GSFS Honours Students
Kate Marr-Laing
Marrying Prairie Nationalisms: Creating and Maintaining the Albertan Citizen Subject
In this presentation, I examine the ways in which a particular conception of the gendered and heteronormative citizen has pervaded throughout the colonization and political development of Alberta. By centering my analysis on the particular subjectivities produced and enforced through colonial policy, I aim to reveal its continued effects in contemporary policy development. In a historical institutional analysis, I focus specifically on the discursive framing of marriage laws and social welfare policy, finding arguments for economic prosperity to undergird violent mechanisms of social control in the Canadian prairie region throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on queer theory and sexual citizenship scholarship, I use this historical analysis to shed light on the obscured impacts of Jason Kenney’s more contemporary political rhetoric since his election as Premier. It is my aim, in this research, to turn critique towards the erasure inherent to the deliberate creation of the Albertan citizen subject in order to create space to imagine alternative subjectivities in policy development.
Mohammed Odusanya
Wúrà: Reflections on the Gender of Gold in Pre/Colonial Yoruba Societies
Examining the shifting relationship between acquisition, fungibility, and gender in pre-colonial and colonial era Yoruba societies, this presentation examines how gold, specifically gold jewellery, came to possess gendered significations amongst the Yoruba people of West Africa. Through an analysis of travelogues, early divorce records, newspapers, and other historical records, I aim to reconstruct the emergence of a gendered Yoruba subjectivity borne out of the coterminous historical processes of Western capitalist accumulation, slavery, anti-slavery, and colonialism. Addressing the scholar’s dependence on European observers and other logocentric sources in order to promote this argument, this presentation will also attempt to reflexively address the methodological limits of reconstructing marginalized subjectivities in historical feminist research.
Gabrielle Surprenant
Sugar Babies, Sex Work, and Slander: Examining the Moral Arguments Against Prostitution, Then and Now
In my presentation, I will analyze and compare the historical construction of morality in North America around sex work, as this sets the precedent of the moral arguments brought forward against sex workers, including Sugar Babies who “participate in typically long-term romantic and sexual relationships in exchange for money and/or gifts”, today. I will then build upon these findings in order to better understand the impact of Sugar babies’ work on perceptions of morality and acceptable female behaviour. Finally, I will use this to discuss the manner in which Sugar-Babying differs from other forms of sex-work because how it fits into social expectations of relationality, and how social constructs associated with sex work continue to adapt to current regulations, social norms, and behaviours.