The presentations are available in an asynchronous video format. The links are guaranteed to work until April 17, 2022.
On the evening of April 12th from 6:00 to 8:20 PM ET, the presenters will participate in a live Q and A session via Zoom.
Live Q and A Session (via Zoom) Schedule
You need to register to get the zoom link for the live Q and A session. REGISTER HERE!
6:00- 6:05 Dr. Alex Ketchum and Dr. Rachel Sandwell make introductions
6:05- 6:20 Panel 1 on the Digital: Thai Hwang J, Kari Kuo, Matthew Martino, Emilie Rossignol-Arts
6:22-6:37 Panel 2 on Art: Rachel Habrih, Gwen Haller, and Jemima Maycock
6:39- 6:59 Panel 3 on Cultural Productions: Abeer Almahdi, Emma Blackett, Sherine Elbanhawy, Erika Kindsfather
7:01- 7:16 Panel 4 on Sound: Laura Boyce, Christina Colanduoni, Emily Leavitt
7:18- 7:38 Panel 5 on The Family, the Home, and the Mother Figure: Valentina de la Borbolla Iruegas, Eilidh Jurus, Natalie Tacuri
7:40- 8:00 Panel 6 on Human Rights: Taylor Douglas, Kate Ellis, Gabriela Gasparini, Catherine Steblaj
8:02-8:17 Panel 7 on Education: Amanda Chiu, Amy Joyce, Maggie Larocque
Closing remarks
Total 5 minutes per student of synchronous questions
All the videos posted in advance.
Abstracts and Asynchronous Video Links
GSFS Joint Honours Students
Valentina de la Borbolla Iruegas
My joint honors thesis focuses on the class, race, and gender dynamics of live-in domestic work in upper-middle class households in Mexico City. I study the way these dynamics shape the structure of the home, and how the physical architecture of the house shapes the dynamics. Rather than describing the individual experiences and perspectives of domestic workers and employers, I am interested in the way their interactions are bound by the context they exist in and how histories and discourses of race and class inform the boundaries of cohabitation. In my presentation, I will highlight my second chapter. As an ethnographic exercise, the chapter titled "The House, The Home," walks the reader through my own house in an attempt to reveal the meanings behind boundaries, structures, and spaces that are seemingly neutral or purely utilitarian. The use of ethnography is central to my work because it is a way to represent the inherent contradictions of domestic work. By weaving together academic analysis with my personal experience, I aim to disrupt discourses that flatten the multiple dimensions of the relationship between domestic workers and employers. Most importantly, I aim to destabilize myself from the position of a reliable narrator of my own story and that of others. I will show you myself and my home, with all its leaks and cracks
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Taylor Douglas on Legal/Illegal Violence: Canada's Continued Discrimination Against Indigenous Women
My joint honours thesis focuses on the gross human rights violations committed against Indigenous women by the Canadian government. Within the range of oppression and violence perpetrated by the colonial settler state, Indigenous women are especially at risk of violence or murder. This is in direct violation of their right to live free from violence, and, as I will argue, constitutes discrimination under all international and domestic human rights codes. My presentation will focus on relevant international legal principles, as well as examining how Canadian legal precedent and The Charter of Rights and Freedoms interact with international human rights legislation to deem current state actions against Indigenous folks unlawful, using First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada et al. v. Attorney General of Canada as the most relevant precedent for such an argument. Situating my argument in the various incidences of violence against women in British Columbia, I will prove that Canada is recklessly committing acts of discriminatory violence against Indigenous women.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND3Lf0IuNiU
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Thai Hwang J on Lagging: Diasporic Remembering Online
In my thesis, I explore how colonial memory might be articulated and mediated by ‘Asian’ diasporic subjects on the internet with an emphasis on the Korean diaspora. The diasporas of previous (and still) colonized nations are often punctuated with a sense of loss and haunting of silence that weave their way in between muddied genealogies and ancestries. With this sense of haunting and absence, I wondered how this might map out onto the online matrix? What are digital hauntings and digital ghosts? What are the possibilities and also the impossibilities of imagining into the future and retrospectively online? And how are subjects meeting im/possibility in this present digital moment? In my presentation, in particular, I discuss two films Ringu (1998) and Lion (2016), and how they articulate haunting on new technologies. Finally, I discuss social media diaspora archives and how subjects are currently collecting around the past and loss online.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnw9hwxWRNo
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Kari Kuo on A Testimony to the Chronic Vaginal Experience in the Technological Era
What happens when an undergraduate student of history, gender studies, and social studies in medicine, experiences an unexplainable medical condition that gives her chronic yeast infections for the majority of her university years?
