are able to say, ‘You can get better policy from people who have experienced these challenges.’

But that’s been a hard narrative to share because of women of color’s tendency to, in some ways, self-select not to run or participate in a system that they don’t see themselves as being qualified to join. We also are having that message reinforced systemically, these perceptions that Latinas’ experiences are not valid or good enough.

They were coming from their communities, they were involved in their communities, and that guided the legislation."

One of the things that’s been interesting, too, is a lot of things that Latinas have succeeded at once they were in office may not have seemed big at the time. Things like Laura DeHerrera introducing car-restraints-for-babies legislation that’s law now, Latina legislators introducing policy for pay equity and smoking bans in public places and prison reform, policy to address the numbers of Hispanic children dying from strep throat. They were coming from their communities, they were involved in their communities, and that guided the legislation.

Question: There’s a lot of hope that the 2024 election cycle will see a lot of Latina representation among candidates for local and state office. Do you think that’s true, or is there still hesitation to run?

Montoya: We’ve found that in Hispanic communities, there’s sometimes some worry about the airing of dirty laundry. It’s sort of this attitude of, ‘We know these are problems within our community, but if we talk about them too much, that invites more intervention that could be worse than the problem itself.’ There’s sometimes a fear the attention could introduce new forms of oppression.

We also see with Latinas this question of how do they maintain legitimacy within the community as they’re working to maintain legitimacy within political institutions. It’s interesting to see Latinas who were community organizers first and the ways they try to achieve that balance. They still really want to be in service of the community and at same time be effective within political institutions. An interesting theme has been just how tired a lot of them get from all of this, the challenges within and outside institutions.

So, my feelings are really mixed (about the 2024 election cycle). I’m hearing some good things and there are some amazing initiatives going on, organizations trying to do community outreach, legislators trying to do outreach and mobilization. Some of the momentum that was part of getting Trump out of office is still there, but will it influence who ends up making it on slate and how it mobilizes people? I think that’s what’s uncertain.

Latinos still have the lowest voter turnout, and we see in Colorado the districts that are seen as red are more likely to be ignored even though those votes still count in bigger elections. It’s interesting to see where the money has flowed. But I think that is starting to change. People are starting to see the need to move beyond the notion that Denver Latino politics are Colorado Latino politics and really put effort into going to Latino and Hispanic communities outside the Denver metro area, learning how they understand themselves, what their needs are. This is so important. If not, we will continue to miss opportunities, to lose voice and representation.

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In newly published chapter, CU Boulder researcher Celeste Montoya demonstrates how social movements have influenced Latina legislative leadership in Colorado.

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‘Calling in,’ not calling out, the racism of those who love you

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 20:52:04 +0000

‘Calling in,’ not calling out, the racism of those who love you Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/22/2023 - 14:52

Daniel Long

In her recently published book, Samira Mehta offers insight into a lesser-known, but nevertheless hurtful, type of racism

It’s 2016, Pennsylvania, and Samira Mehta, who would later become an associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, is having dinner with an old friend.

He asks about her experiences during the election, as he, like many people, has become worried about the xenophobia stirred up by the Trump campaign. How’s that been for her?

Short answer: not great.

The daughter of a white mother from Illinois and a father from India, Mehta has twice been spat on at her local grocery store and told to “go home.” (Home, by the way, is Connecticut, where Mehta was born and reared.)

Samira K. Mehta, an associate professor and director, explores the intersectionality of religion, culture and gender, including US family politics.

Yet although such flagrant acts of racism are scary, Mehta tells her friend, they aren’t the kind of racism that really hurts her. The kind that really hurts her, she says, is “the racism of people who love me.”

Now Mehta has published a book exploring this topic, The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging, which takes a first-hand look at the challenges of mixedness and encourages discussion of a kind of racism that is sometimes overlooked, under-addressed or misunderstood.

Usually, when we think about racism, Mehta says, we think about big historical moments. We think about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; about Los Angeles police officers brutally attacking Rodney King; about Rosa Parks being told to give up her seat on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus; about John Lewis being beaten on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

“What’s much harder to talk about and think about are moments of racism that you encounter in relationships where you love the other person and they love you,” says Mehta.

