Students celebrate diversity

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Beginning on Friday, Portland State’s Queer Resource Center will be hosting the department’s third annual Queer Students of Color Conference. The conference runs April 12–14 and will welcome an array of speakers, artists, activists, workshops and activities.

The theme for this year’s event is “Radical Self-Care and the Decolonized Mind.”

These types of events aren’t normally part of the mainstream agenda, said Ann Mussey, an assistant professor of women’s studies at PSU.

“Normative society values whiteness, affluence, prosperity,” Mussey said. “Those normative things are supported by colonized tendencies. Many communities of color have dealt with colonization in their history, both past and present. They’re constantly dealing with colonization.

“To me, it says self-determination and autonomy,” she said. “It says ‘We’re going to act on our own behalf. We’re going to heal from the daily traumas of being invisible and marginalized.’”

The conference is a call to address marginalization and oppression, said Aine, a coordinator for the Queer Resource Center.

“It’s about making sure you’re asking the right questions about how this is building the community. We’re recognizing cultural forms and creating our own forms that don’t colonize. Forms that don’t colonize other people’s statuses,” Aine said.

According to the conference’s mission statement, it “hopes to bring together QTPoC [queer and transgender people of color] people from every facet of our communities in the Pacific Northwest Region and beyond in order to foster and support a growing number of activists and scholars in the region and encourage ongoing connections across groups, places and spaces.”

“This was the first place I found that organized queer people of color like this. I hadn’t encountered that before,” said Monica Lee Noe, a PSU student helping to coordinate the event.

“This is all about building community, and that’s important to me,” Lee Noe said.

The conference kicks off Friday with an opening night dance party featuring a performance by DJ Monika MHz, a disc jockey, producer and remixer from Portland.

The schedule for Saturday includes an assortment of speakers and workshops, including a presentation from keynote speaker Mia Mingus. Mingus is a queer, disabled woman of color, a Korean transracial and transnational writer and organizer whose activism includes fighting for reproductive justice, queer liberation, radical women of color, racial justice, anti-oppression and community building.

Mia McKenzie will also be presenting on Saturday evening. McKenzie is an award-winning writer and creator of the blog Black Girl Dangerous.

On the final day of the event, Canadian musician and artist Vivek Shraya, who was nominated for the 2012 INSPIRE Awards’ LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer] Person of the Year. Shraya will present his new short film and book What I LOVE About Being Queer.

The exhibit “(Un)heard: Transmasculine People of Color Speak!” will also be featured, which explores aspects of gender identity and variance and seeks to challenge stereotypes about transgender people of color. Its aims are to de-
mythologize and educate.

“This is important. We can learn to talk to each other so that we don’t lose sight that we’re all in this together. It’s about understanding everyone has needs,” Aine said.

“This conference is saying that PSU is a place where you can have these types of conversations,” she added. “Let’s make PSU a destination for these things. It’s about asking, how do we make PSU better? How do we bring interested people to PSU who know they have a support base?”

Registration and scheduling information can be found on the convention’s website at http://queerstudentsofcolorconference2013.wordpress.com/.