Embracing the Specter of Realness
Great news Big Fab Solar Collab! I am embracing the me that is many: both my ghostly nature haunting the halls of academia in search of mattering, and my re-discovered realness among the undercommons of the side hustle as a queer/trans/non-binary person engaged among a group of wonderful friends and family (HT Fred Moten and Stefano Harney).
I will build out some of my writing here, at Heliotactic Press. I am likely going to be the only one reading this space, but it will be a fun space to create and share stories of diffraction through our collaborative work in Solar Ecology.
These new posts are explorations of the small, ordinary affects in the life of a queer scholar who works among STEM and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, (arts), Mathematics) communities.
NB: All statements are my own, and do not reflect the views of anyone else but this queer spooky ghost of gendering, art making, and exploring affect through my days.
What does it mean to “do feminism” in STEM (with STEAM)?
I just spent a wonderful Friday afternoon talking through the “what it is” of running a feminist lab. We went on a quest of speculation and laughter over tortilla chips and cheese dip, in our windowless lab named “the Dungeon,” bunkered into the basement of an old building of coal, oil, and gas research. If gender is a spooky ghost, then we are definitely the ghosts that haunt the halls of this structure.
Among a small team of Collab friends seeding a new project arc called “Just the FACS” (Feminist AntiColonial STEAM). We crafted a three hour space for support and listening (and getting shit done). We spoke on the value of lifting each other up as marginalized women and trans folx in the context of STEM education and career development. We discussed the importance of self-care, attending to our personal health and the health of our Collaborative. We all were thankful for the intention to create and sustain a safe space to bring our authentic selves.
- being strong and skilled instead of the colonial tradition of “not enough”,
- embracing failure as practice, and as paths to success,
- creating a pluralistic support network to share skills to lift folks up
- creating a possibile atmosphere to empower our fellow Collaborators
- working on changing the physical space
We aim to build community and to surf STEM abuse and marginalization (because you belong doing what you love). Most important, we are acting out practices that will facilitate group change/team change moving forward.
STEM has important intersectional traces affected by, and affecting (reinforcement or disruptions) our current global culture. In Friday’s discussion we addressed that this STEM trace can be described through neoliberal capitalism. We would love to disrupt that cycle of power imbalance, and will continue to work on decolonizing STEM through anti-colonial praxis and jointly intentional group agency tools developed among The Big Fab Solar Collab!
Our current STEM practices reinforce extractive colonial power imbalances that marginalize and harm native cultures, women and queer communities, people with disabilities (including mental health conditions of OCD, depression, anxiety; including systemic physical conditions of lupus, chronic Lyme disease, undiagnosed fatigue and chronic pain), elderly and children, people of color, people of faith. Colonial STEM work requires an implicit essentialist ontology (substance-based reality, things exist independent of the observers, nature easily marginalized and fetishized as other); also a demand for continuous growth, and emphasis on measuring efficiency in scarce stock-based environments. This essentialist ontology then guides all forms of academic research, technology development, and job creation. To quote Admiral Akbar: “It’s a trap!”