From: Out in STEM
Date: September 13, 2023
Subject: O4UD Weekend of Abundance + Bitch on Wheels


oSTEM logo.

Queers Read This!

Gay son or thot daughter? [reply]

    Hi, doll! I hope your first full week of classes is going well in spite of #Mondays now put into the mix. Qasim, oSTEM icon & O4U Digital alumn, shared this historic photograph from the O4UD conference featuring THE Dominique Jackson. Her legacy is legendary as ballroom royalty both on- and off-screen. We’ve reached out to the Louvre Museum allowing them to display the picture (below) commemorating the moment UR queers met the queen. 

Last Week

    Missed our GIM last week? That’s okay. Life, anxiety, work, mental health, etc. are valid reasons! There is always a space in oSTEM waiting just for you, feel free to join us next Friday.
    Last week we quickly reviewed what oSTEM is/does as a national organization & as a UR chapter, and who we are (as your E-Board). We also outlined events planned for this semester (like upcoming collabs with the Health Promotion Office, the Fellowships Office, etc.) and celebrated our president’s birthday!! We hope you enjoyed the GIM and meeting other UR queer nerds.
    Last recap item: Welcome back O4U Digital Conference attendees!! We’re so happy to hear about the many life-defining connections & experiences from just one weekend. Looking forward to hearing more about it at our next GMM. Did someone mention our next GMM? As in our GMM next Friday (September 22) in Douglass 407 from 5-6 pm? 

Coming Up

oSTEM
- Weekly Study Hours
    Regular oSTEM SHs are Mondays from 1-3 pm at the BIC (Douglass 305). Join us there to cosplay as studious scholars, munch (shoutout Ice Spice) on some BIC-provided snacks, and expand our beloved oSTEM ambiance. 
- 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!
University
- Greene Center (Part II): Guidance, Interviews, and Career Clothing
    Check out the Greene Center's Clothing Closet during their Career Week Open House and browse their inventory of professional apparel available to UR students for free. Their Clothing Closet open hours will be next Friday, September 22, from 12-1 pm (registration required).
- DEIJ Annual Conference: Held next Friday, September 22 from 8 am - 5 pm
    URMC’s Annual DEIJ conference, “Boundless Together: The Future of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice” will be held next Friday at the Joseph Floreano Rochester Riverside Convention Center (downtown) featuring esteemed guests: Grammy-winning artist, actor, and activist, Common, and author and academic, Dr. Bettina Love! Ellie and I will be there too (as attendees)! Registration required. 
Outside
- O4U Business Conference: Round 1 Applications due October 1, 2023 @ 11:59 pm EST
    Out for Undergrad’s (O4U) conferences are life-changing experiences for LGBTQ2+ undergrads (whether you are out, selectively out, or it’s complicated). Their all-expenses-paid conferences feature prominent queer speakers, mentorship discussions, legendary career fairs, and more! Their Business Conference is tentatively scheduled on March 8-10, 2024 in NYC, read more here. 

In The News

• Trans Formations Project: TFP Newsletter
    The Trans Formations Project is an incredible grassroots nonprofit, their weekly newsletters update you on the status of specific state bills (healthcare, drag, schooling, etc.), compile a list of action items in response to these bills/hearings, highlight movement success news, and summarize other queer news across the nation. Our website also has a page dedicated to their informative work.
• The VMAs
    It happened. Also, Nicki hosted it!!
• E-Board in the news
    Starting next week, our E-Board members will be rotating to spotlight at least 1 news piece in our ‘In the News’ section! This will not only help me ensure our emails are ready on time (good queer news takes time to find), but it will also let you get to know our E-Board members through their coverage. Also, feel free to send us a suggestion through this Google form!

STAR: Bitch on Wheels

“We were determined that evening that we were going to be a liberated, free community, which we did acquire that. Actually, I’ll change the ‘we’: You have acquired your liberation, your freedom, from that night: Myself: I’ve got shit, just like I had back then. But I still struggle, I still continue the struggle. I will struggle til the day I die and my main struggle right now is that my community will seek the rights that are justly ours.”
- Sylvia Rivera, Bitch on Wheels speech

    Civil rights pioneer and STAR co-founder, Sylvia Rivera and her legacy have increasingly been covered as part of queer academia’s renewed interest in intersectional studies. Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) was an activist organization that provided shelter to street people during the 1970s, centralized for the most part in NYC. Street people/transvestites refers to queer individuals facing food/housing insecurity and who we’d now describe as trans, gender-nonconforming/-variant, and drag performers. This stark change in adopted terminology helps us understand the stark environmental differences that are important to not forget when revisiting historic queer projects.
    Side note: I tried to find more details about the credited author but could not concretely establish whether Nothing is an alias or a chosen name, so out of an abundance of caution, I’ll keep to the latter. 
    Author, Ehn Nothing’s STAR: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle engages with STAR’s activities mindful of its disrespected positioning by white academia’s gross appropriation of their work. Nothing’s exploration of history for “weapons and inspiration” for contemporary queer insurrectionist projects is prefaced by an acknowledgment of appropriation. Demonstrating the repercussions of said appropriation, Nothing points to academia’s reductive invocation of STAR as a “radically queer” subculture. 
    Being “poor, gender-variant women of color, street-based sex workers, with confrontational, revolutionary politics,” STAR’s members were not ‘respectable queers’ so the “radical queer” label uncritically martyrs their experiences and fragments their reality based on the framework they’re most ‘useful’ for. 

    While this tendency to appropriate legacies can help digest history, it dehumanizes the individuals it martyrs like imperfect people can’t also have impactful legacies. I’d love to go deeper into specific resistance work that STAR led and influenced, but I felt it more appropriate to look into the engaging of legacies like STAR purely in service of reinforcing any ideology. It also serves as a reminder that progressive movements like feminism, communism, and “radical queer” are not incapable of revisionist history.
 
Don't die!

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