"A Cure to Chronic Googling? A Testimony of the Chronic Vaginal Experience in the Technological Era" is my attempt to unpack the power structures that restrict vaginal health justice through the feminist methodology of testimony. Personal stories about my experiences dealing with healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and looking for information through Google are woven together with critical analyses of 'women's health,' Western biomedicine and the technology industry. I argue that chronic vaginitis sufferers’ attempts to find good health information, especially on the web, are limited due to the social and epistemological conditions that structure medicine, the pharmaceutical and technology industries, and the relationships we have with our bodies. The concluding chapter explores the question, “is it a cure, or a feminist community, that we want?”, and encourages all marginalized people to testify to their personal medical experiences to reveal the structural inequalities that connect us. In this video presentation, I speak about the personal and academic experiences that inspired my research and read edited excerpts from the thesis itself. Physical or digital copies of the thesis will be accessible for those interested.
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Emilie Rossignol-Arts on Female Gurus, Feminism, and the World Wide Web: Questions of Gender Equality
Female gurus have gained positions of authority and power in a socio-political climate where feminist discourses of gender equality are increasingly given the spotlight on an international stage. However, these women partake in a largely male, Brahminical ascetic tradition which often reinforces a division between males and females. Female Gurus, Feminism, and the World Wide Web delves into the websites, teachings, and non-profit organizations of female gurus Anandamayi Maa and Jadguru Sai Maa. By analyzing how both these figures negotiate with, neglect, and/or embrace feminist discourses of gender equality, this thesis hopes to illustrate the various ways in which internationally renowned female gurus possess the power to rewrite male, Brahminical interpretations of the Hindu tradition. In doing so, this thesis suggests that they behave as interstices of disruption, creating spaces of agency for women in the Hindu tradition. This is largely accomplished by reconciling the importance of dharmic duty as wives and mothers within the lives of Hindu women with the growing prevalence of feminist discourse through teachings and non-profit organizations. Through the power of the internet, female gurus possess the power to challenge the status quo. This presentation will focus on the role of Amma, the hugging guru, and her potential to create change.
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Catherine Steblaj on Surviving the State: An Analysis of How the American State Responds to Sexual Violence in the 21st Century
My honours thesis explores the ways in which the state responds to sexual violence and how it is represented in American society. Ultimately, I argue that the frameworks we view sexual violence within currently serve to enforce state power through upholding carceral violence while providing little support for survivors. This relationship of the state and sexual violence is explored through a framework of analyzing the construction of the victim, villain, and hero to demonstrate how the state enforces this narrative in regard to the issue instead of acting to prevent it and ameliorating the harm caused. The chapter I will be presenting focuses on the construction of a gendered, racial, and sexual American identity, and on the role of violence in enforcing these social categories. Through an analysis of the Trans and Gay Panic Defence Prohibition Bill, my work critiques the weaponization of identity factors to excuse violence and of the reluctance of the state to disavow it. By viewing sexual violence as a structural phenomenon, my work ultimately aims to expand our thinking on the issue beyond interpersonal acts, yet rather as manifestations of state violence enacted on the social body.
