From: Out in STEM Date: February 12 Subject: Nail Night Wednesday + Homonationalism
Queers Read This!
Hi, bottom! This newsletter is a lil late because [redacted RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World spoiler]. Anyway, there are some updates, fun events, and a slay queer highlight below!
Last Week, This Week
Queer Care Socialthis Wednesday from 7-8 pm in LeChase 161!!!
Our speed friending event/Qasimfest last week was so slay! It was nice to see the oSTEM community come together and yap/network over cake (also shoutout to our besties from WiC-MiC who joined us). If you missed the meeting, here are the meeting slides. We discussed E-Board positions opening up next academic year (more details below), O4U Conference applications, and upcoming events.
Speaking of, join us this Wednesday (February 14) for our Nails & Movie Night social at 7 pm, this time in LeChase 161! Because of the LGBTQ+ Leadership Lecture & Dinner event next week, we’re moving up the GMM so you can attend that but not be deprived of seeing us. Plus, it’ll be our last social before kicking off our speaker series!
Coming Up
Updates
- E-Board Nominations Open: Nomination Form
We are now accepting E-Board nominations for the next academic year! The open positions are Secretary, Social Chair, Publicity Chair, Industry/Conference Coordinator, and Business Manager. Details for these positions are in slides 7 & 8 of last week’s meeting slides, but feel free to ask us if you would like more information! The nomination form will be open until the end of Spring Break (3/17). - Slight GMM Schedule Change
We’re moving our GMM originally scheduled for next week to this Wednesday (February 14), meaning the following GMMs will be on February 28 and then after Spring break (March 9-17). You can subscribe to our Google Calendar to see changes like these in real time. Click here and press the “+ Google Calendar'' button on the bottom right corner.
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!
University
- Women & Diversity in Tech Panel: This Thursday
Our besties from WiC-MiC and the Greene Center are hosting an inspiring panel and Q&A featuring Jennifer Allen and Manali Maity, two outstanding women of color in tech. The panel is this Thursday (February 15) at 7 pm in Wegmans 1400 and all the cool kids are going! Read more about the event and panelists on Handshake or the flyer attached. - LGBTQ+ Leadership Lecture & Dinner: Register by this Friday!
The BIC is hosting its iconic LGBTQ+ Leadership Lecture & Dinner next Wednesday (February 21) at 6 pm in the Feldman Ballroom and will be featuring Kris Hayashi, outgoing Executive Director at the Transgender Law Center. Registration is required and due this Friday (since they’ll be serving free dinner from Selena’s)! If you attended last year’s lecture which featured Phill Wilson, founder of the Black AIDS Institute, you know the food is good and the speakers are inspiring and v insightful!
Outside
- Latinx Student Leadership Summit: Apply by this Wednesday @ 7 pm
The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) and Google are accepting applications for the Latinx Student Leadership Summit taking place at the Google offices in Chicago, Illinois on April 19-21, 2024. Undergraduate student leaders with a passion for technology (i.e., CS, engineering, or tech-related majors/minors) and an interest in developing their leadership skills are encouraged to apply for the three-day summit. Travel expenses will be covered and accepted students will get grants to cover hotel and food expenses. Read more here and apply here.
Homonationalism: Pinkwashing as Queer Capitulation
TW: There are brief mentions of Abu Ghraib violence (2005) in the fourth paragraph.
Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations.
- Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (p. 205)
A few weeks ago, the university’s Students for Israel (RSI) student org reached out to oSTEM about co-sponsoring their event featuring a queer Canadian who joined the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and would be speaking on “his experience of coming out while serving in the IDF and LGBTQ Rights in Israel, as well as addressing allegations of pinkwashing in Israel”. The event did not fit oSTEM’s mission in any capacity, but it did help me pick this queer highlight that’s been on the docket for a good minute.
Author, philosopher, and queer theorist, Jasbir K. Puar, wrote in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times a multidisciplinary analysis through queer and gender studies of racialized surveillance, queer activism trends, patriotism, and imperialism. Puar outlines 3 symptoms of the “queer times” that we’re living in and how they weave & work together in order to support US imperialism, nationalism, and warfare politics by simultaneously claiming sexual tolerance and progressive expansion/normalization.
Admittedly, Puar’s work can be dense and hard to grasp at first (for me at least). For example, she describes the modern queer times as demarcated by the “neoimperialist, homonormative contemporary”. Sexual exceptionalism, the first symptom, helps break down the “homonormative contemporary” part, describing the relatively recent addition of queer subjects & cultural politics into the “American national life”. The construct of American normalcy went from just an exceptional form of national heteronormativity (think nuclear family), to also including an exceptional form of national homonormativity, or homonationalism (a geopolitical iteration of Lisa Duggan's notion of homonormativity).
The second symptom is the use of queer as regulatory, the construct of queerness by some queer scholars & activists only serves to exalt specific ideals as pillars of liberalist agency. By linking nationalism with survival (re: bio/necropolitics), this sidelining of the sexual and ethnic others is a corruption of their bodies, which is then exported as imperialist violence through the US war machine. Puar points to the response by queer activists to the Abu Ghraib torturings as an example of homonationalism’s imperial complicity. That reductive queer practice to discuss the torture pictures as purely sexual demonstrates the extent that homonationalism is guided by racist, Orientalist views in adding sexuality to the US assemblage (profile) of terrorism.
Puar’s book has stuck with me because of how meta it feels, a great example of layered queer theory through its inward critique of the consequences of progressive capitulation. A lot of previous highlights have covered works that queered (verb) existing frameworks of power, but this one works to queer queer frameworks themselves. She goes one step further by analyzing the consequent ascendancy of whiteness as the third symptom, likening America’s conditional absorption of queer politics as just a tool for warfare with the queer movement’s liberal multiculturalist inclusion of ethnic others.
History will continue to show that capitulating progressive movements achieve mere tolerance and work to corrode true change because collective liberation hinges on cross-movement solidarity. On that note, the next highlight will be on Audre Lorde’s radical self care and more introspective critique work involving crip theory (disability justice)(idk when it’ll be sent though considering the GMM changes, I’ll figure it out).
Join us for a moderated discussion and open Q&A with two outstanding women in technology! Professor Amy Lerner will moderate the fireside chat, after which we will open to questions from the audience. This event is perfect for everyone interested in technology, data science, engineering, business, working for Google, GE, Xerox or L3Harris, and the experiences of women, minorities and international students in the technology field.
Featuring: Manali Maity, '19S MBA and Technical Solutions Consultant at Google
Jennifer Allen '97 BS Chemical Engineering, '10S MBA - Senior Engineering Manager - Program Management at GE Renewable Energy
You can learn more about Ms. Maity on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/manalimaity/ and Ms. Allen at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifernallen/
Sponsored by: Women and Minorities in Computing, Google Student Developers Club, The Women's Network, Girls Who Code, Society for Women Engineers and the Greene Center for Career Education.
With support from: Forté Campus, National Society of Black Engineers, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, Out in STEM, Computer Science Undergraduate Council, Department of Computer Science, Department of Data Science, the Hajim School of Engineering Dean's Office, and the Burgett Intercultural Center.
