After several years of being virtual, in 2023 the Feminist Research Colloquium is back in person.
Harry Ainscough (he/they)
Trash, Rats, and Trans Joy
PhD Student, Philosophy (GWS Option), McGill University
Approaches to feminist theory often begin with the gap between what is experienced and what is intelligible. These gaps are found within valid emotional responses, such as anger, to experiences grounded in oppressive structures and systems. Frye, for example, argues that theorizing from where, and why, valid feminist anger seems ‘crazy and bizarre’ (Frye, 1983) to others can lead to insights about how gendered oppression operates, and can be resisted.
I argue that these gaps can also be found where marginalized groups express emotions such as joy. I use the example of how trans joy expressed in dominant contexts is usually rendered unintelligible. Noticing this can offer insights into how dominant contexts marginalize and stereotype trans persons, and how trans-inclusive contexts create spaces in which our joy is more likely, intelligible, and expressible; a feature of trans-inclusion, I argue, is the intelligibility and possibility of trans joy, rather than merely correct gender classification.
Where trans and queer communities develop alternative social practices, these orient us towards each other differently and construct alternative structures. I draw out practices of community care and alternative family structures within a specific trans-inclusive context familiar to me: the queer collective I live in. I argue that the joy experienced through collectively adopting a rat, Riddle, is partly anchored in broader practices within this community. Through this, I argue that understanding trans joy as gender specific experience is too restrictive. Instead, I suggest an expansive understanding of trans joy rooted in a diverse collection of trans-inclusive contexts, their practices, and the experiences they make possible.
Ty Caux-Loohuizen
Affective Knowing And The Agency Of Land: Felt Relations And Embodied Elations
PhD student, Political Science (GWS Option), McGill University
This paper relies on the insight that settler colonialism comprises an ongoing relational milieu, continually (re)constituted by and through particular ways of being and knowing in relation to land and life, to reaffirm the indispensably affective dimensions of diverse Indigenous land-based onto-epistemologies. When we speak of our embodied existences upon the land in disembodied (unfeeling) or abstract terms, I assert that we risk re-enacting colonial relations of separation and division that mirror the ways that settler colonial relations to knowledge often seek to divide between the knower, the known, and the land known through. Such processes, I argue, mischaracterize practices of deep relationality as mere philosophical frameworks, sterile conceptual toolkits to be learned, understood, acquired, and applied at an individual level, rather than lived through collective practices with real consequences for surrounding lifeworlds. Moreover, I posit that drawing out the affective consequentialities of knowing through and on the land in accountable ways offers us greater fluency in languages through which we might better foreground both land’s complex agency, and also the complex agencies of Indigenous peoples. Not unlike humour and gender (which I invoke as examples of ever-shifting systems of lived or felt meaning) I argue that thinking through the land in affective terms communicates meaning in ways that can only be grasped fully when felt or experienced. In conclusion, I suggest that refusing to ignore or erase the affective dimensions of living and thinking through the land constitutes a potentially life-generating praxis of mino-bimaadiziwin (in Anishinaabemowin, good living).
Kit Chokly
Note-taking as an interdisciplinary feminist method
Communication Studies PhD student, McGill University
To take note is to define what is notable—and, by extension, what is not (Gimenez & Pinel, 2013). While scholarly literature on academic note-taking tends to focus on the representation of ideas and observations, there is little work exploring what to do with notes once they are written. This ignores how notes are always also informed by their contextual relationships, including their location and relationship to other documents. While functioning on a smaller scale, both pen-and paper notebooks and digital folders are like institutional archives in that they are always tied up with power: They inform what is worth knowing and shape how it can be known (Gitelman, 2014; Schwartz & Cook, 2002). How can notes serve the production of socially just knowledges? And how should we organize them, especially in the virtually endless storage capacities of digital systems today?
This presentation positions note-taking as critical to academic knowledge production and thus a useful space for feminist methodological intervention. Diverting from a typical slide deck approach to presentations, it outlines and visually demonstrates four principles of a networked note-taking method with the goal of supporting the production of interdisciplinary and justice-oriented knowledges.
Notes can inform the collection, synthesis, and retrieval of knowledge, especially in research contexts. This makes note-taking worth considering critically in our everyday work. Developing a feminist note-taking system presents one ordinary space where new paths can potentially emerge which challenge the “default setting” of academia towards more socially just ends (Ahmed, 2019, p. 160).
Sage Comstock (they/them)
Envisioning a Queer and Sustainable Future for Sexuality Education in the United States
Department of Integrated Studies in Education, M.A. Student in Education & Society (GWS Option), McGill University
Sustainability education is desperately needed across all disciplines to respond to the interrelated social, economic, and environmental issues, or “wicked problems”, we currently face across the planet, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, human rights violations, global environmental change, and growing concerns surrounding economic, health, and food insecurity (Vogel & O’Brien, 2021; Wals & Benavot, 2017). Despite the emergence of issues related to gender and sexuality that span throughout the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and its associated goals (UN, 2015 as cited in Biström, 2021), education for sustainable development rarely occurs in the context of American sexuality education curricula or classrooms. Education for sustainable development is defined as promoting the value and respect of diverse viewpoints, emphasizing sustainability education across different disciplines, and helping learners gain skills to support life-long learning and adaptability (Wals and Benavot, 2017, pp. 407-409). Therefore, I argue that sexuality education needs to be addressed from a socio-cultural, environmental, economic, and overall more holistic perspective in order to better advocate for the longevity of the planet and all of those who inhabit it. Referencing queer, feminist, and environmental scholarship, I propose that further research is required to determine the benefit of diverse pedagogical and curricular approaches, such as queer eco-pedagogies (Russell, 2021), in ameliorating the state of sexuality education. Drawing on Samaras’ (2011) literature on developing a personal pedagogy through self-study, I ultimately strive to ascertain how educators like myself can engage in critical, innovative pedagogical strategies that support the sexual well-being of generations to come.
Sofia Di Gironimo
Beyond Consent: Towards a Radical Sexual Politics
MA student, Communications, McGill University
My project centers an analysis of the navigation of consent and sexual subjectivity in media that directly challenge idealized contexts of consent – the “affirmative” or “yes means yes” model for consent. Critiques of the affirmative model (Gotell 2015, Torenz 2021, Halley 2016) indicate the need for a new mode of conceptualising and negotiating consent. I propose an alternative model through Avgi Saketopoulou’s notion of “limit” consent, which supposes the expansive power of that which transgresses limits and subjecthood. For Saketopoulou, self-expansion and healing derive from these kinds of experiences, which can border on violation, negotiating the limits of the possible and the desirable (Saketopoulou 2019, 2020).
I draw on pornographic media for my analysis from online platforms that tag porn around keywords like “hardcore” and “bdsm” as well as more explicit tags like “destroy” and “annihilate,” which hyperbolically describe the materials. I analyse the content and structure of these films to view the ways consent may circulate alternatively through them. I make use of the interdisciplinary nature of porn studies, drawing from film to sociological to feminist methodologies. The “hardcore” genre is one that flirts with limits – physical, psychical, socio-cultural – and ‘breaking points’ – tears, vomit, or collapse. These films typically begin and end with ‘anchoring’ interviews with their subjects in which the subsequent or antecedent sexual scene is discussed. This challenging interplay of ‘breaking point’ and ‘anchoring’ tests and stretches will and capacity, flirting with the limit of the possible and the desirable towards expanding and transforming its subject.
Kirsten Catriona Hawson
Exploring New Horizons of Disability Discourse Through Misophonia and Gender
PhD 2: Communications (Gender Option)
Misophonia, a term first coined by Jastreboff and Jastreboff in 2001, is an auditory condition characterised by sensory and emotional reactivity to repetitive, pattern-based sounds causing individuals to report significant functional impairment and interpersonal distress. In this presentation, I will analyse the connection between gender and misophonia, focusing on social and cultural questions around audism. Audism is discrimination or prejudice against individuals who are D/deaf; when audism coincides with race and gender, discrimination increases significantly (García-Fernández 2020). While misophonia, tinnitus, and D/deafness are not the same things, they are all hearing differences affected by audism and developing awareness of different abilities can transform our relationship with them. What is the relationship between misophonia, gender, and race? In 2020, a study conducted at Virginia Commonwealth University showed that “white women reported higher misophonia than any other group”. (Concepción, Wallace, and Vrana 2020). Women face a high risk of depression (Hirth & Berenson 2012) though it is unclear why rates of misophonia differ by race/ethnicity among women. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) was initially reported in 2004 to be a “yuppie disease” affecting mostly upper middle class white women (Jason 2012); yet prior to that report, a study showed that CFS was more likely to be found in all genders of households with lower socioeconomic status (Jason, Jordan et al. 1999). It is unlikely that biological differences are to blame for racial/ethnic rates of misophonia; therefore, it is important to look at the socioeconomic structures that enable white women to report more readily.