GSFS Honours Students
Amanda Chiu on Is "Academic Feminism" an Oxymoron? An Examination of the Perpetuation of Epistemic Violence Against BIPOC Subjects in Women's Studies Programs Across Canada
Inspired by my own experiences as a racialized student enrolled in McGill University’s Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies (GSFS) program, this thesis aims to explore the ways in which my program, as well as adjacent or equivalent programs at other Canadian universitites (such as Women and Gender studies/Social Justice Studies), perpetuate epistemic violence towards Black, Indigenous, and Person of Colour subjects when situated within the contexts of the history of such programs in North America and the frameworks of institutionalized feminism in the academy. By identifying the oppressive processes evoked by colonial and racist structures embedded in the university, the site from which these programs enact epistemic violence towards BIPOC students and subjects is located. In identifying the structures integral to producing epistemic violence via institutionalized feminism, the future trajectory of feminist academia, discourse, scholarship, and activism can be traced. This thesis draws on a variety of resources including autoethnography, BIPOC testimony, qualitative and quantitative data to disrupt the very regimes of white feminism that are confronted by this body of work. I specifically aim to outline my findings of the prevalence of white dominance in GSFS equivalent/adjacent programs reflected in the demographics of faculty, the diversity of authors included in first-year required courses syllabi, and student testimony. These findings are concentrated in Chapters 3 and 4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdqN3fXsQSw
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Kate Ellis on TERF Movements' Obsession with Autistic Children (cw: mentions of self harm, suicide, and eating disorders)
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) Movements’ Obsession with Autism explores the motivations behind “gender critical” organizations focusing on and raising concern about the growing number of autistic youth identifying as transgender and accessing gender-affirming treatments. In creating my honours thesis, I have broken down statements from materials produced and circulated by the UK-based pressure group Transgender Trend to understand the assumptions that cause gender critical groups to view autistic transgender youth as a cause for concern. In this presentation, I will be exploring a specific blog post on the Transgender Trend website titled “Autistic Girls : Gender’s silent frontier” by Jane Galloway, an autistic cisgender adult woman. My presentation will use this case study to explore specific arguments used by gender critical groups and ground these arguments in the larger academic and societal contexts that enable them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WL9d4hF5Hg
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Maggie Laroque on Bridging the Gap
My honours thesis topic and central argument is that the linear economy perpetuates houselessness amongst historically marginalized populations and I propose that a possible silver bullet solution to this detrimental issue is based in a transition towards a more circular economy, directly rooted and employed by local, youth led, community, mutual aid based non-profit organizations working in direct contact with the unhoused community of Canada. The central goal of my thesis has been to create a document that is publicly accessible and filled with tangible, action based solutions that the reader can employ to help and have an impact on this detrimental issue. That is, the detrimental issue of perpetuated colonialism, as seen through the linear economy (which is also known as capitalism consumption habits–the very structure of our society in many ways, unfortunately), a structure that actively yet invisibly perpetuates the ongoing oppression of historically marginalized populations, which then directly correlates to the higher than average percent of unhoused individuals of color across Canada. Therefore, while I found that these vast topics of colonialism, understanding economic structures, historic and contemporary targeted oppression, and community based mutual aid work to be a lot to absorb, again, I remember the absolute central reasoning for me even producing a thesis in the first place, is to provide publicly accessible information where the reader themselves are provided tangible, action based items to contribute to this movement. To have an impact. Especially with these sometimes overwhelming topics, it is easy to feel discouraged or that one person can’t make a difference. I am here to tell you otherwise. Therefore, I firmly believe that this thesis is simply the beginning of what I hope to become a larger movement away from structures of oppression, towards tangible change–starting with the ‘everyday’ individual you might see on the street.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNNDZrH9dAo
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Jemima Zoë Maycock on The Art of Decolonizing the US-Mexico Border
Jemima’s thesis is in conversation with the larger field of activists, organizers, and scholars visualizing and working to undo borders. She debates the role art plays in decolonizing the US-Mexico border, particularly in confronting notions of sovereignty, citizenship, and development, which are intricately embedded within. As a guide, she looks at the intentions, processes, and social location of the artist to work through the nuanced role of art at the US-Mexico border. She explores how the camera, specifically photojournalism and virtual reality, fails to interrogate colonial structures and misrepresent Latin and Central American refugees and their experiences. The focus of her presentation will be to use this same guide to investigate the way art dismantles ideologies embedded within the border as well as how it decolonizes the representation of refugees and forced migrants. Jemima turns to artists, who are impacted by the border, probing what might be. Specifically, she speaks on the work of UndocuQueer artist Julio Salgado; the Repellent Fence designed by the Indigenous artist collective, PostCommodity; and the textile art of Janette Terrazas, also known as Mustang Jane. Artists, who are impacted by this border and take control of their narrative, produce within a decolonial ethic. Beyond this, their art is a form of activism, serving as an emancipatory tool for the artist as well as working to decolonize the structures embedded within the border.
