UMD conference to honor Marxist revolutionary, 'black feminist sexual politics'

The University of Maryland is set to host an event on “black feminist sexual politics” this fall inspired by the late Grace Lee Boggs, a known Marxist and proud member of the communist party.

The event, called “Reimagining Everything,” takes a popular quote from Boggs as its tagline, who said that “the time has come for us to reimagine everything…we have to reimagine ourselves.”

Accuracy in Media, which initially reported the story, notes that a PBS film about Boggs described her as having a “thick FBI file and a surprising vision of what an American revolution can be.”

Nevertheless, UM-College Park’s Department of Women’s Studies will host a daylong event in celebration of Bogg’s legacy that promises to be “a transformative interdisciplinary conversation between emerging dynamic scholars in the fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Asian American Studies, and African American Studies.”

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An advertisement for the event provides a list of topics that will be discussed, including “black feminist sexual politics,” “Chicana feminist praxis and digital humanities,” “queer of color performance art and culture,” and “interrogations of the human and art”—all of which will “speak to the important imaginative work Boggs understood as vital to social justice, activism, and revolution.”

UM is not alone in its appreciations of Boggs, though. In fact, President Obama released a statement on the day of her passing last October, saying her ideas “challenged us all to lead meaningful lives.”

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This fall’s event will feature 12 professors from schools around the nation and will be free of charge to the public, meaning it is possibly funded in part by taxpayer dollars.

Professor L.H. Stallings, the event’s organizer, did not respond to requests for comment from Campus Reform by press time.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski