Good morning — or good evening, depending on where you are and where the sun finds you!
My name is Verónica and I am a graduate student fellow with the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and I have the pleasure of welcoming you all to our annual pedagogy conference.
This year’s theme is Unruly Bodies, and the sheer range of the topics to be covered and the vision for this year’s theme would not have been possible without the excellence that is our very own Pedagogy Lab Director Dr. Caitlin Gunn.
A special thanks is in order for you, Dr. Gunn, for envisioning the digital space we are about to walk into, as well as Sarah, our librarian, and Zora, our Social Media and Design Lead. Thank you to the three of you, as well as anyone and everyone else who is contributing and participating as we co-create this experience over the next few days.
As a researcher on the role that pleasure plays during birth, not as luxury, but as a very real necessity — physiologically, emotionally, neurologically, hormonally, on and on — and as a birth worker, I have thought about the unruly body before. And I’ve started to speculate that perhaps the unruly body really only ever exists when there is a need to discipline a body, as well.
And I think about the ways that the settler state does that. And this thinking has come more alive and more to the forefront recently with the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 in the United States, which made abortion no longer a constitutional right, and instead left it up to each state to decide whether they would offer clinical abortion. And when this decision was made and our world changed, I – like many others with a uterus, or people who menstruate, or have menstruated – I just didn’t know how to grapple with that, and what it means moving forward.
I felt this shame, that I felt that was a collective processing and mourning and grief, and as a birth worker who intends to, at the minimum, support people in finding safety in their bodies, a part of me felt inadequate. And that inadequacy grew and grew, and it morphed into a rage. Because I believe that what we’re confronting with Roe v Wade, the overturn, is a state-orchestrated catastrophe more than it is the true absence of the possibility and viability of a future that includes autonomy over our wombs.
What I mean by that is I found myself enraged that I was asking for permission to do what my grandmothers and her grandmothers and her grandmothers have done for centuries, and that is to release an unwanted pregnancy by stimulating uterine contraction with plant medicine. But of course, that rage subsided, and I had a deep sadness, because I feel torn between what seemingly just one generation ago, my grandmother had access to, and had the dexterity and the relationship with plants to be able to stimulate this type of contraction intentionally to release an unwanted pregnancy. And a generation later, forced migrations and assimilation, I no longer have this capacity. I no longer have this resource. I haven’t inherited it in the way that I think that I should have, or could have. But I’m not alone in that. There are many of us who are trying to recover and recuperate and find new meaning in ancient practices that are at once also new. And I think that, if anything, what this conference indicates is a refusal to let go of what is rightly ours. The ability to tend to and support our bodies even if – and perhaps especially if – the state denies us that right.
I know that, for myself, the future that I envision, uterine autonomy is very very real. And it resides in the intelligence of plants, equally as much as it does in the capacity that we have to rematriate. And full rematriation resides in the return of land to its Indigenous stewards, and Indigenous communities, all of which I believe hinge on our willingness to be unruly in the face of state attempts to discipline us and to control our bodies and our ability to attend to them.
So for this I think that plants offer means to familiarize ourselves with their willingness to be who they are, because plants, in my opinion, only ever know how to be themselves.
And how abundant are they for modeling that for us – I’m so grateful for their guidance as well as the original technologies and remedios and medicines that come from our relationship to them, and the faith that we have in their intelligence. I also believe that that offers a reminder of what we have permission to be. I also believe that the modalities, the concepts, the practices and praxis that are going to be presented in this conference also offer us that reminder.
And so, while the reality of our recent losses to the Federal right to clinical abortion leave a breach between where we are and the work that we must do, I feel reminded that no one will be saving us. And I also feel reminded that yeah, that definitely indicates that we have the capacity to do it for ourselves, and much like plants remind us that we need not be granted permission for something that nature made available, something that our ancestors developed extensively and held the wisdom to utilize and to circulate, I feel that we are finding that we are capable of being the ones to grant ourselves full permission to explore our bodies as the unruly sites for transformation that they are.
And I’m excited that in the digital rooms of the conference that await us, panelists and facilitators are offering spaces to acknowledge the fullness of our bodies – the bodies that we inhabit, the bodies that we love – and that we have the right to learn collectively and to play with movement, to experience joy, and to center that as well as pleasure as we do so.
And of course, with the spaces that we tend to create where we are celebrating and looking forwards towards the visions for the future that we hold, we also make space – I’m so grateful that this conference will as well – to not shy away from the reckoning with the weight that we carry as we discover what pursuing our healing means, and looks like for each of us.
So, there will be discussions that center intergenerational trauma, the politics of fatness, honoring anger, fear, failure, and grief, as well as the open invitation to show up for what you feel called for, to take what works, and to leave the rest as well as the belief that we have the capacity to bear the emotions and to hold space for the processing that is necessary for this kind of work and play.
So I thank you for joining us. I’m excited at the possibility of learning from you and with you, and that that may possibly extend beyond this conference, as well.
Thank you so much for being here. See you all soon.