The racism of people who love you is a subtler, more elusive form of racism, Mehta explains, and one that can be especially challenging for mixed-race individuals. Mehta herself has endured it on many occasions.

One example concerns the very friend she was having dinner with in 2016.

Years earlier, she was flying out to visit him, she recalls, “and I got searched really aggressively by TSA, and it was invasive. I got pulled out of the line and had to take off clothes, and I was worried. And my friend was like, ‘If, by searching people who look like you, they keep everyone safe, this is just an inconvenience.’”

Another example involves Mehta’s maternal aunt. At a family get-together, Mehta was wearing Indian clothing, and so her aunt decided to ask her, “So, are you super ethnic now?”

Neither Mehta’s friend nor her aunt was deliberately being racist. In fact, they’re the kind of people who’d vehemently disavow racism. “These are people for whom being liberal, or maybe even being progressive, is really central to their identity,” Mehta says.

Yet it’s precisely this tension between who the person is and what the person says that can make the racism of people who love you so difficult to address.

“It’s really hard to talk to people about these things, because to them they’re one-offs; to them they’re little things,” says Mehta. “They don’t necessarily recognize what they’re saying or doing as indicative of a larger power structure.”

Plus, Mehta says, “nobody wants to see themselves as a racist,” especially when that person is someone close—an old friend, for instance, or a family member—and especially nowadays, when charges of racism feel extremely high stakes.

“We’ve got a sort of one-drop rule of racism in the United States, where, if you do one racist thing, the distance between you and someone who would burn a cross on someone’s front lawn collapses. It’s the worst thing you could say to somebody,” says Mehta.

This then creates a Catch-22 for those suffering from the racism of people who love them: “If you don’t say anything, you lose the friendship because you let them go off and be racist. And if you do say something, you run the risk of losing the friendship because you just called your friend a racist.”

Put bluntly, either lose the friendship or lose the friendship.

But Mehta has a way around this dilemma, one she drew from the work of Loretta Ross, a feminist, activist and educator known for her work in women’s rights, reproductive justice and anti-racism, and a cofounder of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.

Ross distinguishes between two modes of confronting racism: calling out and calling in.

"The Racism of People Who Love You" by Samira Mehta investigates the complicated challenges within mixed-race families and relationships.

With calling out, Ross says, “You think somebody has done something wrong, you think they should be held accountable for it, and you think they should be punished for it.”

Calling out is an opportunity to shame, says Ross. It’s done out of anger. And for that reason, she believes it is ineffective. “With this approach, you’ve guaranteed one thing. With this blaming and shaming, you just invited [the person accused of racism] to a fight, not a conversation.”

Calling in, however, is basically the same as calling out, but “done with love,” says Ross. It is not an opportunity to shame but an invitation to change. It promotes conversation, not fighting.

It’s the difference between volubly condemning someone at the Thanksgiving table and asking them to a private chat on a walk after dinner.

When it comes to the racism of people who love you, says Mehta, it’s calling in, not calling out, that’s the thing to do.

And that is one thing she hopes her book helps readers do. She hopes it helps those who’ve experienced racism from the people who love them, as well as those who’ve committed such acts of racism, find a healthy way to discuss that racism.

But Mehta is also quick to admit that these conversations don’t always create the desired outcome, which leads one to wonder, as her audience members often do at her book talks, when to forgive a person for his or her racism and when to cut that person off?

“How you make that judgment call is really individual,” Mehta says. “It depends on what's going on in your life. It depends on how much you need that person. I do not think it’s a good idea to cancel the people you love for things that they do that hurt you, but I also don’t think you should be a doormat who is willing to be hurt forever.”

There is a balance to strike, in other words. Care should be taken.

But, ultimately, Mehta believes in people’s ability to be and do better, as long as they’re given the chance.

“If you cancel people, they never grow and change. But they can grow and change when you call them in and offer them love.”

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In her recently published book, Samira Mehta offers insight into a lesser-known, but nevertheless hurtful, type of racism.

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‘We are in a precarious moment, not an unprecedented one’

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 23:13:28 +0000

‘We are in a precarious moment, not an unprecedented one’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/27/2023 - 17:13

Celeste Montoya, hailed for her work to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, reflects on DEI initiatives and current political challenges

Celeste Montoya, associate professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, is one of four people honored for making significant contributions to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across the university’s four-campus system.

