A reflection by Amelia Meman on her feminist mentoring relationship with Assistant Director Megan Tagle Adams.

Megan (right) and I in the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) photobooth.

With Megan’s departure from UMBC (today!), I feel the Women’s Center is saying goodbye to a real social justice champion on our campus. Someone who was constantly striving for excellence in our institution. More than this, though, I feel I am saying goodbye to someone who has taught me what feminist mentorship—in its best iteration—can be.

Traditional models of mentorship are often paternalistic and hierarchical. Relationships are based on a transactional relationship between a mentor–older, more experienced in a particular professional setting, more “successful”—and their mentee—a younger novice looking for their niche, to expand their professional network, and to build on their skills.

2013-2014 Women’s Center staff photo; both mine and Megan’s first time on staff. From left to right: Jess Myers, Narges Ershad, Michael Fell (top), Amelia (bottom), Kelly Broderick (top), Madison Miller (bottom), Megan.

One of my favorite metaphors for this sort of relationship is Paolo Freire’s metaphor of students as containers to be filled—also called the “banking model” of education. In such a model, teachers deposit knowledge and students are meant to memorize and regurgitate. Such a pedagogical method is less about truly learning, and more about recitation. Freire argues, rather, that student and teacher should be able to learn from one another in a dynamic process. The central idea of Pedagogy of the Oppressed  is that pedagogy must be forged with, and not for the oppressed. I know, I know—mentorship =/= teaching; however, I think that Freire’s ideas can be applied to any social justice-oriented relationship—and that is what my mentorship with Megan is in many ways.

In Puerto Rico for the NWSA conference; from left to right: Jess, Amelia, and Megan.

Additionally, feminist and multicultural academicians have contested what mentorship can look like, especially in reaction to the restrictive and frankly stale traditional mentorship model described above. Feminists have developed new models that ask mentor and mentee to account for power dynamics, to treat both as learners and knowledge makers, and to continue reworking the tension around artificial boundaries between professional, political, and personal worlds. Ultimately, mentoring should be based on the feminist and social justice politics we champion.

I would like to take the following post to illustrate what a successful feminist mentorship can look like—using my mentoring relationship with Megan as a model:

Embrace a relationship of mutual empowerment

When I came onto the Women’s Center scene as an Honors College intern in 2013, I was new and so was our Coordinator (now Assistant Director), Megan Tagle Adams. It was exciting to be partnered with this spunky new purple-haired woman who was obviously super cool because she had so much experience in gender studies and feminist activism and all kinds of things.

At Take Back The Night (TBTN) 2015; from left to right: Amelia, Megan, Jess, Yoo-Jin Kang, and Bree Best.

It was in our first meetings together (before Megan had an actual office and when she was just behind a big glass partition in the front office) that we worked together on what would come to be Critical Social Justice.

I remember it so so clearly:

My idea was very vague and very ambitious. Initially, I wanted to do some sort of big, one-time event called an, “Inclusivity Fair,” where we would have UMBC community members and people from Baltimore City come and create engaging, social justice-oriented activities. The concept was fluid and gigantic, and my passion for it was white bright fire hot, which is really never a great combination for a truly successful event. Knowing all of this, Megan worked with me to whittle this giant pile of potential into what is now: an annual event on UMBC’s campus.

Together, Megan and I worked to create Critical Social Justice into an event, an initiative, and a way of working. Megan empowered me—and I her—and together (with the help of numerous others) we created CSJ. She helped me funnel my ideas and my energy into something comprehensive, sustainable, and organized—her strengths exactly. I helped Megan make an impact on our campus in her first year here, and we became quick and powerful collaborators. We empower one another to create great things.

Move away from transactional learning wherein knowledge is deposited—share the learning experience

Post-research presentation at Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) in 2015; from left to right: Megan, Amelia, Yoo-Jin, and Jess.

Although I have, in fact, learned a lot from Megan, I have to acknowledge that we have both been learning from each other. For example, Megan was my research mentor for URCAD. My research was an analysis of This Bridge Called My Back using a postpositivist realist theory of identity as a lens. I know. That’s a mouthful and a half.