WMST 601 Graduate Students
Abeer Almahdi on “Meilleur Souvenir!”: Analyzing depictions of Egyptian women in the colonial postcard
From the European Enlightenment, to Bonaparte’s 1798-1801 military campaign, and finally, the rise and fall of British colonialism from 1882-1956, Egypt has been subject to the violence and current legacies of the European colonial project. Colonialism often took the form of gendered violence through the policing, sexualization, and overall instrumentalization of Egyptian women’s bodies to reinforce colonial patriarchal domination. Gendered violence repeatedly manifested itself through popular cultural representations—such as the postcard. Fetishistic and orientalist depictions of Egyptian women permeated colonial-era postcards, and continue to be auctioned-off and collected. The postcard is an interesting object of study, as it operates both as an artistic photograph and as a mass-produced souvenir intended for international circulation. Postcards are a form of encouragement, enticing the recipient to make a similar trip, and view similar sights—in this case, partially-nude, nameless Egyptian women. These postcards continue to actively circulate e-commerce websites, such as ebay, instead of being laid to rest in the archive. This study excavates the postcard as a popular cultural artifact, as a way to interrogate the larger structures of colonialism that inform these artifacts. This study adopts a feminist post-structuralist materialist critique, to address the way these physical images reproduce cultural mythologies of Egyptian womanhood for the colonial gaze. As an Egyptian woman researcher, I inevitably see myself reflected within these images. Thus, I incorporate auto-ethnographic methods, as a way to assert the importance of Arab women’s self-representations, as orientalist cultural mythologies continue to persist as a contemporary colonial legacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohELf__qXtI
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Emma Blackett: BLUE CRUSH CINEMA: Oceanic (Media of) Feeling and Settler-Colonial Women
This paper discusses the settler-colonial femininity at work in two films that foreground the Pacific ocean, Blue Crush (John Stockwell, 2002) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993). With these film readings it offers a critique, albeit admiring, of the feminist new materialist call to turn towards water, the project Astrida Neimanis calls a “hydrocommons of wet relations.” The feminist hydrological turn aims to amplify the oceanic sensorium’s potential to dissolve the always-illusory boundedness of Western subjectivity into a recognition of watery enmeshment, and it aligns importantly (though does not often directly engage) with Indigenous Pacific and trans-Pacific Asian anti-colonial hydropolitics. Bringing feminist hydrologic into conversation with film theory and psychoanalysis, what I call blue crush cinema has the following elements and functions: (1) It tells of a white settler woman with a powerful draw towards the water—here crush has a double valence, referring to both her longing to enter the sea and the potential violence of oceanic pressure; (2) The ocean is at once literal and psychic-metaphorical; (3) The film camera allows water’s diffractive animacy to distort human form, a distortion that hydrological feminists associate with dissolving Western subjectivity, and that Julia Kristeva associates with “oceanic feeling,” but (4), in the end, the blue crush momentarily satiates the woman’s death drive and thus enables her to return to colonial work. This final function has critical implications for feminist readings of water, which may work paradoxically to recuperate Western thought by scattering its elements into the sea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mErNXoNx70
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Laura Boyce: Transitory Monuments and Site Specificity: Rebecca Belmore’s Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-Mowan: Speaking to their Mother and Wave Sound
In 1991, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore constructed a massive wooden megaphone as a response to the 1990 “Oka Crisis” where the Canadian government used military power against the Mohawk land defenders in Kanehsatà:ke. Instead of aiming the megaphone at the government, Belmore decided to “turn it towards the land, so that [Indigenous] people could speak to [their] Mother, to the Earth…” (Belmore qtd. Beaucage, 1992). The megaphone then toured to various indigenous communities across Canada and has since been part of other rituals and museum exhibitions. In 2017, she constructed four conical listening devices to be placed in four national parks, these artworks mimicked the landscape and encouraged visitors to listen to the land as part of LandMarks2017/Repères2017, commissioned