Projects in Comprehensive Sex Education

This last week has felt incredibly busy by the fact that there is somewhere I have to be at some point every single day, and many of the days have been incredibly long days. It’s good to know that I have things to do and that I’m accomplishing things. But it’s also hard to pause for a moment or sit down and get a chunk of writing or reading done.

Over the last week I’ve been able to attend two of the three Vice President of Equity Vice Provost student candidate forums. They have taken a lot of energy to attend, even for the relatively observational and shorter role I took. They have been tense and powerful and painful and I do not have words to describe the feelings that come up or to understand where I have been positionally in those spaces or in the work that is happening around those topics, and I would never want my words to get in the way of words from someone who understands better or is more involved or more affected by what is happening. So I note them here as important and powerful and that I am thinking about, but not as my place to speak when I don’t fully understand and can’t fully contribute to what progress needs to happen.

During the last week I have also spent time putting together pieces of my own event, putting up fliers and making announcements on social media and through various online forums I am part of. I spent some time at the tail end of the Seeds of Familia fundraiser night, in time to hear about the work they’ve been doing as a student club and as student leaders working to create a retention program to be in place for the coming years.

I also attended one of the showings for American Idiot on campus. I include this because I’ve always been fascinated by the way music, satire, life performance, art, and politics meet and mix. I don’t know much about Green Day or American Idiot, and there were times during the show when I lost track of which characters were which and what was happening. But the way music that was not created for the purpose of telling a story put in order and in context to tell a story is a really interesting creative method. It reminds me of the show I saw several years ago called We Will Rock You, a musical story put together with Queen songs. And both of these performances were to my eyes, pretty dang political. And I really like thinking about and feeling those interconnections and uses of different ways of storytelling and changing between storytelling forms and other art forms. It’s really hard to express how you think about these mixtures, or how they make you feel, but I think it’s really important to think and feel and experience this kind of medium mixing and expression even if you can’t explain it in so many words.

I’ve put some thought over the last week into my writing, into justifying why the pieces of writing I have done this quarter should exist and why they should be connected to and important to the work I set out to do this quarter, and into how the ideas I’ve had this quarter and started working on started. It’s hard to track ideas most times, but for this quarter, I can pinpoint exact moments when many of the ideas I had clicked. And that’s been primarily because most of my ideas over the last quarter have come from a line or a phrase or a word that someone has said in conversation, that was a joke or a pun, or that I saw written in someone else’s writing and gently borrowed to craft into my own writing. For this quarter it’s been a lot of ‘oh that sounds cool’ or ‘that phrase makes me think of this’ or even ‘it would be fun to take this one liner and make it a fancy one liner that surprises you when you read it’.

My final reflection paper will be the culmination of my thinking on how these sometimes silly little pieces of text fit in with the experience I set out to have in terms of writing this quarter, but a lot of it has to do with feeling freedom to write, and adding in subtle details and diversity in writing. I can’t exactly write an epic narrative that rings true to the experiences of a particular identity that I don’t hold myself, and to try would be disingenuous and dubiously ethical. But I can write in the world as I see it, with many different kinds of people and experiences that make up a rich world. It’s making sure the characters don’t all look alike and don’t all have the same experiences or go through the same story in their own lives.

In the writing that has been filled out enough and polished enough to be posted on my blog that’s a little hard to tell, but in the writing that’s on its way, and in the ideas that have still been jangling around in my head, that is there and present, and talking about those experiences will be part of my end of quarter reflection.

I wanted to note here also a very interesting article that I read this week about languages and names in fantasy of science fiction writing. There were a lot of linguistic or grammatical pieces of jargon that I don’t really understand because I don’t have that understanding or training, but the basics of understanding languages and naming in terms of sounds and origin and how names are connected to origin and how to work with that in a way that’s not racist or awful to languages that really exist in the world was really fascinating to think about. It made me think about a process that I had put little thought into before: naming. Creating names that fit with languages that exist or especially languages that have been made up for the writing. How to create languages for fiction, and what to pay attention when you do or when you’re working with someone else to create that language.

It’s really awesome that thinking about that layer, even a small amount, can add a really rich layer of meaning into your work. And it doesn’t matter if it’s noticeable outwardly or not, it’s like much of other writing. Much of character backstories and information is not in the work itself. It’s in the authors’ head or scribbled on post it notes or into a well categorized organizational system. But when the author knows it, the story becomes exponentially richer. And from this article and things it makes you think about, language and naming can do that also.