Luckily, Megan had a lot of knowledge on feminist theories and especially This Bridge. Not as luckily, she was not steeped in postpositivist realist theory like I was. As my mentor, though, Megan allowed me to teach her about this. Rather than trying to learn all about this theoretical perspective and then take a top-down approach to my research, we came together, collaborated, and learned from one another. I taught her about the theory I was using, and she expanded my understanding of This Bridge. Together, we were able to share our experiences and perspectives, and create a research project that was comprehensive, dynamic, and unique. This was only enabled by our ability to teach and learn from one another.

Promote a holistic model of professional/academic life

As many might know, one of the first things Megan did when she got into the Women’s Center was created the Women of Color Coalition and began really centering conversations about racial justice and intersections with feminism.

From left to right: Megan, Amelia, and Jess. Picture by Yoo-Jin Kang.

In 2013, when both of us started, I had a lot of trouble understanding my racial identity. Megan and I would often come together and talk about what it meant to be biracial, white and Filipina. We understood the strange privilege and not-privilege that we occupied, how it was different from region to region, and how it translated into our cultural identities. Megan really helped me construct a sense of belonging with other women of color and racial justice activism networks.

The personal is political in feminism—and just so, feminist mentorship should rightly blur the lines to promote holistic success. Megan and I both had boundaries around certain topics (as any relationship should), but we also worked together to make professional, academic, and personal discoveries about ourselves and the world we live in.

Share power, share respect, embrace mutuality

As I believe all of these facets of our relationship have demonstrated, Megan and I shared power, shared respect, and embraced mutuality. We were collaborators, co-leaders, teachers, students, friends. As such, I believe our mentoring relationship was something so much more meaningful and enriching than what a “typical” mentorship looks like. It was never about Megan having more power and teaching me how to gain that power. Rather, it was always about sharing power, learning together, and making the world better with each other.

Selfie with Jess, Megan ,and I after we presented on campus activism projects at NCCWSL in 2016.

As folks pursue their careers and their goals, I hope you are able to find mentors that disrupt traditional models of mentorship. As I hope I have demonstrated, mentorship does not have to be limited to learning new skills and benefitting from someone’s established network. Feminist mentorship expands the potentials of this relationship and centralizes the idea of learning from one another to create a world where social justice is essential.

With my mentoring relationship with Megan, I believe we have both grown tremendously and have contributed much to UMBC’s social justice vision. I’m really going to miss my mentor as she starts on a new path as the Director of the  Women’s Resource Center at California State University, Dominguez Hills. However, like any other great leader, mentor, and friend, Megan’s impact will continue to resonate throughout UMBC long after she is gone.

Freaking out before Bell Hooks spoke at NWSA

That’s me! And my body.

A reflection on body acceptance and positivity while being a part of a water ballet by Special Projects Coordinator, Amelia Meman.

I tend to not write about my body much. It’s not that I don’t think about it. I’m preoccupied by it, actually. Rather, it’s that I don’t want to continue to bring attention to something that seems, to me, like a glaring error that folks can already pick apart.

It’s not just that I’m sort of fat. I am fat, and that’s something I’ve been able to tease out through years of BMI charts. There’s also everything else: I’m broad shouldered, hairy, weirdly proportioned, and I have a really large tongue. I have weird chubby baby cherub hands and my feet are callused because I use them to climb (read: fall out of) trees.

I could spend many more words on my weirdo body (as I’m sure many others could, too), but this summer I signed up to be in Fluid Movement’s annual water ballet, and now I am actually proud of what my body does. It’s a weird and foreign feeling for me–being proud of my body. After I have somersaulted and tread water for an hour and pin-wheeled and held people’s ankles while floating like perverse otters, I think I’m starting to really love this body.

One of my favorite performances, a water ballet inspired by Jeff Goldblum’s The Fly (1986). Photo retrieved from facebook.com/FluidMovementWB/

See, Fluid Movement’s water ballets are magic. They’ve been going on for almost 20 years now and they’re characterized by unabashed silliness, a heaping ton of glitter, and diverse folks from all over the place coming together in Baltimore’s public pools to dance in water.