by the Canada 150 fund. The site specificity and mobility of both objects, positions them as “transitory monuments” (Hopkins, 2017). This paper asks: What happens to these artworks when they are placed in colonial institutions like museums or commissioned for a colonial celebration? How do their sonic qualities change across sites? Through an analysis of these objects and particular installations of them, I build upon pre-existing multidisciplinary scholarship to argue that Belmore’s interactive sound artworks use site specific ritual to expand beyond the sites themselves. By transporting indigenous voices, integrating voice with environment, and inviting people to listen to the land, Belmore sounds “poetic protest” through indigenous feminist dialogue across disciplines, across space, temporalities, and various environmental media all while blurring the boundaries of voice, body, and land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WHk30FTqvU
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Christina Colanduoni on Blindness and Violence: The Disabling Effects of Operatic Conventions
Compared to earlier eras, nineteenth-century opera saw considerable number of disabled bodies on stage. Whereas most studies of opera and disability have focused on the connections between derangement and physical disfigurement and femininity and madness (Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, 2000), this interdisciplinary project draws on existing scholarship on literary representations of blindness (Weygand, 2009) and disability and performance studies (Sandahl and Auslander, 2005), to form a new approach towards operatic depictions of blindness. Similar to gender theorists, disability scholars have stressed the social construction of disability as something produced in relation to a disabling environment (Davis, 2002). Drawing on feminist music scholarship on vocality (Hadlock, 2004; Clement, 2014), this project considers how the two operas Belisario (1836) and La Gioconda (1876) accommodate their blind characters within the musical environment produced by Italian opera conventions of the nineteenth century. Gendered expectations around voice types play a large part in these representations of blindness; the baritone Belisario and contralto La Cieca possess different levels of agency despite sharing the same disability. Blindness imbues Belisario with a sense of intelligence and military prowess, while La Cieca’s blindness helps construct her as a religious figure with special spiritual insight. By analyzing the vocal output of these characters, this paper examines the ways in which the death and aestheticized suffering of these two blind characters is exacerbated by nineteenth-century operatic conventions. Their marginalized positions on stage reveals a hierarchy of disability in nineteenth-century opera that viewed blindness as less artistically valuable than other disabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVT4_r0b7Wg
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Sherine Elbanhawy on A Literature Review of Arab-Canadian anthologies: A gendered analysis as identity formation, self-representation and cultural production
Arab immigrants have received less academic attention than other minority groups in Canada. Most research on Arabs in Canada focuses on the challenges of exile, language-learning, and Dubois’ double-consciousness, which addresses people who experience a sense of ‘twoness’ as trapped between two worlds. Moreover, post-9-11, Arab-Canadians as a hyphenated identity often became equated as Arab-Muslims, which entailed an erasure of other linguistic, ethnic, and religious minorities within the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa). This study contributes to a better understanding of the literary contributions of Arab-Canadians by conducting a literature review of both Anglophone and Francophone anthologies, the differences in the dynamics can be addressed between Arabs living in Quebec vs. the rest of Canada, especially within the context of Quebec’s secularism bill 21. Therefore, this study will show how these anthologies have enabled them to self-identify and reaffirm their existence as part of the community through multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious self-representation. A comparative gendered analysis will enable a focus on why some anthologies have decided to focus on women writers or have curated the collection through a feminist lens. The challenges and complexities of the lives of Arab-Canadian women reveal how they have resisted inequities, refused compliance, and challenged representation using both languages. These anthologies generate a nuanced, self-representation of their hyphenated identity, their sense of belonging and their existence as cultural producers in Canadian multicultural societies.