Natalie Malka
“It Doesn’t Go Away”: Analyzing Rape Culture and Shame in Young Adult Literature
Ph.D. Candidate in Department of Integrated Studies in Education (Gender and Women’s Studies Option)
Known as the primary source for teenage readers, the Young Adult (YA) literary genre continues to grow in popularity and profitability, covering a myriad of topics and stories concerning teenage coming-of-age, romance, drug use, sex, bullying, and more. An emerging topic within YA centers on the predominance of rape culture and violence against women in order to address this real-life concern. In this article, I examine how New York Times bestselling author Courtney Summers uses her novels to depict rape culture in YA to broaden the discussion concerning teenage survivors of sexual violence and its lasting repercussions. Regina Afton (Some Girls Are) escapes an attempted rape from her best friend’s boyfriend. Rather than receiving support from her friends and peers, Regina is disbelieved, ridiculed and ostracised, and subject to bullying to the extreme. Romy (All The Rage) is raped by the town sheriff’s son at a party. Despite informing her peers of her traumatic encounter, she is disbelieved, shunned, and mocked by the entire community. Due to the community’s lack of proper response, both characters must face their trauma alone, which results in a drastic decline to their mental and physical health, and they become depressed, vengeful, and have cynical outlooks on life. This article examines how rape culture, shame, and ostracization is represented in YA, along with its cultural significance and lasting impressions on readers.
Shahla Morsali
Diaspora, Gender, And Identity: A Case Study of Female Iranian Students in Higher Education in an Eastern Canadian University
MA student in Education & Society, Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University
An individual’s identity is shaped and impacted by numerous factors such as race, gender, sexuality, society, and culture. One of the factors that affects identity is the geographic location a person is born and raised in. This aspect of identity can change if a person is displaced or immigrates to another geographical region. For the last forty-five years and under the current political regime, which has tried to impose its own version of identity and womanhood through culturalization of religious norms and values, Iranian women have faced discriminatory laws and policies affecting their identity. They have been forced to follow culturalized rules relating to dress, media, education, and religion and endure sexual harassment. Moving from an extremely conservative context to a new one with a different political system which has its own version and definition of gender, sexuality, and womanhood can be a challenging issue to deal with. The aim of this study is to discover the dynamics of identity change in diasporic context among female Iranian students in higher education in an eastern Canadian university. For the purpose of this study, ten female international Iranian students will be selected via the snowball method and be interviewed in person. I aim to find out how this group will resist, (re)negotiate, (re)construct their conceptualization and realization of their gender and sexual identity after moving to Canada.
Sarah Nandi
Bodies of Meaning: The production of knowledge about sexual and gender-based violence in refugee situations
PhD Candidate Political Science, McGill University
Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) has long been a site of feminist dialogue across disciplines and struggles for gender equality. In the case of refugees, SGBV is often perceived as the main concern of women at different stages of displacement (Buckley Zistel, 2017). During Rohingyas and Syrian forced migration, humanitarian organizations prioritized responding to SGBV in the camps and in flight. To do so, these actors created systems for identifying SGBV and hiring gender experts, which have resulted in a standardized approach to SGBV. However, from this expert knowledge, humanitarian actors and clinical staff have increasingly come to see sociocultural practices in refugee communities as a root cause to be treated, with refugee men pinpointed as in need of reform. Investigating these tensions, this project examines the encounter between humanitarian staff and refugees in SGBV programming to understand how gendered knowledges about refugee bodies and experiences are produced, observed, and translated into neutral categories that become standardized as international data. By examining this global project, this dissertation aims to better understand how the production of gendered knowledge demarcates bodies of expertise and, thus authority and reinforces global gendered and racialized hierarchies (Sending, 2015). At the same time, this project sheds light on refugees as experts-by-experience and knowledge producers, challenging much of the literature that portrays these groups as passive beneficiaries or suffering bodies. In doing so, I challenge the frequently reproduced notion that experts are only those who have received formal (usually academic) training and resituate expertise in lived experience.
Lois Vaah
The Nuclear Black Family and the Politics of Struggle
MA student in Communication Studies
This article discusses the social impact of negative media representations of the Black family unit. Situated at the intersections of Black Feminism and Critical Media Studies, this piece will investigate the association of Black families with struggle and dysfunction, specifically in dramatic genres. Films like Lee Daniel’s “Precious” and Tyler Perry’s “For Coloured Girls” that take a more dramatic approach to representing Black family life often feature plot points that center on abuse. In addition, Black women and children are typically the victims of this torment, resulting in the undervaluing of Black motherhood. Looking closely at its effect on Black women, this article will trace the origins of the ‘welfare queen’ stereotype and its subsequent rebrand as the ‘independent (and/or) strong Black woman’ caricature. The dysfunctional household trope impacts Black women uniquely as it synonymizes their lives with struggle. For decades, Black women have been subject to stereotyping and misrepresentation. Harmful tropes have worked to further these ideas into the dominant culture. While systemic racism and structural barriers can disrupt Black families, the normalization of broken Black homes cements suffering into Black identities. Specifically, the rise of the single Black mother, a tool often used to showcase Black female strength, perpetuates the commonly held notion of Black female hardship. This chapter will investigate how these ideas justify and normalize the mistreatment, undervaluing, and masculinization of Black women. Finally, this article will examine the effects of these representations while highlighting the importance of showcasing the successful Black family and its capacity for empowerment across the diaspora.
