Welcoming back feminists at MSU 

What’s better than pizza?

Great discussions and activities with new friends about interesting topics. 

The Gender and Women’s Studies Program and Students for Reproductive Justice hosted their Welcome Back Feminists event Wednesday in the Women’s Center where MSU students engaged in discussing certain topics while also enjoying free pizza. 

Senior Deyton Drost, president of Students for Reproductive Justice, said the purpose of the meeting is to not only discuss certain topics with students but to also help them connect with each other through similar interests.

“The purpose is to get everybody that wants to be involved back together or to meet each other. Because I think a lot of the certain group that we’re trying to target doesn’t really know each other,” Drost said. “Our major is Gender & Women’s Studies and it’s quite small, but the minor is a lot bigger and we want everyone to meet each other and get involved, and also just people that aren’t in the major or minor that are like minded to us, but want to be more involved.” 

Vice President Avalon Luehman says the meeting can also help students gain an insight on the Gender and Women’s Studies program. 

“People who are interested in feminism, reproductive justice and women’s rights, but aren’t necessarily wanting to major or minor in Gender & Women’s Studies, it’s like an opportunity for them to get a bit of the experience of what it could be like to take that class, but to make it less professional and more peer-based and peer-led, finding like minded people. In my mind, it’s like a support group,” Luehman said. 

For the welcome meeting, Drost and Luehman plan to discuss a variety of topics, saying that even if their organization’s mission is reproductive justice, they still wish to cover several intersectional subjects involved with the term. 

“We’re going to talk about sex education, so more specifically, comprehensive sex ed, STDs, birth control and healthcare. Reproductive justice and reproductive freedom; they’re kind of similar, but they’re also different,” Drost said. “Reproductive justice goes as an umbrella term for reproductive health and all those other things that we mentioned. So domestic violence, sex ed; they all fall under reproductive justice.” 

“Information on consent and how that can relate back to reproductive justice and comprehensive sex ed. We’re called Students for Reproductive Justice and our primary focus may be on reproductive justice, but we do cover a whole plethora of topics,” Luehman said. “And many of those things do relate back to reproductive justice. It’s just that people may not know that and how it is; how domestic violence can relate back to reproductive justice and how sexual assault can.”

As Students for Reproductive Justice prepare to introduce their activism for reproductive rights this year, Luehman shared what the organization’s main goals are. 

“Our main focus is a lot for voter registration, political advocacy and education. So that would come with voter registration events partnering with different organizations, both on campus and in the community that have to do with voter rights, registration, political advocacy, and then also doing our own events that focus on education and the topics that we care about. So that would be like the teach-ins that we did last year on abortion bans; sex toy bingo and other events like that,” Luehman said. 

With voting registration being an important subject matter for the organization and the MSU community, Luehman shares that a future concert will be featured on campus on Oct. 1, with its sole purpose of encouraging young women at the university to vote as the voter registration deadline for Minnesota is Oct. 15. 

“This is a concert that the College Democrats are putting on campus and it is to increase the voter turnout for college-aged women. And we’re really going to be focusing on female candidates. So it is going to be women that are running for office in more of the Southern region of Minnesota such as Rachel Bohman and Amy Klobuchar,” Luehman said. “Some of them will be in person. Some of them will be submitting videos, and then also having women performers from in the community come and there’s going to be singing. And we’re going to be talking a lot about the importance of voting.” 

After attending the welcome event, first-year graduate student Breanna Kesler encourages students to discover and learn more about the topics associated with sex education. 

“I really liked the event. I met a lot of new people and learned a lot of new things about sex education that I feel like high schools do not teach people, so it’s really informative,” Kesler said. 

Drost and Luehman explained why it’s overall important for MSU students to learn about reproductive justice and other intersecting topics as there can be misconceptions about them. 

“Incoming freshmen or just college students in general, have kind of a blurred idea of what consent really is, and the idea of a perpetrator. That’s just an example and also sex ed and learning about consent is a good example of why it’s important to realize what it actually is because it’s dangerous to not be aware,” Drost said. 

“When we talk about wanting reproductive justice, immediately, everyone’s mind goes to abortion, and abortion is included in that but it’s also having autonomy over your body,” Luehman said. “Being able to make decisions, deciding whether or not you want a hysterectomy, deciding whether or not you want a child, if you have access to birth control, if you have access to a safe provider, if you’re able to pay for your medical care.” 

To learn more about Students for Reproductive Justice, visit Mav Central. 

Photo Caption: The Gender and Women’s Studies Program and Students for Reproductive Justice hosted their Welcome Back Feminists event Wednesday in the Women’s Center (Troy Yang/The Reporter)

Write to Anahi Zuniga at anahi.zuniga@mnsu.edu