From: Out in STEM Date: April 22 Subject: Game Night Debrief, Awards, & The Hijra Community
Queers Read This!
Hi, yappologists! The semester is rushing to finish at a bittersweet rate, bitter for the big deadlines that come with it, and sweet for the change of pace after it. Anyway below is a debrief of our last GMM game night, a call to celebrate you, and our penultimate queer highlight of the semester brought to you by Sree!
Last Week
Last week, we held our traditional end-of-semester Game Night w/ oSTEM where we celebrated graduating oSTEM members, met the iconic 2024-25 E-Board team, and fought to the death over board game logistics. /s It was the perfect closing event of the Ellie-Kevin dynasty, thank you so much for your kind words and for coming together one last time to celebrate all graduating members. <3
Coming Up
Updates
- Celebrating Member Milestones
oSTEM members! Part of our student org’s mission is to platform queer voices and stories in the UR community (aka you). Are you doing a slay internship/study abroad trip this summer? Let us know so we can mention it in our newsletters! Don’t let impostor syndrome diminish your voice, sharing your unique experiences helps us build our lil oSTEM community and helps other members who are feeling alone/underrepresented.
Feel free to also share any upcoming events that you’ll be a part of and would like fellow members to come out and support! For example, I’ll share an invite next week to Design Day where I’ll be presenting my senior design project and showcasing it in action (still working on the “action” part), more details to come in the next newsletter.
oSTEM
- Website
Browse through our CCC website to take advantage of our compiled Resources & Opportunities (scholarships, conferences, etc.), read more about our iconic E-Board, and find other general oSTEM links. The website is regularly updated, if you spot any issues or know of an R&O we haven’t included, our Feedback Form is always open!
Outside
- O4U 2024 Conferences: Round 3 Apps due this Sunday @ 11:59 pm PST
If you haven’t yet applied, Round 3 is your last chance!! O4U connections last a lifetime and it’s free!
Their Engineering + Life Sciences Conference (serves chemical, manufacturing, energy, consumer goods, consulting, and other engineering-related fields + research & development (R&D), pharmaceuticals, health technology, and other related life science fields) is scheduled for September 26-28, 2024 in St. Paul, MN. Read more and start your application here.
Their Digital Conference (technology, media, and marketing industries) is projected for Sept/Oct 2024 in NYC (as an engineer, I’m so jealous). Read more and start your application here.
In the News
• oSTEM at The Rocky’s
Last week, Ellie and I were at the university’s Student Life Awards ceremony The Rocky’s where I was presented with the Award for Campus Contributions for the senior class after being nominated by Cat, our legendary student org advisor who has helped us since day 1. While receiving an award in recognition for my campus contributions feels like a joke from the university after having to fight my way through institutional blindspots/neglect, it took me a second to realize that those fights were the contributions in question (yeah I’m queer theory-ing this too). There is a lot of work (fights) left for me to conclude, but I am glad they’re being recognized and there are amazing people here to help. Thank you for your contribution to our oSTEM community and our journey to liberation!! <3 • Sree slaying ROCTalks
Sree, our incoming oSTEM secretary, repped us at the Office of Undergraduate Research’s ROCTalks event earlier this month. They were amongst 20 undergrads presenting their research across all disciplines in less than 3 mins of lighting talks. Always a treat to see our members be active on campus (representing oSTEM no less) and show up to support and cheer them on!
Queering Ethnography: The Hijra Community
Spoilers: Parts of the movie Monkey Man are discussed in this highlight.
You look at the old carvings in these temples in India and the freedom, the sexuality, the philosophy, all of it, was so ahead of its time.
- Dev Patel
Hi y’all! I’m Sree, the incoming oSTEM Secretary for next semester! In honor of successfully overthrowing Kevin (as a DC native, I definitely have experience with insurrections), I decided to take a stab at my first queer highlight, showcasing queer representation in South Asian culture.
For some context on this piece, I recently watched the new action film Monkey Man, the directorial debut of actor Dev Patel, who also stars in the lead role. The basic premise of the film is that Patel’s character, who works as an underground fighter wearing a monkey mask, attempts to exact revenge on corrupt individuals who were responsible for the death of his mother. As an Indian-American and film aficionado, I was definitely surprised to see that in addition to a lot of bloody action set pieces, there was a lot of political subtext, especially regarding the state of Indian politics that I did not initially see coming. I would say if you’re an action film person but you also want a little more substance between the set pieces, it’s definitely worth a watch. I was also definitely not going into this film expecting queer representation, so I was pleasantly surprised to see an interesting aspect of the film that showcases how the queer community has really been shaped up within global cultures.
In the latter half of the film, Patel’s character, in his quest for vengeance, is shot by the police chief he is trying to kill, and he falls into a river where he is saved by a local community of Hijra warriors, who eventually near the end of the film, come to his aid in a pretty cool final battle. For those who may not be familiar, the Hijra are a community of transgender and intersex people within the Indian subcontinent. They are primarily composed of people who were assigned male at birth but look and dress in traditionally feminine ways. That being said, they are usually not considered as either male or female, but instead as their own gender. The Hijras have had a presence throughout history and Hindu mythology, particularly in ancient stories like the Mahabharata, where the character Arjuna is cursed by a nymph, losing his masculinity and being forced to live life in exile as a Hijra within their community under the name Brihannala. Hijras have slowly become more recognized within the Indian community, and in a landmark case in 2014, were officially recognized as a third gender by the Indian Supreme Court. In Bangladesh, they were also given the right to vote under their own gender in 2019 (previously they could only vote as either male or female but many chose not to vote at all since they didn’t feel represented). That being said, many Hijras still face discrimination in issues such as housing, financial concerns, and exclusion from education & employment, and often must resort to sex work or performance as the only major source of income.
So suffice it to say, I did not expect to see a movie with a final act involving trans warriors fighting the forces of evil corrupt political figures on my bucket list, but I am so glad that I did. And the presence and representation of the Hijra community not just within a Hollywood action film, but throughout South Asian culture, speaks very much to the way the queer experience is a global one, spanning many different cultures and for thousands of years. While much of our understanding of queer experiences is rooted within the scope of American history and culture, it’s easy to forget about our fellow queer communities and individuals throughout the whole world, many of whom are facing similar, if not worse crises involving queer rights in their home countries. As someone who has grown up as a citizen of both the US and India, it’s very interesting to learn about queer cultural experiences and identities. While we do differ in many ways (and I could write a whole future queer highlight on global & cultural experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals), the queer experience is universal, and the existence of a community like the Hijra, as well as many other groups throughout the world, shows how unified our stories are.
