The month of April has been designated Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) in the United States. The goal of SAAM is to raise public awareness about sexual violence and to educate communities and individuals on how to prevent sexual violence.
We are excited to announce the schedule for Sexual Assault Awareness Month 2024! Please help us celebrate throughout the month of April by checking out the events below! Feel free to email us at wgac@colostate.edu for any questions or accommodations.
Please select each tab to learn more about our featured events, how to get involved, and how to register to participate.
The month of April has been designated Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) in the United States. The goal of SAAM is to raise public awareness about sexual violence and to educate communities and individuals on how to prevent sexual violence.
We are excited to announce the schedule for Sexual Assault Awareness Month 2024! Please help us celebrate throughout the month of April by checking out the events below! Feel free to email us at wgac@colostate.edu for any questions or accommodations.
The theme for this year’s TBTN is ‘a light in the dark /Luz En Lo Oscuro’, inspired by the book by Chicana Feminist Gloria Anzaldúa.
This book takes a deep look into Anzaldua’s creative and spiritual processes in which she develops her aesthetics and theories on transformation that are grounded in interconnectedness.
She was especially focused on exploring knowledge production that is shaped through social justice, identity (trans)formation, and healing. This book is unique in the ways that Anzaldua intentionally sought to have the words move inside the reader’s bodies, transforming them.
A symbol of this transformation is Anzaldua’s reclaimed conceptualization of Coyolxauhqui, which was her first “light in the dark”. The story of Coyolxauhqui represents a complex holism in both the acknowledgment of painful fragmentation and the promise of transformative healing.
From this story, Anzaldua created the ‘coyolxauhqui’ imperative’, which is a complex healing process and a theory of writing that she described as “both the process of emotional psychical dismemberment, splitting body/ mind /spirit /soul, and the creative work of putting all the pieces together in a new form, a partially unconscious work done in the night by the light of the moon, a labor of re visioning and re membering.” Appearing in every chapter, she suggests Coyolxauhqui hovers over Light in the Dark, “Ella es la luna and she lights the darkness.”
Interweaving the personal with the collective, Anzaldúa uses these concepts to bridge the historical moment with recurring political aesthetic issues, such as U.S. colonialism, nationalism, complicity, cultural trauma, racism, sexism, and other forms of systemic oppression. Throughout, she valorizes subaltern forms and methods of knowing, being, and creating that have been marginalized by Western thought, and theorizes her writing process as a fully embodied artistic and political practice.
With this in mind, we seek to apply the theories gifted to us by Gloria Anzaldúa to cast a light on the ways in which survivors have a vast array of differing lived experiences that are layered inside Western colonial systems that create barriers to healing, justice, and (re)connection.
These experiences, always political, are kept in the dark. While survivors are cast out as broken.
Reflecting on Anzaldua’s practices of healing, we know that survivors of oppressive systems and rape culture are not broken, rather, we are called to embark on a complex process of falling apart to come back together in a new form, a light in the dark.
This year, Take Back the Night will be a space where writing, ritual, and artistic creative expression empowers survivors to be the light in the dark, both in their own lives and the world. And, for the first time, we plan to use Take Back the Night to honor survivors who will be graduating this spring 2024 semester.
We are incorporating our chosen symbol, the Lunamoth, as a nod to Anzaldua’s reflections on the moon and Coyolxauhqui as Luna moths use the moon and stars to orientate, always adjusting their flying tracks to keep the light source at a constant angle to the eye. Because of the ways they use moon and star light in the darkness of the night, the luna moth is seen as a symbol of spiritual transformation, of heightened awareness, and a striving towards truth and searching for the light.
Luna moths signify rebirth, renewal, regeneration, and new beginnings.
They represent perseverance,vulnerability, and letting go.
We felt that the luna moth is a beautiful representation of what it means to live as a survivor.
A reminder that through the dark times, there is always light guiding the way to the next phase of self, spirit, and life in spite of trauma and violence.
A Reminder that reorientation and starting over as many times as needed is what allows us to take flight.
A reminder that as you leave here from this place, endings always bring new beginnings and a chance to lay down all the things you’ve been carrying.
“Let us be the healing of the wound.” Gloria E. Anzaldua