It’s a little bland, and I wish I’d made myself do it in time to make some designs, but I think it’ll be pretty clear, and the version that has gone onto the greenscreens on campus is surrounded with rainbows, so I think that will help as well.

My Event (Further posting Later): Let’s Talk About Sex! Thursday, May 25^th from 11am-12pm at the Trans and Queer Center. Join us to watch awesome videos, hang out, and chat about sex!

I have spent much of this week making slow progress on putting together my plan for the event I’m putting together at the Trans and Queer Center. At the moment I have an introduction and some pretty awesome conversation prompts, and I’m working to put advertising feelers more thoroughly this coming week. I’ve created a poster, though one that’s mostly text based since I was having trouble finding images to use that weren’t very simplified or very stereotypical, and I didn’t have the patience or inspiration to create my own image.

I’ve gotten my brief poster submitted to the greenscreens on campus, and I’m planning on putting up flyers, and notices up on facebook, greener commons, and some other groups that might spread further word of mouth.

I’m hoping that some awesome and open conversations can happen, as well as maybe some sharing of cool resources or hopes for future events or ideas for bettering the future of sex education.

I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about this event and putting together my thoughts for facilitation and advertisement.

For some reason, the lull of week five has hit me instead during week six, so it’s been hard to motivate myself to think and reflect on the work I’ve been doing in very productive ways, or sit down and do work on writing or editing or research. I think much of this week’s work has been kind of behind the scenes in my mind, it’s the little bits of thinking that I do when I’m ostensibly doing something else or walking through campus and the like.

However, toward the end of the week, which was also Queer and Trans week on campus, I was finally able to attend a QT week event. I went to hear Pidgeon Pagonis speak about intersex activism and experiences. This was a wonderful event, and I’m so glad I was able to go. There was a beautiful activity based around gender, a presentation on what intersex is and what activism around intersex issues looks like, and a short documentary that Pidgeon made was shown. One of the things that struck me on a more personal level was how familiar the experiences Pidgeon had with doctors was to my own.

Not in the direct experience of being intersex, because that is not an experience of mine, but the way the doctors treated a ‘condition’ that they didn’t understand. Either working on information that was incomplete or incredibly biased and harmful or putting a lot of pressure on an individual patient to know what they needed and wanted to do.

It’s really frightening to think that the experience of seeing a doctor, a person who’s supposed to be an expert or at least willing to seek out the relevant knowledge and be able to heal and help create a better quality of life, could be something so negative and something that is so applicable to people of vastly different experiences.

It’s a subject that seems at the moment incredibly large and important, because there’s connections to the current politics around healthcare and insurance, and there’s connections to so many different social justice movements.

The presentation and the descriptions of experiences with doctors reminds you that we really don’t know as much as we think we do about how the human body works. There is so much nuance that we haven’t begun to scratch the surface on, and so many ways to start and places to look at. It’s an incredibly broad area, and an incredibly connected and important subject. It highlights in a way the importance of interdisciplinary studies, to remind us that things have connections that we haven’t considered yet that are just as important as the obvious ones.

None of the things I’ve been working on this week or thinking about have really given me any unified ideas to write about, so I’ve mostly determined to muse a little, and maybe one of my simple musings will inspire someone else to write or study more on a subject.

This last week has been an incredibly busy one, it seems. The mid quarter writing assignment was due, I was training to be one of the tour guides for the State Supreme Court Judges on Monday, I was doing my work at the TQC, and thinking a lot about story telling in different mediums and how details create rich layered and effective stories.

I have taken several tour trips for practice around the campus, and though I was not trying to learn the entire tour, there was a lot of learning about different areas of the campus and making sure I included all of the elements in each place I was to talk about. Since I was going to talk about the SASS hallway, Sem II, and the Comm Building, there were a lot of elements to remember. It’s interesting to see and hear the kind of conversation that goes into the background work for such an event. There was talk about how we were supposed to deal with ADA routes if that was necessary, where to go in depending on how time worked out, and how we were supposed to react in various circumstances, as well as the differences between what parts of the campus and its systems to highlight differently for adult visiting judges than would be highlighted for prospective students and their parents.

The day of the tour itself was pretty straightforward, there were a couple of pictures with the GSU, Judges, George Bridges, and the students doing the tour. A few of the Judges visited a some classes and spoke with students, answering questions and talking about their experience. I was in the classroom with Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst and Justice Debra Stephens, where some of the topics discussed were around the connection between philosophy and law, the paths each of the Justices took from their education to their current positions, what kind of interdisciplinary learning and understanding they needed in their positions, and what affects new technologies will have on law, all of which were very interesting topics.