I first heard about them through, who else, but my former professor and all-around life hero Dr. Kate Drabinski who had thought of me for their 2014 production of the War of 1812. I wasn’t able to do it, nor did I make it to the show, but I followed their page on Facebook, only to find out that the next year they were doing a water ballet inspired by the life of Jeff Goldblum. I know. They’re amazing. Anyways, my best friend Susie and I went to this show, and we couldn’t keep from crying in awe at how wonderful this whole thing was. We vowed to join the troupe. Now it’s 2017 and we’re starring in the [The Scottish Play] in this summer’s Sharkespeare production.

Poster designed by Justine Jones. Buy tickets to a performance here: https://www.mt.cm/events?title=Sharkespeare

Let me tell you about the phenomenon of being in a water ballet troupe with strangers: it is weird, it is awkward, it is incredible.

We started out doing land rehearsals and really spotting the whole production out. We would meet up at the Clifton Park Mansion where folks brought Jell-O Jigglers and clementines, and we would try our best to remember each other’s names. It felt a lot like marching band camp–we would move to the music, find spots, spin in circles, all that. Everyone was dressed in whatever they had come from work in or they had on some iteration of a “dealing with Baltimore heat” get up. It was all very comfortable and simple, but as we neared pool opening season, I became increasingly anxious.

I knew I would have to eventually strip down to a bathing suit and get in the water, but I still wasn’t all that ready when we finally did. It wasn’t just the bathing suit and all of the flesh it exposed, but that I was not a swimmer. Although I have a piscean affinity for being in water, I wasn’t some sort of avid water sportsperson. I only knew how to freestyle because I was obsessed with Michael Phelps’s arm flap stretch.

I was really afraid that not only would my body not work visually, but that it wouldn’t work physically.

But I think everyone was entering the pool with similar preoccupations. What if my body is too fat or too skinny? What if my butt is exposed? What if I can’t make it through the whole practice? What if I’m the first person to ever drown during a performance?

Getting in the water and futzing around with all of these other people who are just as adorably inelegant but enthusiastic as I am was the turning point. Many of us were new and doing something as simple as laying out was frustrating. But our directors were patient. Other folks who were returning to water ballet guided us through the moves. We kicked at each other and quickly apologized, only to laugh, because water ballet is just a very intimate activity. You trust and appreciate each other quickly, when you have to make a pentagram by spread eagle-ing in formation.

Otters are the original water ballerin(x)s.

The other night at practice was unusually hard. We were in a different pool, I had had a long day. The water was also choppy because a water aerobics battalion had blasted their way through enough EDM and disco to make a club tired. I inhaled quite a bit of water (use a noseclip, kids) and my mind was exhausted. But even after everyone started getting ready to leave, I stayed in the water, egg beatering, sculling, and flipping around. I kicked at the water and propelled up and out, I whipped my arms in circles and somersaulted, I folded my body and sunk slowly down. My body does all of this. It’s capable of learning and exerting force and taking up space and being–of all things–beautiful.

Yes, the visual idiosyncrasies of my body are still here, but so are everybody else’s and I like everybody else’s. I like the dimples of cellulite if you have them. I like that “hip dip,” I like your hair (whether it’s on your head, your chest, your legs, your toes), I like the way our boobs are oppositely asymmetrical. It doesn’t even really matter if I like them–I guess I just appreciate you for you and think you are beautiful.

Our body diversity (although fairly narrow as it is in this instance), our weird little eccentricities, our way of working together and genuinely appreciating each other; it’s all just another thing pushing me to earnestly fall in love with home, whether that’s Baltimore or my own body.

Resources and related posts:

Fluid Movement Website

Treat Your Body Lovingly: A Twelve-Step Program by Dan Willey

Unruly Bodies Class Blog

Note of Absence for 10/9/13 by Amelia Meman (when I was in Dr. Kate’s Unruly Bodies Class)