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.