Mar Galvez Seminario

They/Them

Mar is a PhD Student in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. For seven years, they worked in the frontlines of Colorado reproductive politics with the Rocky Mountains’ only Latina-led reproductive justice organization. Now, as a doctoral student, their research is a continuation of their work in reproductive justice, queer and trans politics, sexual and reproductive health policy, and looking at the privatized and racialized familial politics entangled with the institutionalized violence that reproductive justice seeks to dismantle.

Curriculum Vitae (doc)

They worked for the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR) for seven years as a community organizer, educator, and eventually their Legislative and Research Manager, supporting COLOR’s research, legislative and regulatory work for laws such as regulating anti-abortion centers, a shield law for trans and abortion care, expanding Colorado medicaid for undocumented Coloradans, and more. Also, defeating bills like total abortion bans or bills that granted warrantless access to private messaging to law enforcement, in regard to “illicit substances” and “trafficking” (which not-so-implicitly impact access to abortion and gender affirming care).

They also helped co-created the online Abortion Doula Training for the Colorado Doula Project, facilitating module, “Disparities in abortion care for people of color and queer and trans people, and how to combat reproductive injustice,” as a continuation of their community education work.

Mar’s research is interested in taking expanded definitions of “queer”—that focus on how power shapes people’s sexual and reproductive lives on both sides of the queer/hetero dichotomy—to evaluate and interpret the canonical reproductive justice movement in the US as well as alternative genealogies to reproductive justice. Through various forms of archival research, Mar examines how sexual, reproductive, and familiar politics shape the boundaries of belonging within the US nation state and its imperial power. They look at how those in previous movements have built systems of care, and how they navigated self-determination and demands on the state to tease out how why is necessary to reject the “disposability” of deviant, perverse, or otherwise “unproductive” subjects in order to dismantle the insidiously interconnected systems of reproductive and sexual oppression. Rather than rhetorically distancing the RJ movement from what makes undeserving subjects subjectively nonnormative, they might shift the focus towards how that subjective designation by hegemonic power results in basic needs and care being denied by the state, and sometimes also the collective.

They’ve written and published work in academic journals such as Feminist Studies; the Journal of Adolescent Health; and Politics, Groups, & Identities.