Last month, CU President Todd Saliman announced the President’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Awards, which also recognized one program.

Montoya, who is the faculty director of the Miramontes Arts & Science Program, studies race and gender in U.S., European and global politics and has published extensively on topics such as gender violence, voting rights, political representation and social movements.

Celeste Montoya holds a PhD in political science and a graduate certificate in women, gender, and sexuality studies from Washington University in St. Louis.

Her current research examines Latina leadership in Colorado, a project that is of both personal and professional interest to this southern Colorado-born professor.

Montoya recently answered five questions about her work, the status of DEI initiatives nationwide, and the challenging climate that exists. The interview follows:

Question: You hold three degrees in political science and a graduate certificate in gender studies; what drew you to focus your research, teaching and service on diversity, equity and inclusion?

Montoya: I remember growing up and seeing a lot of disconnect between the way I thought or was taught things were supposed to be (in terms of fairness and equality) and the way that they were. Whether they were things that I experienced firsthand because of my gender, race-ethnicity or class, or things that I witnessed or learned about from others, I think I’ve always been curious to better understand these disconnects, but also to find ways to address them.

I see my research, teaching and service all as ways to both better understand and address inequality and oppression, and to lessen the distance between what could/should be and what is.

Question: DEI initiatives seem to have been embraced by many universities, although different institutions might choose different strategies to advance diversity, equity and inclusion. In your view, are there “best practices,” meaning features of a university DEI structure that make it more likely to succeed?

Montoya: I think my biggest frustration with DEI (in any institutional setting—from governments to higher education) is that so much of the change is rhetorical. It is relatively easy to state a commitment to DEI (although even that is being challenged in some states). It seems much more difficult to commit resources, build capacity, coordinate efforts, and establish accountability.

While I’m heartened by a lot of the work that’s currently being done, I think we have a long way to go.

Question: One of your research foci is intersectionality. To what extent do you think this concept is well understood within and beyond the university? And to the extent it is not well understood, how can that lack of understanding be corrected?

Montoya: There are definitely a lot of misunderstandings about intersectionality, both within and outside of academic settings. As the term has been mainstreamed or institutionalized, it has become more disconnected from its origins in social movements, where those at intersectional of multiple marginalities challenged single-axis (race-only, gender-only, class-only) understandings of oppression that often excluded or overlooked their experiences and sought to combat oppression in all its interconnected, interlocking forms.

I think of and use intersectionality as a framework for better understanding how something might impact those who are differently situated. I also see it as a way of creating inclusive communities. Some people misunderstand intersectionality as divisive, of dividing us into smaller and more finite identities/groups. But intersectionality can also allow to delve into the messiness of our lived realities, that while we may differ along some dimensions, we may find commonality upon others.

Question: Journalists from around the country have reported on attempts in some state legislatures to restrict DEI programs at colleges and universities. What do you make of such efforts, and how should experts in DEI respond?

We are definitely in a precarious moment of our history, but not an unprecedented one. There have always been differences in how people understand and approach structural inequalities … whether to recognize, ignore, combat or uphold them. How engaged the political parties (either of them) have been on these types of issues has and continues to vary."

Montoya: We are definitely in a precarious moment of our history, but not an unprecedented one. There have always been differences in how people understand and approach structural inequalities … whether to recognize, ignore, combat or uphold them. How engaged the political parties (either of them) have been on these types of issues has and continues to vary.

What is particularly alarming about this moment is that several state legislatures have decided to cut off any sort of deliberation or debate about inequality. It is an alarming attack on academic freedom, and a devastating blow to higher education.

If education holds the potential to be the great equalizer of society, then shutting down the ability to even speak about, let alone address, the inequalities within it, is a tragedy. I think a lot of DEI experts are already aware of the ebbs and flows of governmental and institutional support, and to never take anything for granted. If ever there were a need for speaking up and showing solidarity, now is the time.

Question: You’ve won a dozen awards for your teaching, research, service, mentorship and more. What reaction do you have to being recognized for your work in DEI?

