T
his year the Feminist Research Colloquium will be virtual! The presentations are available in an asynchronous video format. The links are guaranteed to work until April 15, 2021.
On the evening of Monday April 12th, the presenters will participate in a live Q and A session via Zoom.
More details and video links are forthcoming!
Live Q and A Session (via Zoom) Schedule
(all times are in ET)
6:00- 6:05 Opening Remarks by Dr. Alex Ketchum and Dr. Rachel Sandwell
6:05- 6:20 GSFS Honours Students Panel (Hyeyoon Cho, Abigail Drach, and Meera Raman)
6:20-6:40 WMST Graduate Student Panel # 1 (Nina Morena, Sarah Abou-Bakr, Tayana Simpson, Anna Lee White, Sami MacKenzie )
6:40-7:00 WMST Graduate Student Panel # 2 (Amelia Eppel, Safia Amiry, Kit Mitchell, Alana Tumber)
7:00-7:20 WMST Graduate Student Panel # 3 (Rachel Hottle, Lara Balikci, Rebekah Hutten, Sadie Couture)
You need to register to get the zoom link for the live Q and A session. REGISTER HERE!
Abstracts and Asynchronous Video Links (in order of panels)
Video Links will be up by April 10th.
GSFS Honours Students
Hyeyoon Cho: Mothering Survival
My honours thesis explores the history of reproductive politics in South Korea from the 1960s to the early 2010s, by examining the biopolitical motivation behind population policies and family planning. My research is particularly interested in historicizing how reproduction has been enlisted as an instrument of the state’s modernist project, which is by definition gendered, classed, ableist and an ongoing product of struggles between multiple actors. In my presentation, I pay attention to the intersectional, historical account of women and queer communities who have been marginalized in the discourses of reproductive politics. Joining feminist scholarship and activism on reproductive justice, I investigate the assumptions that have become normative in reproductive politics and how they have been mobilized to oppress certain group of women. In doing so, I hope to broaden what reproductive justice could mean in the current Korean context, when the recent call for an amendment to anti-abortion law took place in 2019. By going beyond the pro-choice/pro-life framework, my thesis and this presentation ultimately tries to imagine a queer, decolonial and feminist agenda that can rework the ideas of reproduction, kinship and family.
Abigail Drach: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”: Whiteness, Girlishness, and Biopolitics
Exploring the racial, gendered, and social dimensions of Anne Frank’s ubiquity in American culture, in this presentation I theorize the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness in contemporary American culture. Anne, as a metonymic figure for the white Jewish beneficiary of American multiculturalism (despite the fact that her family was denied refuge in the United States during the Holocaust), is an instructive case study in the ambivalent racial status of white American Jews since World War II. With a methodological framework of Black feminist theory and girl studies, this presentation first analyzes the whiteness of European-American Jews as constructed through visible, gendered, and classed characteristics. Then, using contemporary theories of biopolitics and necropolitics, I examine how some American Jews’ inclusion in whiteness is necessarily predicated on the exclusion, exploitation, and violent treatment of Black, Indigenous, and Brown populations through American white supremacy. Critiquing activist approaches that seek to include more groups within the fold of whiteness, I ultimately aim to demonstrate how we must dismantle the insidious racial hierarchies that structure all aspects of American society.
video link: https://youtu.be/oqWQog6tFNQ
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Meera Raman: The Revolution will be Aestheticized: An Analysis of the Summer 2020 Black Lives Matter Instagram Activism
In this presentation, I examine the advantages and disadvantages of the Summer 2020 Black Lives Matter activism that took place on Instagram. Through an analysis of Instagram posts, alongside activist theory, I aim to present an argument that highlights the importance of Instagram’s aesthetic dimension in online activism. I will present some of my findings of my data set of Instagram posts, giving detailed explanations on the effects that they produce, and describe why this activism happened so largely on the Instagram platform. It is my aim, through my thesis and this presentation, to provide a resource to activists and researchers alike who wish to pursue Instagram activism as a productive tool for social justice.
video link: https://youtu.be/JuKBxmZ-uXk
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Graduate Students in the Option in Women and Gender Studies
Panel 1
Anna Lee White: Representations of Women in a North Indian Bhakti Hagiology
Ever since the rise of twentieth century Indian nationalist movements, Hindu bhakti (devotional) traditions have been presented by scholars as radical, democratic, and socially egalitarian in terms of caste, class, gender, and sectarian divides. John Stratton Hawley, a preeminent scholar of bhakti traditions who writes about the historiography of bhakti, has emphasized the diversity of these traditions. This approach has disrupted the idea of a singular, pan-Indian “movement” that spread from the South to the North, and has also allowed for more nuanced examinations of the ways in which bhakti has actually upheld some social divisions. My paper focuses on these central questions: what does an examination of the representation of women in North Indian bhakti hagiologies reveal about the understandings of gender in bhakti traditions? Despite not being the main focus of the stories, the wives, daughters, and other women often religiously and morally guide the male saints. I engage in a close reading of the Parcais of Anantadas, a hagiology composed and transmitted orally before being written into manuscripts around 1600 CE. It contains the stories of several well-known bhakti saints like Kabir and Namdev, alongside lesser-known saints like Dhana, Angad, Trilocan, and Pipa. As feminist research necessitates inter-disciplinary work, I nuance my reading of the Parcais by drawing from scholarship from fields like anthropology and performance studies. My goal in doing so is to learn about and from the lived reality of women in bhakti traditions, rather than relying solely on literary representations.
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbwfv_CSXjw
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Nina Morena: #Mastectomy on Instagram: Gendered Loss and the Function of the Scar in Photography
Posts tagged #mastectomy on Instagram contain a range of breast cancer-related content, including patient selfies which sometimes reveal mastectomy scars. This paper seeks to draw connections between media studies and the social studies of medicine in order to conceptualize the meaning behind mastectomy selfies on Instagram, explore the function of the mastectomy scar in photography, and promote feminist approaches to interdisciplinary research. I conceptualize the mastectomy – a surgery with gendered implications – as a form of gendered loss, and of posting photos as a performance of such loss. However, rather than considering loss in the traditional negative sense, this paper considers the possibility of loss as affirmation and follows Audre Lorde’s feminist reading of the mastectomy. Refusing to consider breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, Lorde writes, “I also began to feel that in the process of losing a breast I had become a more whole person.” Following Elaine Scarry’s assertion that pain is resistant to language, this paper considers the medium of photography and the affordances of social media such as Instagram as sites which allow for the expressions of pain, grief, and mourning on the patient’s own terms. Unlike the corporate image of the pink ribbon, patient self-representation on Instagram may not seek to sell a particular image of optimism or hope; however, patient selfies do tend to abide by the aesthetics of posting on the app, a phenomenon which holds wider implications for connections between social media, platform economies, and patient visibility.
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoNWwiGClHk__
Sami MacKenzie: Representation or Fetishization?: Queer Identity in Pornography
In pornography, facets of an individual’s identity are frequently generalized into searchable terms, enabling viewers to find what appeals to them with ease. However, more than being search categories for browsing, these identities and subcultures are often also embodied in people’s daily lives—race, sexuality, gender, body type and ability, religion, among countless other constructors of identity—which leads to the creation of what I will refer to as a “categorical identity.” Queer folks find themselves consistently among the most popular and trending of categorical identities in pornography; lesbian, bisexual, trans, and gay subcommunities often lead in search terms. Concurrent to a mounting representation of queerness in pornography, many queer folks—predominantly sapphic women—have begun vocalizing their discomfort with embodying these categorical identities, citing hyper-sexualization and fetishization as sources for their alienation from, or resistance toward, queer identity labels. Through conducting a comparative historical analysis of queer interaction, drawing on a mix of primary and second accounts from both pro- and anti- pornography social movements, subsequently put into dialogue with existing social theoretical contributions of identity formation and performance, I seek to generate an explanatory theoretical framework that addresses and contextualizes the duality of acceptance and rejection of pornography’s representation of queer identities within the queer community. This research is a sociological contribution to an ongoing discourse within queer spaces and feminist research regarding porn literacy, and will adopt an interdisciplinary, porn-neutral approach to holistically interrogate the experience of queer folks navigating new realities of categorical identities.
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_1eVYWdmws
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Sarah Abou-Bakr: Muslim women in Quebec: A struggle of the visibility of the veil while the women are pushed into invisibility.
