Queers Read This!

Hi, queen! Girl, you have done it again, constantly raising the bar for us all and doing it flawlessly. I’d say I’m surprised but I know who you are. I’ve seen it up close and personal. Anyway, below are the details for the legendary oSTEM x Nicki Mirage event coming up, your election form, slay opportunities, and an ever-relevant queer highlight!

This Week

Nicki Mirage: STEM in Drag this Saturday at 5 pm in Hawkins-Carlson!!1!

   Our Spring Speaker Series is escalating the Richter scale by yet another order of slay magnitude this weekend! Join us for our STEM in Drag event starring the iconic Nicki Mirage where she’ll discuss her journey in the intersection of STEM, drag, and the community, as well as treating us to a jaw-dropping drag performance. The event is this Saturday (3/30) from 5-6:30 pm in the Hawkins-Carlson Room (Rush Rhees) as is *free* for all UR students and we’ll have plenty of light refreshments. Register here!
   Shoutout to the BIC for the One Community Grant helping make this oSTEM event possible! <3 #besties!! The registration link might not be open until late today, or tomorrow at the latest. Lastly, below is Nicki’s bio for you to get hyped!!

   Nicki Mirage (she/they) is a Florida-based drag queen and content creator with a PhD in Bioengineering! Nicki has been performing all over her local scene and the internet for over 10.5 years. She is a Twitch Partner, popular TikToker, and show producer, recently co-hosting the TwitchCon Drag Showcase in Las Vegas!
   Nicki began her drag journey in September 2013 during her undergraduate studies in chemical engineering. Drag was a critical factor in Nicki’s acceptance into her graduate studies, which she began in the Fall of 2015, researching food safety and the development of low-cost nano biosensors for the detection of foodborne pathogens.
   Her humble content creation beginnings were in the Fall of 2019 when she played video games in drag on Twitch. Finally, she obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in Agricultural and Biological Engineering in the summer of 2020. She recently returned to work in the STEM field full-time, and now balances her career, performing in drag, and content creation. The intersection of STEM, drag, and community has been an integral part of her journey to becoming who she is today!

Coming Up

Updates

- E-Board Elections Live: Vote by this Wednesday @ 5 pm
Voter? I hardly know ‘er! E-Board candidates were announced in our last meeting. You can vote through the CCC voting form above which also details the candidate’s platform/bio. The form closes this Wednesday (March 27) at 5 pm.

oSTEM

- Website

Browse through our CCC website to take advantage of our compiled Resources and 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

- FASA-Fest: This Friday!
Our besties from the university’s Filipino American Students’ Association (FASA) have invited us to FASA Fest, their annual festival celebrating and educating the U of R community about Filipino culture. The festival will be at Wilco’s Hirst Lounge this Friday (March 29) from 4-6 pm and feature several booths involving crafts, dance, sports, language, picture-taking, and more! We’re co-sponsoring the festival (and will be devouring their halo-halo while supplies last) and hope to see you all there!

Outside

- Grace Hopper Conference: Apps due TODAY!
The Grace Hopper Celebration for Women and Non-Binary Technologists offers attendees career & academic workshops, networking opportunities, and inspirational role models. They also offer scholarships to enable students, faculty, women, and non-binary technologists to attend the Celebration virtually (due today, March 25). Read more about what a virtual attendance would look like (notably access to their Resume Database and ability to submit yours) here, and apply here.
- Google’s Funding Conferences Scholarships: Apps due June 7, 2024 (varies)
Google is looking to fund historically underrepresented students attending select tech, business, STEM, and other related industry conferences. This scholarship helps students afford common conference-related expenses (registration, round-trip travel, hotel accommodations, stipends, etc.). The deadline to apply for funding varies per conference you’re attending. Read more about this resource and apply here.
- O4U 2024 Conferences: Round 2 Apps Due by March 31, 2024 @ 11:59 pm PST
Out for Undergrad’s (O4U) Conferences are life-changing, all-expenses-paid experiences for LGBTQ2+ undergrads, featuring prominent queer speakers, inspiring mentorship discussions, legendary career fairs, and so much more! All O4U Conferences are open to international & DACA students and accommodate students with disabilities as well as students who are not out. oSTEM members have gone to their conferences every year since being founded at the U of R, feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or want application guidance!!
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.
Clarification note: O4U applications are on a rolling basis split into 3 rounds, you only need to apply for one round and it’s not a long process at all! Most acceptances by % happen in the earlier rounds, so apply now!!

Performing Gender (Part IV): Untucking Drag Race

The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.

- José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

   Parts I-III Recap: In Part I of Performing Gender, I broke down ballroom culture as the roots of performance drag, contextualized within the surrounding anti-queer violence that it offered an escape from. We evaluated the social & political utility of performance drag through its employment of gender subversion using Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance by Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms. In Part II, I looked at camp as a queer survival coping strategy in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic decimating queer populations. I followed Moe Meyer’s The Politics and Poetics of Camp, and its critique Susan Sontag’s sanitization & reduction of camp through Notes on Camp (the 2019 Met Gala), describing it as a mere esoteric form of expression disconnected from queer, nonnormative roots. In Part III, I explored RuPaul’s Drag Race as a utopia that’s platformed authentic queer stories across the world through performance drag.

   Finally, standing at 1130 words, I’m ready to conclude this Performing Gender highlight in true queer theory fashion by scrutinizing and problematizing RPDR! I used the word “utopia” in Part III as a reference to José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia to adopt his temporal framework of the queer present (and partly as an excuse to revisit the highlight itself, re: QRT! 26). In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz proposes a queer-ing of time (using queer as a verb here) where the past is is “having-been”, the future is “the not-yet”, and the present is “the making-present”. He likens the queer drive for the disruption of the “straight [present] times” to a queer utopia.
   In both Part III and the highlight, I position performance drag as a utopic bubble that celebrates the queer failure (re: Halberstam’s notion of failure designation as empowerment) of gender expression post-cis/heteronormativity. However, just like in pragmatic discussions of Muñoz’s notion of utopias, we see that the world complicates utopias materializing by necessitating ‘balance’, put simply: someone’s utopia is always someone else’s dystopia.
   Drag Race has become a unique vessel for queer representation in mainstream media, but it is not a drag monolith (thus not a queer utopia). Its early seasons were a trans dystopia because of production’s treatment and exclusion of trans contestants, despite the undeniable contributions trans pioneers have had in the artform. Performance drag’s very existence serves as a critique of gender bounds and mocks the production of social gender visibility that we’ve been taught. Compulsive efforts to regulate & restrict utopias often have problematic justifications (think suburbs+race, university+income, and Drag Race+[etc]). Other regressive markers for utopic regulation that the show has comfortably adopted like money spent on runway looks, “passing”, able-bodies for lip syncs, etc.

   I’ve been a huge fan of Drag Race since my middle school years where it was my beacon of hope for queer authenticity that I could one day attain despite growing up in a hyper-religious family in Texas (I was later suspended for “promoting alternative sexuality”). Despite this love (or most likely because of it), I know it’s important to contextualize the show with respect to its biased utopic regulations and the pioneers who developed and fought for the artform’s survival.

See you Saturday!

@UR.oSTEM

ELECTION

24-25 EBoard Elections

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