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Gabriela Gasparini on Discrediting the Notion of Credibility: Domestic Violence Cases in the Wake of #MeToo
Legal cases of domestic violence are stringently dependent on the notion of credibility – the likelihood that the victim is truthful. As a result, the court rejects most victims due to the narrowness of credibility criteria. Existing research on this topic is slightly dated, where findings on credibility remain unchanged. What I believe is lacking, however, is research transgressing sociology and criminology and taking into consideration feminist historical events. The #MeToo movement, growing in popularity in 2017, drew much attention to violence against women. While #MeToo is a great outlet to feel heard, it would not be accomplishing much for victims without translating into sociopolitical level changes. The current study uses a qualitative discourse analysis of four domestic violence cases from Canada using the Lexis Advance Quicklaw database (two cases from the year 2006 and two from 2019). I chose these years to give enough time before and after the movement’s momentum to see an impact in court. If #MeToo has had an effect on legal cases, the results should uncover more sympathetic language cues toward victims in 2019 compared to 2006, which seems to hold true. These results will specifically be unpacked as the focus of my talk. The unique analysis of #MeToo transgresses the sociopolitical and criminal standpoint and instead grounds the research in feminist and intersectional thought. This interdisciplinary use of feminist, sociological, and criminological research offers new insights into how cases should be handled in court, while also ensuring victims are receiving proper tailored solutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-RUnJkcvwE
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Rachel Habrih on “Ya raï,”: Presenting a timeless genealogy of raï through four Algerian women artists
Raï, a genre unique to Algeria, started in the early 20th century in the Western Algerian city of Oran as a musical mode of resistance. Raï has been a vessel to express opposition to government corruption, Islamic fundamentalism, and patriarchal (post/neo-)colonial power structures by self-consciously running counter to accepted artistic and social norms. The word raï itself includes a wide range of meanings; opinion, to see, free will, thought, judgment, all definitions that relate to the genre’s truth and storytelling nature. The name of the genre also speaks to the improvised nature of raï, which I will use to argue the genre as performance art. In fact, raï songs always include the lyric “ya raï,” a call for one to express opinion, also symbolizing a call for inspiration of lyrics—a ritualistic practice unique to performance. By incorporating various mediums, including videos, music snippets, photos, and visual art, this article aims to create a holistic database of four Algerian women artists and present a timeless genealogy of raï through themes of individuality, spatiality, temporality, and affectivity present during raï performances, parties, and gatherings. I specifically use the concept of queer spatialities and temporalities to highlight raï’s timelessness—a musical genre that exists beyond timed and spaced bounds. In this study consisting of the various disciplines of musicology, ethnography, gender theory, and art history, I understand raï as a space of knowledge production conducive to feminist dialogue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7peWTyGS74
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Gwen Haller on Beyond the Muse: Collaboration and Forced Proximity at the Exhibition of 31 Women
Surrealism, at its heart, aims to dismantle and transcend existing boundaries - of propriety, of canon, and of discipline. As an artistic movement, it rejected conscious control of the creative process in favour of the pursuit of the unconscious mind. In practice however, these works of art were often plagued by the objectification of women. Despite this misogynistic thread, women within the movement were able to advocate for themselves within personal and professional surrealist networks - negotiating boundaries to collaborate and provoke. One such provocation was the 1942 Exhibition of 31 Women - in which women working in Surrealism took centre stage for the first time. Displayed artists Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, alongside gallerist Peggy Guggenheim, worked in forced proximity due to a shared lover and spouse - surrealist painter Max Ernst. These women, despite personal turmoil, were able to collaborate on an exhibition that shattered convention. It is vital to recognize the ground- breaking nature of the show in the context of the 1940s New York City art scene, while simultaneously acknowledging that today’s feminist curation and exhibition practices have moved far beyond those of Guggenheim. By centering the exhibition and its works, it is now possible to synthesize discussions of visual analysis, curatorial practices, architecture, interior design, and microsociological networks - instead of following the trend in existing literature to generalize and anthologize. The inclusion of close reading of exhibition criticism and memoirs situates the exhibition as a key moment for women working within the surrealist movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxKTwYXI1bQ
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Amy Joyce on ‘Who Said It’s a Man’s World?’: A Survey of 19th Century Community and Student Newspapers Responding to Women’s Education in the Maritime Provinces
Grace Annie Lockhart was the first woman in the British Empire to gain a bachelor’s degree from Mount Allison University in 1875. Despite the importance of the Maritime Provinces as an early site of women’s achievement in higher education, historians have yet to explore in-depth the experiences of women. Did women enter a hostile environment? And if so, what was the impact on their education? To answer these questions, one must understand the environment they were entering. An effective way to examine the popular opinions about women’s education is to explore student magazines from various universities and local newspapers and analyse how these papers presented their ideas to their communities. For this paper, the focus is on Dalhousie University and the Halifax community. The opinions of students and local communities can offer new insights into the attitudes towards women’s education in the Maritime Provinces. This research will identify the differences between student opinions and the local community and the potential differences that could arise in differing coverage found in these resources. While it is clear that the question of women’s education affected all Canadian institutions, the regional approach taken will allow for a more detailed examination of the realities on the ground in the Maritime Provinces. Ultimately, researching women’s entry into higher education helps us understand the gender differences in present-day higher education.