In a time when the province of Quebec legitimizes Bill 21, a law banning Quebecers wearing religious symbols from being teachers, police officers, or prosecutors, where does the voice of Muslim women stand? Over the century, different bills have been suggested by the Quebec government in an attempt to solve a non-existent problem: Muslim women’s visibility in Quebec society and what it means for the province. For years, the veil, also called hijab, has been the subject of public and political debates while the voice of Muslim women has been continuously muted and suppressed. My presentation’s aim is to draw attention to the long-lost voice of the visible Muslim women in Quebec in order to point out their continued struggle in the province. I will present findings from qualitative data available from previous debates, interviews and publications of the Quebec government, human testimonies collected from previous studies, and attestations and experiences from Muslim women living in the province. I will also present quantitative data to portray the experience of Muslim women in Quebec. This research adopts an interdisciplinary approach joining the disciplines of Islamic studies and Gender and Women’s Studies. Researching through the lens of both disciplines is necessary to analyze where the narrative of Muslim women living in the province of Quebec stands, and to demonstrate that their voice has been present all along but forced into silence.
video link: https://youtu.be/FeN8c_yBXKo
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Tayana Simpson: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: Settler Femininity Interrupted
Discussions of womanhood infrequently intersect with concrete discussions of settler colonialism. In settler states, and specifically in Canada, however, the intersections between settler colonialism and womanhood hold significant power. Norms of femininity underlie the interactions and politics of Indigenous – settler relations and can be linked to ongoing instances of Indigenous resistance and instances of brutality. My presentation will address the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women through this lens. I will be presenting qualitative analyses of how settler colonialism shapes both white and Indigenous womanhood, before discussing the rationalization that settler colonialism provides to the epidemic. While my sources will be composed predominantly of scholarly works, I will also be utilizing methods such as articles, interviews, and blogs by Indigenous peoples, recognizing the gatekeeping that can often exclude Indigenous voices from scholarship. This work connects Indigenous studies, political science, gender studies, and broadly, discussions of justice; resisting the limits of ‘disciplines’ to transgress and create a multidisciplinary approach. Through my work, I will be privileging the voices and experiences of Indigenous peoples, acknowledging my own positionality as a white settler woman in Canada who has been shaped by settler colonial ideologies. My methodology will be guided by this acknowledgement and positionality and I seek to engage with my sources as collaborators, recognizing the hierarchy inherent in research of Indigenous peoples. The relevancy of this work is clear: as more and more Indigenous women go missing, deeper understandings of how these ideologies have shaped us is key to dismantling them.
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-O1AP-8gs4
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Graduate Student Panel 2
Alana Tumber: Dialects of Death: Necropolitics and Biopower in Pandemic Times
In Toronto, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has intensified pre-existing social crises of a city in a perpetual state of gentrification and privatization. As “stay home” orders and social distancing guidelines were implemented, those without homes were not included in a plan for safe housing. Between November 2020 and March 2021, Daily Shelter and Overnight Usage statistics consistently report that emergency shelters hover at 95% occupancy rates. Further, as of March 22, 2021 there are 149 active COVID-19 cases in nine shelters across Toronto. Despite the demonstrated inability to safely house the city’s homeless, Toronto mayor John Tory has ordered the removal of homeless encampments in the Rosedale Ravine Lands and in green spaces across Toronto.The destruction of temporary housing when no safer option is provided by the City of Toronto demonstrates the necropolitical (the power of the state to dictate which populations may live or die based on racialized, class based, gendered and colonial ideologies) logics of the neoliberal state as authorities decide which populations deserve to be exposed to: sickness, the elements, and police brutality. This paper discusses how the right to housing is not only imperative from a public health standpoint, but the inability to provide housing is exemplary of necropolitical ideologies within neoliberal cities. I will draw upon multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks from urban and feminist geographies, legal scholarship, and decolonial literature in order to discuss how gentrification is being accelerated during the pandemic.
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNxDDFSgDLc
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Amelia Eppel: Teen moms in Québec’s child welfare system: what are their perspectives?
In Québec, nearly 1 in 3 adolescent girls involved in the child welfare system have been or are currently pregnant. With the highest recorded rates of abuse across the welfare-involved population and the equally high likelihood of having their child taken into care, parenting while in child welfare can be traumatic. Using a ‘desire centered’ approach (Tuck, 2009) to conduct research using arts-based methods such as photovoice, my doctoral project will examine the perspectives of this marginalized population. Focusing on resilience, this participatory research aims to highlight the state of institutional sexual health and perinatal care for Quebec’s youth. This presentation seeks to evaluate the ways in which a feminist theoretical framework can be used in the practical context of a participant-centered investigation Analyzing literature from across disciplines, this presentation will consider the suitability of feminist approaches to humanizing participant research. This will be workshopped by asking: what is a ‘desire centered’ approach to working with a marginalized population? What is needed to avoid the historically damaged/ damaging stereotype of teen mothering? How can this research address a “problem” from a feminist perspective?