On the tour itself, it was kind of funny how many things on campus got in the way of being able to speak and be heard, and it was great how much we ended up talking about light and windows. On the tour itself there weren’t very many topics or note or particularly interesting conversations. The event itself, and that the experience was a good one for the Justices, was incredibly important. It’s the first time they’ve ever visited this college, and obviously it’s necessary to make a good impression. And it’s hard to balance the right amount of the progressive, responsive image of the college with the right amount of traditional catering to make that good impression.

On one of our training tours we were talking about subtle things that you don’t really notice when you’re living on campus or going to school here, but you certainly notice when you’re looking at it from the perspective of making a good impression on a group of important people in authority with fairly uncertain personality and sensibilities. Small things became incredibly important. A pair of rainbow suspenders, and a giant event poster advertising a pleasure based sex education workshop with ‘Orgasm’ written in giant letters hanging in the library become points of discussion. What to do with personal expression, and what to do with the different campus culture.

At one point during last quarter I went along on a lobby day, I think it was set up through the TQC, but I could be remembering wrong. And I decided, partly seriously and partly because it was an amusing thought, that I wanted to be someone who could walk around the Capitol campus in a Deadpool t-shirt and talk with the important people there, and be taken seriously. The idea of being someone who had enough credibility or knowledge to get away with breaking the social dress code of power was really cool to think about. I’m already in a position where I have quite a bit more privilege than many people would, but even still the idea of breaking dress code rules in various places makes me really happy, and seems a lot like progress.

So to me, it doesn’t seem like the small things are as big of a deal as they are to most, and it’s really interesting to note that. Dynamics of power and funding, and universal design toward underserved or marginalized students is an incredibly important and complicated topic for its own sake. I have the impression that most insitutions are dealing with populations of LGBTQIA+, veteran students, students with various visible and invisible disabilities, first generation students, and margainalized students, and yet the systems in place for supporting these students, if there are in fact any in place, are reactive, meaning that much of effort of getting that support is put onto the student rather than the institution.

Additionally, another interesting dynamic to consider is how students were chosen to be tour guides. I can’t speak for other students, or other events, but there have been several times at this college where I have been chosen for events or student leadership roles simply because I am in the right place at the right time.

This makes sense, since so much of our interactions as humans are done through networking, but it means it creates a circle of people who are active in the student leadership roles, and it’s hard to new students, underserved students, or new perspectives in those places of student leadership and student lead change, which is unfortunate.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about this week has been the different ways that different mediums of story telling create rich worlds. I saw Secret Garden at 5^th Avenue Theatre this week, I have continued to read Octavia’s Brood, and I have read the comic book Red’s Planet. Three different mediums, but very rich stories in their own right. Live theatre can incorporate music and lighting to the feelings you get when you watch. Depending on your seating you have facial expressions from the actors, or you have gestures and larger motions. You have sets and choreography.

In Octavia’s Brood there are all the mechanics of beautiful well put together writing.

In Red’s Planet, there is the simplified style of writing that is mainly shown through dialog, while the rest of the scene and world is set and built around the art style, the content of the panels, and the level of detail. Motion is portrayed through static visual clues, and even while the page stays still, you see the characters moving and their facial expressions changing when the story telling and visual elements are well put together.

In a lot of ways, I want to incorporate the social justice and political elements in my writing as a background, part of the setting, part of the world that affects the characters. It will come to the forefront when it’s needed, but it will also be part of what helped make the characters who they are. In my mind, that’s an effective way to include those elements in writing, especially when some of the elements I want to include can’t come from my own direct experiences.

So these are some of the thoughts I’ve been having over the past week, and thought I know they’re not all fleshed out or put together, I think they could contribute to the process of other’s thinking, and they will certainly contribute to the process of my own thinking.

Last Monday I started my shifts at the TQC, which end up being three shifts a week at about four hours each shift. Because of this, my hours have involved a lot of being present in a community space and learning about and interacting with the community in a way I haven’t really been able to before.