Montoya: I think everyone likes to be recognized for the work that they do. But I don’t do the work for the recognition; I do the work because it needs to be done and because I feel the responsibility to do it.

I’ve been given a lot of opportunities because of the sacrifices made by others, by my family, by my community, by the generations who came before me. I feel like it is my responsibility to use whatever talents and resources I have to do the same for others—to pay it forward.

If I can make someone’s path a little easier where I can, then the work is worth it. I hope that these awards can bring attention and resources to the work being done and that which could/should be done.

Celeste Montoya, hailed for her work to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, reflects on DEI initiatives and current political challenges.

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Reexamining lessons learned from COVID-19

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 17:10:59 +0000

Reexamining lessons learned from COVID-19 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/16/2023 - 11:10

Bradley Worrell

CU Boulder professor is concerned that the focus on individual responsibility for health and wellness—especially during health crises like the COVID pandemic—overlooks underlying causes as to why minorities generally had worse outcomes than the overall population in the U.S. Ideas to be discussed in next Let’s CU Well seminar

In the days since COVID-19 first became a pandemic in the United States in 2020, researchers and health care professionals developed a series of guidelines associated with getting vaccinated, masking, handwashing and social distancing, as well as making lifestyle changes, to reduce the risk of dying or becoming seriously ill from the disease.

Those guidelines were well-meaning, but at the same time they generally are focused on “biomedical individualism” (how the virus is transmitted and what the individual could do to reduce their risk) to the exclusion of understanding why certain segments of the population, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, were at much greater risk of being harmed by COVID-19, according to Maisam Alomar, University of Colorado Boulder professor in women and gender studies. Part of her research focuses on race and gender policies of medicine and rehabilitation.

“It’s not that masks or vaccines aren’t important,” says Alomar, acknowledging that the politics around COVID-19 can be polarizing. However, at the same time, “part of what I’m suggesting is that we need to be moving away from our almost exclusive focus on biomedical individualism in our understanding of wellness … to try to understand that group wellness is not just the sum of individual behaviors or the biological mechanisms by which the virus can infect someone.”

Maisam Alomar is an assistant professor in women and gender studies. Her research lies mainly in the areas of disability studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and also incorporates black studies and critical race scholarship to analyze ways racial categories shape what is considered a disability, who is considered disabled, and the legal and social consequences of such categorization.

For example, the scientific and health care communities came to embrace the idea that making healthful lifestyle choices could reduce the risk of becoming sick from COVID—without recognizing that these lifestyle choices are not equally available to everyone, that some people live in “food deserts” that make it difficult to obtain nutritious meals or that those populations don’t have easy access to recreational spaces, according to Alomar.

“These are some of the things we don’t tend to consider as much,” she says, adding, “I’m also suggesting that we should be tailoring our interventions to account for the most vulnerable people … and this idea that when you structure your health care systems in a way that’s geared toward the most vulnerable people that you yield better health results for everyone.”

What’s more, when considering why certain groups of people, such as racial or ethnic minorities, have worse outcomes when it comes to COVID, there is a tendency even among the scientific community to ascribe those outcomes to preexisting conditions within those communities or even biological factors—rather than issues having to do with socioeconomic inequities more generally and the disparity in health care among different segments of the U.S. population, according to Alomar.

Alomar will share other additional views on COVID-19 and U.S. health care policy during her upcoming seminar, “Moving Away from Biomedical Individualism in Health and Wellness.” This event is scheduled as a Zoom presentation starting at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, March 21. The event is free, but registration is required.

The event is part of the Let’s CU Well speaker series for CU staff, students and interested community members. The series is an offshoot of Be Well, a wellness initiative launched by the College of Arts and Sciences.

Alomar draws a line between COVID-19’s effects on varying populations relate and the “interdisciplines” at universities.

According to Alomar, interdisciplines—which includes Black and feminist studies—have performed valuable research related to COVID-19. That’s particularly true, she says, when it comes to debunking some unsupported claims involving COVID-19 outcomes based on race and ethnicity.

Interdisciplines offer a very useful critique ... When budgets are tight, people start asking, do we really need this (field of study) if there’s a crisis? I think that when there’s a crisis we need these fields even more because of the explanatory power they offer.”