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYQ4HFm_ddQ
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Kit Mitchell: Enacting precarity, preventing stability – housing assistance applications and the production of the needy subject in Boston
Between April 2018 and April 2019, the Boston Housing Authority recorded 56,000 outstanding applications for housing assistance. Less than two percent of those applications received assistance during that year. These disparities represent the material ramifications of an increasingly unaffordable housing market in the city and a limited supply of public housing that is largely at capacity. As a result, many of the city’s residents spend years in precarious housing situations, attempting to manage precarity in the short term while they wait for assistance. For people experiencing homelessness this precarity is particularly acute, contributing to frequent changes in health, shelter options, and material possessions. Managing precarity, the work of what I call “survival in the meantime,” frequently has negative effects on applicants’ eligibility for housing assistance, thus excluding people experiencing homelessness from the very pathways that would provide an exit from precarity. Drawing on a multidisciplinary body of feminist-oriented literature from anthropology, critical theory, and sociology, as well as my own professional experience, I explore how pathways for housing assistance produce particular kinds of gendered, racialized, and medicalized subjects. However, rather than highlight human cases, I follow Tuck and Yang’s (2014) call to ‘turn the gaze back upon power,’ by directing attention towards the documents themselves and what these documents assume and demand of applicants. Such an exploration reveals the underlying cruel optimisms of housing assistance and suggests ways to rethink narratives of need and deservingness in our immediate communities.
video link: https://youtu.be/b_3bPb7sqA4
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Safia Amiry: The Role and Importance of Gender Mainstreaming in Women’s Empowerment in Post-Taliban Afghanistan
After decades of war and instability, Afghanistan has been struggling with gender injustices and inequality in different aspects. This resulted in the exclusion of women from the reconstruction process, affecting the development programs and further restricting women’s rights. In the post-Taliban period, gender mainstreaming has been identified as a strategy by the Afghan government and the International Community to promote equality and reintegrate women into society and development process. This strategy is also considered to equip women with the right skills and capability to reclaim their agencies and be an active part of society. This study will look at the development discourse specifically role of women in socioeconomic and political participation from a feminist lens with a focus on gender mainstreaming as a tool for gender equality and the inclusion of women in development processes in Afghanistan. This paper will start with a literature review on the history of women’s rights in Afghanistan to highlight the importance of gender mainstreaming and its impact on women’s empowerment in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Furthermore, this study will look at the implementation of gender mainstreaming programs and their challenges, which can impact their efficiencies. This is a crucial topic specifically for Afghanistan, as the country is still struggling with the lack of qualified human capital, which is impacting the development process, and excluding women from this process makes this practice more challenging. Furthermore, this study will open more doors for feminist dialogue across disciplines, especially focusing on women’s role in the development process.
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eslzDCTuPs
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Graduate Student Panel 3
Lara Balikci: The Music We Don’t Listen To: Queer Phenomenology and Furniture Music
How might music act like a table and why should we care? As if part of the wallpaper of the room, repetitive sound such as elevator and ambient music often appears to fade into the background. This musical tradition in Western art music is often traced to French composer Erik Satie’s early twentieth-century experiments writing furniture music. How are we to understand these obscure moments of sonic furniture sounding from behind? As an example of feminist dialogue across disciplines, I apply Sara Ahmed’s reading of phenomenologists and their furniture to music theory and sonic furniture. Ahmed claims that by working at the table, the table disappears for the writer. Extending this logic to sonic furniture, rather than “work” at the “table,” we “listen” to the “sounding environment” (i.e., a musical piece). Through repetitive listening, musical furniture may disappear from our sonic awareness. The sounding material seeps into the crevices of the room, forming a sonic wallpaper that one may no longer listen to, yet is still present. Grounded in Ahmed’s queer phenomenological approach, I analyze how an experience of musical furniture is created using Satie’s Tapisserie en fer forgés as case study. Foregrounding repetition, I present diagrams of two relations of repetition happening at various structural levels as the music repeats indefinitely. I argue that repetition works to create musical furniture as a particular type of sonic object, one which is a uniquely queer phenomenological musical experience that impacts and draws attention to the relationship between bodies and objects.
