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 looks at the reproductive justice movement and its theory in the US, and what queer and trans of color (QTPoC) critiques and non-normative familial formations that resist reproductive and sexual oppression can teach us about the current moment. By dehumanizing those outside of them, reproductive and sexual oppression have long defined the boundaries of whiteness to increase white capital, thus, upholding white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism. Those outside the boundaries are not considered legitimate political actors in this closed political system, which is what makes the current dual attacks on trans and reproductive health a rational first step to narrow the boundaries of whiteness. Mar hopes to learn from these histories of resistance, resilience, and kinship formations of care to find how trans and queer liberation are inseparable from reproductive justice, beyond the starting point of “agency” and “bodily autonomy.”

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