For example, she notes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has highlighted obesity as a co-morbidity factor disproportionally harming minorities in COVID outcomes, but that research from a noted sociologist found that “the association between ‘obesity’ and mortality is baseless.”

Alomar says interdisciplines at universities can be very useful for the insights and critiques they provide for various fields of study, such as science and health care. At the same time, she says interdisciplines also tend to be one of the programs universities first look to cut when their finances are dented by unforeseen circumstances, such as the Great Recession of 2008 or the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What I’m saying is interdisciplines offer a very useful critique, and it’s very important to have that in a university,” Alomar says. “When budgets are tight, people start asking, do we really need this (field of study) if there’s a crisis? I think that when there’s a crisis we need these fields even more because of the explanatory power they offer.”

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Professor aims to comfort, protect students in wake of Club Q killings

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 22:58:04 +0000

Professor aims to comfort, protect students in wake of Club Q killings Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/14/2023 - 15:58

Orla McGrath

Kristie Soares, assistant professor of women and gender studies and co-director of the LGBTQ Certificate Program, outlines resources, safe spaces and people’s varying experience of grief

On Nov. 19, 2022, five people at Club Q in Colorado Springs died in a mass shooting, renewing debate about the gun-violence epidemic and domestic terrorism, but there was another dimension to this shooting: Club Q is a well-established and beloved LGBTQ+ club in the Colorado Springs area.

Many members of the LGBTQ+ community have been left feeling scarred, fearful and violated, and with a lack of protections in place for this community, some wonder how LGBTQ+ students on campus process the event and find helpful resources and safe spaces.

Though the question has no simple, definitive answer, Kristie Soares, assistant professor of women and gender studies and co-director of the CU Boulder LGBTQ Certificate Program, hopes to start an open conversation on the campus about LGBTQ+ violence and provide students with support networks in a time of great pain.

“Most importantly, there is no correct way to feel after Club Q. You should feel you have space to cry, scream and get angry,” Soares added. “Emotions can’t be processed in a right or wrong way.”

Assistant Professor Kristie Soares is working on an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of disco and dance music in 1970s New York.

Soares focuses their work in queer Latinx media and queer of color critique, specifically media representations.

“It’s interesting to examine not only negative stereotypes in media, but also how unintentional representation can become something radical, like when a character is written as cisgendered but becomes a queer character within the fanbase of a piece of media,” Soares said.

The LGBTQ+ Studies certificate program is interdisciplinary, meaning that students can take classes outside of the department to meet requirements, which opens up a wide range of courses and topics to study.

“As long as the course has more than 50% LGBTQ+ content, we approve that for the certificate. This includes classes with a large independent project component if you choose to do a project about LGBTQ+ issues,” Soares said.

The program is approaching its 30-year anniversary in 2025, but Soares said interest in the certificate has spiked in recent years.

“We’re in a really exciting and scary time for queer and trans people, and in some ways these very negative issues have reinvigorated people’s interest in studying the LGBTQ+ community and taking that with them into government and public-policy jobs,” Soares said.

Soares is working on a manuscript titled Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media and is passionate about “the ways that joy can be a response to severe trauma and state-sanctioned violence in marginalized communities.”

“There’s something very queer about joy,” Soares said. “We have a strong history of queer and trans people connecting joy to politics—Stonewall was an uprising, but it was also a bar where people were dancing and enjoying themselves.” (The Stonewall uprisings were a series of protests in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, in response to police crackdowns on gay and lesbian bars.)

Reflecting on the reactions to the Club Q murders on campus, Soares said joy and fear naturally go hand in hand, and there is room for all emotions.

“Recognize that this is a violation, and we don't currently have the protections that we need to guarantee that this won’t happen again—it is not unreasonable to be out in LGBTQ+ spaces and be scared.”

Soares emphasizes that there is no one correct way to grieve in these moments: “There are normative systems put in place related to grieving that just don’t fit for marginalized communities—when trauma is not the exception anymore, that grieving process is going to be more constant.”

“Despite this reality, there are many ways on campus to find safe spaces to feel emotions and talk to one another,” Soares said. She believes community spaces are the key to this; such spaces can be nightclubs but also knitting circles, book clubs or text chains.

