The Women’s Center will bring Sonya Renee Taylor to campus on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020 at 6 p.m. in Witherspoon Cinema as the Womxn’s Herstory Month keynote speaker. Taylor is founder of The Body is Not an Apology, a digital media and education company promoting radical self-love and body empowerment as the “foundational tool for social justice and global transformation.”

Taylor is also an award-winning performance poet, author and activist, national and international poetry slam champion and author of two books, including The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love (2018).

Her work forms the basis for a movement emerging from the belief that discrimination, social inequality and injustice are manifestations of our inability to make peace with the body, our own and others. The keynote address will examine how information dissemination, personal and social transformation projects and community building fosters global, radical, unapologetic self-love that translates to radical human love and action in service toward a more inclusive, just, equitable and compassionate world.

Taylor holds that “each time we heal our shame, love our bodies, value ourselves, and step into our power, we give someone else permission to do the same. ”

Sonya Renee Taylor’s work connects and intersects with both National Eating Disorders Week and Black History Month. We invite you to participate in both of these events.

Womxn’s Herstory Month

This year, the Women’s Center looks to engage the campus community in dialogue centered on the practice of radical self-love. We invite our community to join us as we focus on the theme of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book, The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love.

Taylor reminds us that “radical self-love demands that we see ourselves and others in the fullness of our complexities and intersections and that we work to create space for those intersections” (2018). During the month of March, we hope to take the community on a radical journey of self-love that focuses on critically examining sources of knowledge and information, relearning how we view ourselves and others, practicing self-love, getting to know ourselves and our bodies and seeing and acting in radical self-love within our communities, all while building a community ethic of care and compassion.

We hope that you will consider submitting a program as part of the Womxn’s Herstory Month calendar of events for one or more of the following:

• Taking Out the Toxic — sorting through all the information that we receive and learning to make choices that further our ability to engage in radical self-love and collective compassion for those around us.
• Mind Matters — examining our toxic thoughts, reframing and relearning how we view ourselves; this is the change we see happen inside ourselves while we critically think about how the toxic messages we have received have impacted our views of ourselves and others.
• Unapologetic Action — taking what we’ve learned and using self-love in our actions; getting to know our bodies and paying attention to when we are neglecting ourselves, we practice being an example of self-love and we empower ourselves to make new stories about our experiences — stories rooted in radical self-love.
• Collective Compassion — moving from individualism and self-reliance to community care and seeing ourselves as a collective with responsibility for one another; collective compassion in how we engage with the people, environment and the world around us. Radical self-love cannot exist without expressing love for those around us.

We invite proposed programs for Womxn’s Herstory Month by Mar. 1, 2020.

Lisa LaBarbera-Mascote is director of the Women’s Center.