5/7 Draft Questions - Sadie Van den Bogaerde

1. Micha Cárdenas writes “I am the monstrous child of immigrants feared by the right.” As a trans and queer Latina daughter of an immigrant, she has every reason to fear the violence she could face because of her identity and the xenophobic nature of this country. Instead, she takes power in calling herself “monstrous” and asserts that those who seek to kill and oppress certain demographics of people are the ones who are in fact afraid. Reclamation of words by the communities to whom they refer is a common thread in many social movements. How can we translate this reclamation of power into the concrete social and political change that we need to see in this country?
2. I love Micha Cárdenas’ use of a fictional film as a way of imagining emancipatory changes in culture and society. Are there any works of art or pop culture that help you to picture a future free of oppression? 
3. The “How did social media unite and empower DREAMers” post highlighted the power for positive change that social media holds. What other movements have been able to organize and flourish through their use of social media? Social media also carries inherent risks, though- alt-right and white supremacy groups come to mind- how do we reduce and ideally eliminate these possibilities? 
4. Safiya Umoja Noble’s “Missed Connections” brought up a myriad of issues for me. She picks apart a complex and multifaceted problem- the misrepresentation of women of color as having primary value in this society as sexual or fetishized objects. This problem in the context of search engines raises an entirely new perspective of this problem for me, and many questions as to how we approach it and fix it. How does one quantify feminist ideals in a way that can be fit into the algorithm used by a search engine? I wonder how everyday people (as in those of us who are not computer scientists) can contribute positively to changing the often sexist top search results.