“The great thing about these spaces is the joy that comes with them—it’s OK to laugh at something funny on a text chain or watch silly movies even though we are in a world in some ways defined by homophobia, transphobia and the trauma that comes with it—that’s a part of the experience of being queer and trans,” Soares said.

Queer Asterisk, a group of queer mental health professionals in Boulder, is a great place to start when accessing resources, she said. The group offers free digital support groups to process emotions and build connections and can connect students with free therapy.

On campus, students can find an array of resources and communities. “We have the Pride Office, which is a student services focused center, and the academically focused certificate program. These are all great options for returning students, students new to Boulder and students who may not have spent a lot of time on campus due to the pandemic and are still searching for their community here,” Soares said.

That’s the great thing about the CU community—there is faculty you can reach out to who are working on these issues but also identify as part of the community."

“We also have clubs like the Gay Student Alliance and Queer People of Color; both great places to make friends and find the joy that is so important in these times.”

Clubs and centers will individually host events, and there is also a TRANSforming Gender Conference on March 18-19, which will draw people from around the country and include discussions and workshops. Faculty gathered last year to do a panel discussion on their experiences as trans/non-binary folk in higher education, Soares said.

“That’s the great thing about the CU community—there is faculty you can reach out to who are working on these issues but also identify as part of the community. This can be really helpful, too,” Soares adds.

Grief is an ongoing process, one without a straightforward path. “When our day-to-day safe spaces are violated, that can be devastating. In those moments, it is even more important to find community,” Soares said.

“You do not need to go through this, or any other traumatic events, alone.”

A full list of resources can be found on the LGBTQ+ resource website.

Kristie Soares, assistant professor of women and gender studies and co-director of the LGBTQ Certificate Program, outlines resources, safe spaces and people’s varying experience of grief.

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‘Untraditional’ Hanukkah celebrations are often full of traditions for Jews of color

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 19:31:17 +0000

‘Untraditional’ Hanukkah celebrations are often full of traditions for Jews of color Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/19/2022 - 12:31

Samira Mehta

Multicultural Jewish families and Jews of color are innovating food-centered holidays to bring their whole selves to the table

Hanukkah, the Jewish “festival of lights,” commemorates a story of a miracle, when oil meant to last for one day lasted for eight. Today, Jews light the menorah, a candelabra with eight candles – and one “helper” candle, called a shamas – to remember the Hanukkah oil, which kept the Jerusalem temple’s everlasting lamp burning brightly. Each year, the holiday starts with just the shamas and one of the eight candles and ends, on the last night, with the entire menorah lit up.

But because the reason for the light is oil, Jews also celebrate by eating food cooked in oil. In the United States, most people think of those oil-soaked foods as latkes, or potato pancakes, and jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot. For most American Jews, these are indeed important holiday foods, replete with memories – both of their heavy, greasy deliciousness and of the smells that permeate the house for days after a latke fry.

More specifically, though, these treats are Ashkenazi, referring to Jews whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe. Two-thirds of Jews in the U.S. identify as Ashkenazi, which has strongly shaped American Jewish culture. That Eastern European culture, however, is only one of many Jewish cultures around the world.

At the top of the page: Hanukkah creates opportunities for families to celebrate their heritage—especially in the kitchen (zilber42/iStock via Getty Images). Above: Many families find ways to incorporate other sides of their heritage into Jewish ceremonies and holidays (Lindsey Wasson/Getty Images).

In recent years, Jews of color and non-Ashkenazi Jews have been bringing attention to new Hanukkah traditions that celebrate the diversity of Judaism in the U.S. My work as a scholar of gender and Jewish studies often looks at how multicultural families navigate and celebrate the many aspects of their identities.

Many different Jewish stories

Jews of color come from many places. Some people were born into communities that have always been Jewish and have never been considered white: For instance, there are Jewish communities in India, Ethiopia and China. Others are people of color adopted into white Jewish families; adult converts to Judaism; or children of interracial, interfaith marriage.

