Name: Hannah Vogel.
Year: Junior
Major: English major.
Originally From: Sacramento, CA.
On Campus Role: President of the Feminist Discussion Club
How’d you get into Feminist Discussion Club (FDC)? What sparked your interest?
When I first came to UP, I wanted to find my niche, my enclave of people I could connect with. As a survivor of sexual assault, feminists have always been a really welcoming community for me and they’ve always been a really great support group. I enjoy their political activism and a lot of their ideologies and rhetoric, so joining FDG was a no brainer. The women who were running it before me were just wonderful and they really took me under their wing.
What made you decide you wanted to be president of the club?
I didn’t actually want to be president of the club, I just wanted to be involved. I emailed the [previous] president and asked how I could get involved and since she was graduating she asked me if I wanted to be president, so I was like “ok”. I just kinda fell into it.
Plans for this year and the future?
We have a couple goals. One is we are trying to partner with other clubs and make name changing easier for transgender and gender nonconforming students. In the past they would have to get married or get a new birth certificate or something. It’s just impossible. They have all this paperwork under a name that they don’t use and it’s really confusing for the health center and for professors. They have a name on their paper that doesn’t match their face and we’re trying to make the name changing process easier. We’re also planning on doing some movie screenings, some poetry events and we usually do a debate or discussion with another club, last year it was the Republican Club.
What are the challenges of working for FDG?
The challenges are the club has a lot of visibility. We have a lot of people in the club, a lot of people on our mailing list, and a lot of people watching us, in terms of other faculty, staff, and administration. When you have a lot of people watching you, you have a lot of different perspectives coming into play. So some people don’t approve of what we do, some people want to change what we want to do, some people really like what we’re doing, and some people want to improve it. So it’s difficult when I get like a million, billion, emails a day like “can we talk about this”, or “this was offensive”. The intention is never to offend anybody, but the more people that are there, the more likely it is that something’s going to happen that’s going to cause some trouble. We had 53 people at our last meeting and everyone has the opportunity to say something and I can’t necessarily control what people are going to say and how someone’s going to take it. So we just try to facilitate really constructive conversation and send out a message to the campus that we are a welcoming, warm, and accepting space. Which I think has been really successful so far, but some people hear FDG and think something else and are immediately defensive. It’s been trying to break down those barriers that has been really challenging. People just don’t want us to exist and it’s hard.
What are the rewards of working for FDG?
The rewards are definitely that I’ve had the privilege of hearing stories from students form a lot of different backgrounds and being able to connect with them and help them grow. I’ve been able to walk with other survivors of sexual assault on this campus and form a bond with them. We’ve tried to create a space for them and for LGBTQ students where they can be authentic and be engaged and be heard.
Is there any big issues you’d like to tackle on campus?
I’d love to see the sexual intimacy policy done away with. I think that by telling students it’s against the rules to have sex, you prevent a lot of sexual violence from being reported. I’d also like to have the sexual offenders on this campus publicly announced so we can be safe. Or I’d like to have them expelled ideally. But if we’re going to keep them on campus we should know who they are. That’s what we do with actual sexual offenders in the real world. I would also like to see more attention for the women’s studies minor. I’d like to see it become a major one day.