Women’s History Month featuring Donna Mejia

Q: What is your role at CU?

A: I am honored to serve as the inaugural Chancellor’s Scholar in Residence for the Renée Crown Wellness Institute. The Crown Institute is an interdisciplinary home for research and practice that is dedicated to the social and emotional wellness of all young people, and because we believe wellness must be understood in context, the wellness of adults who support them. That’s why we’re pursuing a new paradigm of research rooted in connection. Our work builds connections across disciplines within the university and partnerships where teams of researchers, families, teachers, young people and community members work together as equal partners. We co-design and study transformative practices, programs and policies that foster wellness among children and youth, families and communities, and educators. I serve as Faculty Director of several lines of research: JEDAI pedagogical tools research, leadership-focused scholarly work, embodiment and trauma-informed somatic integration research, the CU Boulder cohort of the Dalai Lama Fellows Program, and holistic approaches to cultural retention, innovation and transformation. I’m also an Associate Professor in the Theatre & Dance Department, and affiliated with Ethnic Studies, Women & Gender Studies, and the Center for Teaching and Learning. As an interdisciplinarian, I’m continuing to teach, perform and create new works in my home field of Transcultural Fusion Dance (TcFD). It’s a mashup genre that dialogs the dances of North Africa and the Arab worlds with hip-hop and electronica subcultures. 

Q: What does being a woman mean to you?

A: My relationship to womanhood has changed as my life unfolds. It has also been informed by women of color as my models of strength. When I was a youth, compliance with conventional definitions of femininity was strong in me until I experienced sustained patterns of gender bias, domestic violence, suppression of my intellectual life, theft of my ideas, objectification, unwanted sexual attention, professional sabotage and subjugation. I then started to self-define from an inner locus of meaning. When I experienced motherhood, I was so honored to have the privilege of nurturing and supporting life. I was deeply invested and fascinated with learning how my experience was situated within cycles of creation, and the experiences of other women. At the same time, I was navigating some congenital and life-altering medical issues, and I began to understand that the female body was a low priority in research. I felt I was on my own to locate relief and had mixed emotions: a combination of awe-struck joy for parenting and deep resentment for the relentless illness and disruption. Now contentedly entering my mature years, I am enjoying an accumulation of observations, experiential wisdom, and no diminishment in my appetite for learning. The freedom to try, explore, give and receive love, and mentor with generosity is very rewarding. I experience my inner world as fairly androgynous, but am confident I read socially as woman and feminine to others. I am at peace with what nature has handed me, but not everyone has the safety to experiment, express or experience self-determination in those ways. It makes me very driven to create more equity in the lives of girls, women, femmes, transwomen and female-presenting kindred the world over. Our devaluation, ongoing threat of violence and second-class citizenship is not acceptable to me.  So being a woman has been an experience of resisting what I’m told women should be. It’s an experience filled with questions and contradictions. I felt I had no choice: acquiesce to others’ definitions with compliance, or embrace my strategic superpowers of observation and truth-telling.  In taking this Earth-walk as a woman, I crave for all humans to be able to self-define in dialog with their motivations, temperament, interests, compassion and heart-yearnings. I regard femininity to be a learned artifice that is socially indoctrinated. It’s not inherently one thing, and there are so many exquisite ways to “woman.”

Q: How has your position at the university helped empower your femininity?

A: I observe how the current educational priorities and system can be very disorienting for people. Through the lens of being a cis-woman, it can be a rich community of alliances and support, even when we have differences of opinion. It can alternately be a space where there are flare-ups by defensiveness, pettiness, competitiveness and manipulation. It’s what we choose for it to be in how we respond to it all. I’m personally choosing to increase my involvement in the hopes of collaboratively transforming how universities operate. It’s a brutal system to thrive in as a parent, regardless of one’s gender or biological sex, because striking a work-life balance is very difficult in higher education. I’ve met such brilliant women and femmes, so I’m hopeful that we can collectively reinvent it to be more humanizing and reasonable in workload and pacing. I think our students are expressing a need for that, too, in the post-lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. No one is at their best when we operate at a perpetual edge of burn-out and overwhelm. I nerd out for learning … I think my childhood sense of wonder never disappeared. Working at a university has made me young at heart, and a perpetual learner. My work as a scholarist (scholar and artist) has bloomed into full expression through interdisciplinary projects and the visionary leadership of Dr. Sona Dimidjian of The Crown Institute. Time for mindfulness is integrated into our workday. Anti-racism and anti-bias work is centered in all conversations. Student voice and participation in the design of our programs is crucial! If you’d like to learn more about the range and priorities of The Crown Institute, please spy on us here:  https://www.colorado.edu/crowninstitute/

Q: What do you want students to know about Women’s History Month? 

1. That women’s history is a collective and entangled history for all of us. Please study it.
2. That the term feminism cannot be distorted or weaponized into a dirty word. There are hegemonic efforts to discredit and obscure words that provide us tools to begin addressing human history with precision. Please fight for them. 
3. That the playbook for discrimination against women is still being used against other marginalized groups, too. Please learn to recognize it, support those impacted and mobilize to decommission it. 
4. That what we think of as femininity is learned and acquired, and not automatic for anyone born biologically female. Please don’t weaponize it. 
5. That violence against women, femmes, transgender women and girls cannot be tolerated as inevitable, statistically expected, eroticized, novelized or normalized. Please resist and stand against it.  
6. That there is evidence of a matriarchal phase of public, religious and political history within the Neolithic period of human agricultural establishment. It was not utopian, but there is enough information to help us know war, military fortification, torture, pillaging and brutality began to dominate with the imposition of monotheism and conquest. It is an utterly important part of history worth studying. We impoverish our understanding of our contemporary challenges by not knowing what has come before us. Most K-12 education begins with the Roman Empire and ignores Africa, South America, Asia, Indigenous histories, and the history of more than half of humanity’s population: females. Please don’t let your reality be scripted by partial truths and sanitized narratives. Untangle and face it, check for the veracity of the information, and begin to imagine a better version of what is possible. 
7. That love nourishes. Tell someone female or femme-identifying in your life that they are important to you.