In the last year, supporting the women of UC Irvine has become a priority for Tess Andrea. Since being a part of The Vagina Monologues cast in 2013, she has become a Peer Educator for UC Irvine’s CARE (Campus Assault Resources and Education) Office, co-founded a club dedicated to providing an educational and confidence-boosting space for women, co-directed her first play, and is currently organizing a campaign for V-Day at UC Irvine. All of these activities serve a different function, like limbs on a body with one common theme: making room for students’, especially women’s, voices, opinions, and passions.
After growing up in a sheltered town where sexuality was seldom talked about and sex education rarely ventured beyond abstinence, Tess felt her first wave of liberation last winter, during her second year at UC Irvine. She was an actor in The Vagina Monologues, an episodic play by Eve Ensler that navigates matters of sex, physicality, and the female perspective. As Tess remembers telling her boyfriend after the first night of the show, “This night, I moaned in front of a huge audience of people and I told a very intense story about childbirth… and I got to bow with a group of women who went through all of that with me… and I have never felt so powerful, so strong, and so accepted in my life.” These moments of empowerment changed Tess’ life, thus motivating her to take action against the obstacles that face women in modern-day society.
“I fell in love with that feeling [of liberation], and wanted to support other people in getting that feeling as well,” says Tess.
At the end of her second year, Tess single-handedly nominated V-Day UCI (UC Irvine’s chapter of the national umbrella organization from under which The Vagina Monologues operates) for “Best Social Support Group” at the Anteater Awards. No one thought the organization would win, and so Tess was the only member to show up to the ceremony. When the winner was announced and V-Day UCI earned its first Anteater Award, Tess accepted the honor alone. It was a keen reminder to have more faith in herself and the projects she invested herself in. Again, Tess found empowerment on the stage, but this time she was holding an award.
This year, Tess has taken on an even grander charge: organizing a demonstration for V-Day itself on February 14th, 2014. Under a chosen theme every year, people across the world dedicate Valentine’s Day to breaking the silence around gender-based violence. For 2014, V-Day’s theme is “Justice.” In a meeting with Orange County’s leaders from V-Day and its subordinate campaign One Billion Rising, Tess came up with the idea for a movement dedicated to recognizing that “no one justice is more important than another. All of these injustices are interlinked. If you have an injustice anywhere, you have injustice everywhere.” The demonstration is titled “Flag Your Justice,” and invites campus organizations across UC Irvine to write the justices they fight for on a piece of fabric. At noon on Valentine’s Day, they will be tied together to create one large flag of solidarity that will then be marched around the campus.
In addition, last weekend featured three performances at UC Irvine of the off-Broadway play, “My First Time” by Ken Davenport. Co-directed by Tess Andrea and her friend Leslie Yacopetti, the performance featured interactive statistics based on audience surveys and UCI students telling scripted stories of virginity. Though Tess is not a drama student and “had no idea what [she] was doing,” she put all of her energy into directing, a role she had never dreamed of attempting. In just over a month, Tess and Leslie put on a performance that was hilarious and heart-wrenching in equal measure.
The work to create a production in so short a time was exhausting, but worth it. According to Tess, she knew she would be passionate about the project from the moment Leslie suggested it: “There are so many mis-constructed ideas about sex that result from the lack of talking about it and educating people about it. And the reality is, the average age of losing your virginity is 17 years old… Those old, archaic ideas of abstinence and waiting until you’re married are not relevant. And they’re not working.”
And so, this play offers the solution to all of society’s confused ideas about sex; a concept that Tess wishes to instill in everyone: “Let’s talk about it.”
Creating a dialogue and spreading knowledge also motivated Tess to found a campus organization with fellow UC Irvine student Laura Baker at the beginning of last quarter. The social support group’s title is “A Positive Space for Women,” and aims to give people the freedom to talk about issues surrounding gender. While some meetings allow for free-range discussion, others focus on developing confidence-building skills for women, from learning to barbeque, to putting air in their car tires, to practicing assertiveness. Ultimately, Tess wants to give women “the tools and the skills to go out and get what [they] need.” She claims, “A lot of times women lack that sort of confidence because no one ever really teaches them.”
After a rocky start in the organization’s logistics, “A Positive Space for Women” gained a consistent following and received recognition from UC Irvine’s CORE (Campus Organization Resources and Education) Office as “Organization of the Month” at the end of Fall Quarter.
Now, the organization has nowhere to go but up. This winter, members are urged to choose a gender-based topic of interest and design a presentation to educate the rest of the group. In the coming bimonthly meetings, the club will feature workshops on Relationship Abuse, Women’s Sexual Health, and Patriarchy. Every other Wednesday from 6PM-7:30PM in the Board Room of the Cross Cultural Center, you can find Tess and Laura creating a positive environment for the mutual exchange of stories, research, and ideas.
Somehow, Tess Andrea finds enough time in the day to work through all of these accomplishments. Between fulfilling the requirements for her two majors and one minor, working as a Kitchen Assistant at the Anteater Recreation Center, and performing her duties as a Copy Editor for the New U, she works to shine light on the darkness that comes from silence surrounding gender, sex, and violence. Tess is not going to give up the fight anytime soon. This Campus Celebrity makes room for justice, and with every inch, helps people find a space in which to speak, shout, and fall in love with their own liberation.