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Art professor to give talk at Gender and Sexual Minorities Conference this week

A Kutztown University professor is using art to advocate for the expansion of the term “motherhood” to include “LGBTQIA+ communities.”

Art education Professor Leslie Sotomayor (pictured) will discuss questions about mothers at the public university’s annual Gender & Sexual Minorities Conference, starting Wednesday.

Sotomayor’s presentation is titled, “Madres Radicales: Queering Art & Motherhood.” It centers around an art exhibition of the same name that she and several other “artivists” created in the summer in Texas, according to the event description.

“Through the art exhibition, Madres Radicales, we sought to expand traditional narratives about madres/mothering as an action, an embodied experience that transcends private domestic spaces & re-frames under-valued ideas by imagining & creating new stories,” the description states.

It continues:

Queering (Marcus 2005) the theme for this art exhibition by expanding terminology of motherhood as it connects to LGBTQIA+ communities, racial identities, gender expressions, surviving oppressions, straddling socio-economic statuses, citizenship, & cultural memory, we asked; Who is a madre/mother? What do madres do? What is their role in our communities? Societies? How is a mother/madre radical? What does a madre radical look like? …

This talk speaks to challenging larger social issues affecting inclusivity and diversity within the arts as we unpack how allyship and the arts can be places for resistance and artist agency. We situated ourselves in this art exhibition as agents of self-knowledge production to create self-empowering learning environments & a sense of belonging by queering creative acts through artivism to sustain community building efforts (Deepwell, 2018).

The exhibition involved Sotomayor and more than 20 other artists, including “protest organizers, interactive art, musicians, poets, & drag performers,” according to the description.

Over the summer, the exhibition stirred up controversy in Lubbock, Texas, The Daily Caller reported:

In a Facebook post on July 6, 2024, communications co-chair of the Lubbock NAACP 6198 – Kim Gonzalez – stated performers for a “Madres Radicales” drag show at the art trail were told last minute to “perform OUT of drag.”

The post includes two videos of men without drag attire dancing suggestively while some children are present.

The drag show was held at the Charles Adams Studio Project (CASP). According to an official proposal for the exhibition posted by the curator, Leslie C. Sotomayor II, the “theme for this exhibition is entangled with the expanding terminology of motherhood as it connects to LGBTQIA+ communities,” among other left-wing groups.

At the conference this week in Pennsylvania, Professor Sotomayor’s talk will include art activists’ “issues with censorship.”

Other events at the conference include discussions about transgender athletes and the November election, meditation and yoga, and workshops on developing healthy relationships.

MORE: Dept. of Ed. funds LGBT teen ‘affirmation’ study

IMAGE: Leslie Sotomayor/Instagram

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