Many Jews of color have strong ties to Ashkenazi Judaism. Increasingly, though, they are publicly celebrating the range of traditions they bring to the table, making space for more diversity in mainstream Jewish life. There’s been more conversation about the Ethiopian Jewish holiday Sigd, for example, and what role it might play in American Jewish life.

One of my favorite examples is a children’s book called “The Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas,” which features a boy and his little sister, named Sadie. Their dad is Ashkenazi and their mom is Indian or Indian American, as is their live-in grandmother, Amma-amma. In their house, Hanukkah means cooking up a plate of dosas, South Indian crepes sometimes wrapped around a savory filling. The narrator is annoyed by Sadie’s tendency to climb on things, but her climbing skills save the day, and the dinner, when the family is locked out of their house and she can climb in and open the door.

What I especially appreciate about this particular book is that the dosas are not the point of the story. This is a story about an annoying little sister who in the end saves the day, and her family just happens to make dosas as a Hanukkah treat. “The Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas” doesn’t mention whether the Indian side of the family is Jewish, but either way, its message for kids is clear: It can be totally normal to be a half-white, Jewish, half-Indian kid who has dosas for Hanukkah.

‘Kosher Soul’

In real life, one of the most influential Jews of color adding distinctive Hanukkah foods to the communal table is Michael Twitty. This acclaimed food historian is author of “The Cooking Gene,” about the social and culinary history of African American food, and “Kosher Soul,” which brings together traditions from these two sides of his identity.

Twitty notes on his blog, Afroculinaria, that “traditionally African Jewish communities – the Beta Yisrael of Ethiopia, the Lemba of Southern Africa, and groups in West Africa, did not celebrate Hannukah.” That said, in the spirit of celebrating Jewish food from around the world, he shared the Somali dish sambusa, a flaky deep-fried pastry something like a samosa, that can be filled with meat or vegetables. As with dosas, it is not so much that these foods are traditionally associated with Hanukkah but that they could provide Black Jews with a way to celebrate African and Jewish aspects of their heritage with a food fried in oil.

Worshippers celebrate the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana, at Shaare Rason Synagogue in Mumbai, India (Pratik Chorge/Hindustan Times via Getty Images).

Twitty is known for his skill at a wide range of cuisines, including a wide range of Jewish food; cuisine cooked by African Americans for themselves and, at times, white employers; and African foods. Drawing on all these traditions, Twitty created a riff on more traditional latkes: Louisiana-style latkes, which include the “holy trinity” of Creole and Cajun cuisine – garlic, green onions and celery in this recipe – plus a bit of cayenne pepper.

Plenty of people improvise their latke recipes: My former synagogue, like many others, had latke cook-offs in which people brought all sorts of innovations, including black bean and sweet potato latkes and latkes flavored like samosa fillings. For Twitty, pulling from Creole flavors allows him to marry his Jewish religion and his African American heritage – and to offer a path for other Black Jews to do likewise.

Full table, full selves

In my new book, “The Racism of People Who Love You,” I think a lot about being brown in white spaces and about the innovations that come from blended identities.

I am not from a historically Jewish Indian community, but my own innovation, as a Jew of color, is this. The last Hanukkah before the pandemic, my mom came out to visit me. She is neither Jewish nor Indian but became an excellent Indian cook during many decades of her marriage. I, however, am not an excellent Indian cook and, whenever I am able to spend time with my mom, I want her to make something called aloo puri, which is a chickpea and potato dish served with crispy, puffy fried bread. I have no idea how to make the bread, and it is a “seeing Mommy” treat.

I invited an Indian colleague who was not going home for winter break to join us for dinner. When I happened to mention this dinner to one of my senior Jewish studies colleagues, he commented that he wanted to have my mom cook an Indian dinner for him, and so, with my mom’s permission, I invited him and his husband to join us as well.

My mom looked at me. “Puri are fried in oil,” she said, and all of a sudden we had a Hanukkah party, with a menorah lighting and fried food. For me, having my senior colleague there and excited to join us was a moment of realizing I could bring my full self to the table.

If I were the type to make holiday wishes, that is, perhaps, what I would wish for: a place where all Jews of color could bring their full selves to all the tables where they sit.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Multicultural Jewish families and Jews of color are innovating food-centered holidays to bring their whole selves to the table.

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