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Eilidh Jurus on Urban/Rural Differences in Canadian Childcare: Old Concerns, New Insights
Childcare is a long-lasting, inadequately addressed concern with specific gender implications. The role of mothers and the role of workers are oftentimes at odds with one another: women continue to remain primarily responsible for childcare despite their surge in the paid labour force. For instance, working mothers of preschool aged children are more likely to reduce their paid labour force participation than working fathers (Fuller and Qian 2021). While there is considerable research on varying aspects of childcare, little is known about urban-rural differences. This presentation will consider urban/rural differences in childcare arrangement types, revealing new insights that provincial comparisons obscure. Incorporating a feminist-sociological lens, this presentation will examine urban/rural childcare characteristics as grouped into three categories: formal care, informal care, and parental care. Following, the study sample, drawn from Statistics Canada national survey data, comprised of parents with children 5 years old and younger living at home full-time, is evaluated using descriptive statistics. It is long accepted that childcare is a feminist and gender issue that disproportionately impacts working mothers; however, the exclusion of urban/rural differences overlooks the experiences of many families, based on factors such as education, income, and race. This presentation includes urban/rural differences in childcare with the aim of filling this gap transgressing current research on the topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDFp6nGUa4
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Erika Kindsfather on Between Art and Activism: Unravelling the Transformative Politics of Humor in Evelyn Roth's Creative Recycling Practice, 1970-1975
In 1972, artist Evelyn Roth embarked on a road trip from Vancouver, British Columbia to St. John’s, Newfoundland, holding public workshops on crocheting discarded videotape into hats and sculptures. Roth invited news stations to film the events and crocheted hats for media personnel as they interviewed her, demonstrating her technique while creating a playful metaphoric tangle of videotape in the process. Based in Vancouver during a time of heightened activist organizing around the incipient environmentalist movement, Roth found ample ground to bridge her existing strategies of textile re-use and her political values through the new framework of recycling. Wearing a costume of crochet videotape, Roth adopted an entertaining public persona to counter the systemic marginalization of women artists working with feminized “craft” media and prompt widespread engagement with the ecological concerns motivating her work. While historical sources situate her at the forefront of artistic activity intertwining alternative creative practices and environmental activism, her contributions to these domains of cultural signification remain scarcely studied. Approaching the archives of Roth’s career through feminist methodologies developed across disciplines, this research aims to locate the politics of her creative recycling practice. I examine Roth’s strategic use of humor and play, situating her work in relation to countercultural artistic activity and dialogues on ecological care proliferating across North America in the 1970s. I argue that Roth’s playful approach to art and activism demonstrates the potential to critique the dominant cultural practices driving environmental destruction and raise public consciousness around these issues through accessible creative techniques.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHeYHpZwScs
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Emily Leavitt on An Ethnography of the Electroacoustic Music Industry in Canada
Andra McCartney’s 1995 study of women electroacoustic composer-performers in Canada found that “to be a woman composer of electroacoustic music is to straddle two worlds, both gendered male”. As such, this paper builds on McCartney’s work and asks how her conclusion has evolved since the 1990s. To answer this question, I interview six composer-performers currently working in the electroacoustic music industry in Canada. I uncover that, despite the efforts of my consultants and scholars alike, there continues to be gender bias and stereotyping occurring in electroacoustic music spaces. From this, I identify the need for intervention and reinvention, on behalf of women, queer people, and gender non-conforming people, so as to increase representation and establish equality in both performance and academic spaces. My