I consider myself to be part of the LGBTQIA+ community, though perhaps a bit on the outskirts of it because of the amount of privilege I hold and the way I’ve experienced the development of my identity. At community college, I happened on the newly formed GSA group, and I ended up being Vice President for the last six months of my time at that college. In my time at Evergreen, there wasn’t really a community space or group, so I haven’t been able to find too much connection. These reasons are what makes it feel like a very new experience to not only be in a community identity based space, but also be there as someone who aims to make others feel welcome is a pretty different experience than I’ve had before. One of my objectives was learning more about community and identity based spaces, coordination and programming, and I feel like being present and talking with the people who work, pass through, and hang out in the TQC is an important aspect of that objective, so I’m really glad to have the opportunity to be there.

It’s a very strange dynamic, to have a space that’s very much trying to create a safe space and a counterspace, a place in which to find refuge from defending identities and worth and to find foundation to fight for equality and acceptance and resist systems of oppression, and be in that space because of a system that tends to marginalize LGBTQIA+ students. I am in the space because of my educational pathway, and though I would love spending time in the space on my own, it’s unlikely I would have connected with the center very much without my ILC components of the last couple quarters. So it’s a little odd to be in such an interesting position between systems and resistance. It’s not something I’ve figured out what to say about it yet, but it’s definitely a dynamic that I’m aware of, as I’m becoming of other dynamics that I haven’t previously been aware of.

At the TQC I have also been part of some discussions around event coordination, planning, and brainstorming as well. There have been discussions on how to make various parts of the college more inclusive to LGBTQIA+ students, as well as a couple of discussions around Lavender Graduation, and some thought around individual event planning and stuff.

I am in the process of finding a date and putting together a plan for a discussion group time around a topic of sex ed, pleasure, or experiences, but I am not super clear on any details yet, so I’m not sure exactly when or what will be happening. That is one project for this coming week.

As for my research project, I have laid out a draft outline from some of the topics that have come up in my sifting through popular media articles, conversations, and videos that I’ve seen before or very recently. This draft outline will help me solidify what angles my research will take and how to process the articles and material that I want to use as sources. I tend to do research projects in bursts, so I’m not worried about whether I have much tangible evidence of my thinking, because I know that I am thinking about it, and I know that it is in the back of my mind even when I am not consciously thinking about.

I have spent a lot of time this week on reading. Some of it has been short articles from media, but there has been quite a bit of reading from the book Octavia’s Brood and then reading a comic book called Lumberjanes Vol 1. Octavia’s Brood is an anthology of short science fiction stories about revolution, resisting oppression, and social justice movements, this book is really important to my studies because it is basically the kind of writing I want to be working on this quarter in my fiction, though it is a specific genre, a slightly longer form, and for my own writing I’m not sure that the elements of social justice, resistance, or representation will be immediately obvious. The writing in Octavia’s Brood follows the idea that whenever you are participating in social justice work, you are also creating science fiction, because you have to imagine a vastly different world as a goal to work toward, and you should have an idea of what you do next once you win whatever part you are currently struggling for. Reading the stories with all the different ideas and writing in this book has been a really awesome experience. I knew that science fiction is a really great genre for social/political commentary, and I knew that there were works of writing that were specifically working toward creating greater diversity and giving representation to marginalized populations and struggles, and giving voice to marginalized authors existed, but this quarter’s objective has allowed me to pay a little more attention to how to find these books and how to promote them and who’s doing the work of publishing and writing.

Lumberjanes is a really great comic book that a friend loaned me that has some awesome representation. I only read the first volume, which doesn’t have as much discussion of the identity around the characters as the later volumes, but it is around an awesome girl scouts type troupe that has awesome crazy adventures and creatres friendship. The awesome person who loaned me the book tells me that one characters is a trans girl, there is a lesbian couple, there’s an Ace person, and some other cool identities that aren’t given much time in mainstream media, writing, etc. I’m kind of glad that the first volume didn’t specifically get into the identities of the characters, because it’s good that it’s story driven rather than issue driven, which is a problem in a lot of the books with LGBTQIA+ characters. They’re not written as people who are LGBTQIA+ with motivations and goals outside of their identity, the problems it causes, the discovery of it, etc; they are unfortunately more frequently written as LGBTQIA+ vessels to explore coming out, or bullying, or some particularly identity driven issue that provides the entire motivation of the character and moves the plot along sometimes without any outside development of that character. So it was really cool to see story driven characters with awesome art and written in a way that’s accessible and acceptable for younger audiences. Representation is imoprtant, y’all.

In all, I’m pretty happy with where I am right now in the quarter. I’m glad to be getting to do more reading and being present in an awesome community driven space, and I’m looking forward to what develops over the rest of the quarter.