video link: https://youtu.be/hb5d2lCI6os
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Rachel Hottle: Paranoid and Reparative Analysis of Post-Tonal Music
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued that “paranoid reading”—which anticipates and avoids negative affect through the use of strong theories—formed the dominant position of queer theory around the turn of the millennium (2002). In contrast, reparative reading uses weak theory to search for pleasure, embracing aspects of experience that refuse to be systematized. In this dialogue between music theory and queer theory, I trace the analytical contours of paranoid and reparative thought in the study of post-tonal music through close readings of Forte (1972), Lewin (1993), and Kielian-Gilbert (1994). I argue that we must interrogate the epistemological positions underlying music analysis to challenge exclusionary discursive practices. Fortean set-class (SC) analysis provides an example of paranoid analysis, characterized by reach—explaining every note in a given work—and reductiveness—disregarding aspects of the music that lack mathematical significance. While Lewin’s use of pitch-class set networks builds on Fortean principles and likewise abstracts away from the musical surface, his invention of the piece-specific J-transformation is locally contingent in a radically reparative way. Kielian-Gilbert presents her analytical observations as “frames,” providing various partial perspectives on the work at hand. She draws attention to the process by which interpreters construct their interpretations, and in doing so envisions utopian possibilities for reparative musical discourse. The epistemologies that structure research are not value-neutral. Several scholars argue that paranoid methods constitute a white heteropatriarchal knowledge validation process. We must ask, “Whose standpoint and experience of music is represented by paranoid theory? Who is left behind by it?”
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNDEfdJsIjQ&ab_channel=RachelHottle
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Rebekah Hutten: The East Coast Sound as an Imaginary
Canadian east coast identity is a complex construction influenced by various ideological strains. This complexity is represented in a diverse soundscape within the region. Yet despite this diversity, there is a pervasive belief in a homogenous, geographically, and culturally representative “sound” rooted in histories of curatorial ethnomusicology, tourism initiatives, and government policies. This homogenous sound was especially solidified during the boom of Celtic-rock pop music to come out of region in the 1990s. In this paper I contend that the east coast sound is no longer musical but, rather paradoxically, an imaginary. Following the Celtic pop revival of the 90s, the east coast sound transitioned away from obvious musical signifiers, conveying instead a sense of geographic placement through subtler strategies. I analyze songs by Hey Rosetta!, Joel Plaskett, David Myles, and Rose Cousins and their corresponding YouTube comment sections to expand Hennessey’s (2015) framework of deterritorialization and reterritorialization strategies in Celtic pop. Despite the sense of community that the east coast sound provides for east coasters, this conceptualization also acts as a barrier to participation for people of colour, new immigrants to the region, and those working in racialized genres, like hip hop (Rosenberg 1994; Granta and Buckwoldb 2012). Further, the image of the “good maritime boy” works to maintain white masculinity in the east coast music industry. This project mobilizes a cross-disciplinary approach, bridging digital ethnography, musicology, and feminist theory to offer a new conceptualization of aural musical cultures on the east coast.
video link: https://youtu.be/54uQTPQ2Sxw
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Sadie Couture: Aural Intimacies: Gendered Constructions of Familiarity on The Mary Margaret McBride Show
In this paper I present and theorize the work of Mary Margaret McBride, a popular yet under-theorized radio personality who hosted a number of shows on American network radio from 1934-1954. On her genre-defying programs, McBride chatted in a casual and unscripted way with her guests about their recent work, life experiences, and thoughts, fluidly discussing both their professional and personal lives. McBride’s unscripted conversational style was unique for her era, in which tightly rehearsed shows dominated the airwaves, and her role as a woman in a non-performing, on-air role was similarly exceptional (Hilmes, 1997). Her formally innovative use of radio technology produced an interesting relationship with her listeners, characterized by feelings of closeness and intimacy and expressed on gendered terms (Ware, 2005). In this paper I present findings from my archival research at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC during which I consulted a significant number of McBride’s programs and a collection of her personal papers. I focus on the form of McBride’s program, specifically on structure and aural features such as flow, pace, audioposition, and vocal techniques (Verma, 2012). I ask: what does this program sound like, and how and why did it foster such close personal connections between listeners, guests, and McBride? McBride was variously ‘disciplined’ in her working life as she crossed boundaries of gender and genre. In this work I draw on the fields of sound studies, feminist media studies, and radio history to offer a similarly undisciplined analysis of her life, work, and legacy.
video link: https://youtu.be/aA-SvnzLbLM