work is divided into three categories: (1) Performing, Composing, and Existing in Stereotypically “Male” Spaces; (2) “Women’s” Strategies of Performing and Composing; and (3) Post-Human and Queer World Building. I engage with feminist, queer, and post-human frameworks to situate the varying and diverse responses received from participants and I employ these perspectives to highlight the interdisciplinarity key to conducting a balanced, yet political and situated, ethnography (Bosma 2006; Wong 2015; O’Shea 2020). The necessity of these frameworks becomes clear when looking to represent all genders and viewpoints equally in electroacoustic music environments, as I endeavour to forward supportive, safe, and balanced electroacoustic music environments not dominated by men, and this work functions as a foundation upon which future research looking to improve electroacoustic music environments can occur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bu3KYvHOHk
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Matthew Martino on White Noise: Linguistic Appropriation and Digital Blackface on TikTok
Much of what is considered Western anglophone internet culture has been stolen from African American Vernacular English. Ubiquitous phrases such as “lit,” “bae,” “squad,” and “on fleek” that originated from Black communities are treated as deracialized internet language and co-opted by white users. This paper examines this broader phenomenon of linguistic appropriation through the video-sharing platform, TikTok, which allows users to sample other creators’ voices. More specifically, I conduct a critical sonic and visual analysis of TikTok posts that appropriate Black women’s speech for the creation of popular memes mocking their behaviour. This paper argues that the non-consensual sampling of Black women’s voices on TikTok, though seemingly innocuous for many white users, ultimately reproduces anti-Black racism. Focusing on three Black female creators who have been sampled by over ten thousand users each—Coco Jones, Brianna Blackmon, and Jasmine Collins— I illustrate that the exaggerated physical gestures white users perform while sampling these Black voices are directly descendent of the minstrel show, including the practice of blackface. In addition, I analyze TikTok’s affordances to argue that white users take advantage of the platform’s audio-editing features to engage in a form of minstrel performance online. This research spurs new insights in the disciplines of feminist media studies, critical race studies, and sociolinguistics, facilitating intersectional dialogue across disciplines. Contrary to the belief that performing Black women’s voices belongs to a harmless internet culture, this paper demonstrates the quotidian ways that practices on TikTok reinscribe decades-old racist and sexist values.
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Natalie Tacuri on “This is Show Business”: Examining Gender Norms and Racialization Practices in Season One of Dance Moms
Debuting in 2011, Lifetime’s reality TV show Dance Moms quickly became a viral hit. Dance Moms intimately captures the experiences of the Abby Lee Dance Company’s (ALDC) Junior Elite Competition Team as they rigorously train and rehearse for dance competitions across the United States. Despite the popularity of the show and success of the ALDC over eight seasons on air, Dance Moms has received significant backlash from viewers, media outlets, academics, the broader dance world, and the cast themselves for issues pertaining to racism, sexualization, emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, bullying, and exploitation. This presentation will specifically analyze the ways in which the young dancers on the show are hypergendered/hypersexualized and racialized by examining the following research question: How are gender norms and racialization practices (re)produced and contested in season one of Dance Moms? This presentation will focus on two key performances that call for feminist analysis: Electricity and They Call Me, Laquifa. Drawing upon an intersectional, interdisciplinary perspective from the fields of dance education, feminist media studies, and feminist studies more broadly, I argue that Dance Moms is a crucial media representation of the ways in which gender and race are deeply entangled within U.S. competitive dance culture. Additionally, I assert that Dance Moms represents and produces gendered and racialized identities that have a negative impact on the young girls’ identity development and the ways in which dancers are appropriated as feminized, sexualized, and racialized beings by broader society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnts92zmfrM