Women's Studies

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"(Un) Privileged Embodiments of Femininity, (Un) Hegemonic Articulations of Desire: The Shifting Grounds of the New Veiling Trend in Jordan"
(2014-07-09) Abbas, Saba; Moghissi, Haideh
This dissertation examines the new veiling trend as it is embodied by Jordanian Muslim women. It approaches veiling in terms of being an experience of femininity and desire and unpacks its complex bodily implications. I place the emphasis on one of the trend’s increasingly popular manifestations in particular; namely, the fashionable veiling. By accentuating their bodies and actively engaging the male gaze, fashionably veiled women negotiate the Quranic and cultural limits of the practice and turn it into a fashion-based and desire affirming body project. In addition to engaging the embodiment of the practice, the dissertation explores its shifting conceptualization and the discourses that shape the different forms of Muslim femininity in the country. Alongside Muslim veiling, the dissertation examines Muslim non-veiling as another important constituent of the project of Muslim femininity in Jordan. By exploring Muslim veiling and non-veiling simultaneously, the research draws attention to the interconnectedness of these body projects and underscores the stakes and contingent privileges that accompany a woman’s decision to embody one but not the other. To explore these aspects, I used the theoretical frameworks of Smith, Foucault, Butler, and Mahmood among others and conducted one-to-one semi-structured in-depth interviews with fifteen veiled and non-veiled Jordanian Muslim women. Starting from the participants’ narratives, I argue that the forms of veiling that are gaining hold in Jordan challenge the Quranic conceptualization of the practice as well as the hegemonic expressions of desire in Islam, but only to a limited extent. While transgressive, these forms reinforce the structures that stand behind the practice and do not disrupt the sexual politics embedded in it.
Open Access
Que(e)ring Home Care: Older Lesbian and Bisexual Women's Experiences of Accessing and Receiving Care Services
(2014-07-09) Grigorovich, Alisa; Armstrong, Pat
This exploratory study examined the impact of sexuality, gender and aging on older lesbian and bisexual women’s access to home care services and their experiences of receiving home care. This study had three objectives: (1) to learn about the experiences of older lesbian and bisexual women who currently access home care services in Ontario, (2) to gain an understanding of the impact of sexuality and sexual orientation on home care experiences, and (3) to explore older lesbian and bisexual women’s definitions of quality home care and the factors that enable (or hinder) quality care. This study used a qualitative case study design and was guided by a feminist political economy framework and the critical sexuality and LGBTQ studies literature. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 16 women who have accessed home care services in Ontario in the last five years. These interviews were subsequently transcribed and analyzed using an iterative thematic analysis. The findings of this thesis reveal that attitudes around gender, sexuality and sexual practices affect individuals’ need for home care, their access to care and their experiences of receiving home care. This study highlights the necessity of incorporating a consideration of gender, sexuality and sexual orientation into home care policy and delivery, as well as into the training of home care workers and case managers. These findings may be useful in the development of respectful and effective home care services that are sensitive to diverse experiences and to those of lesbian and bisexual families.
Open Access
Brown Cowboys on Film: Race, Heteronormativity and Settler Colonialism
(2015-01-26) Jafri, Beenash; Noble, Bobby J.
This dissertation analyzes minority-produced westerns as examples of settler cinemas. Though they are produced by subjects at the margins of settler society, I argue that settler colonialism is, nonetheless, a significant cultural context shaping these films. The dissertation intervenes into existing film studies scholarship, which has tended to frame settler colonialism as the historical context structuring the racial oppression of Native Americans, rather than as a constitutive feature of all forms of racial subjugation. As a result, the connections and investments of other racialized subjects within the dynamics of settler colonialism have received limited attention. Drawing on queer, race and Native American/Indigenous studies, the dissertation develops and deploys an intersectional framework for examining film that illuminates the fraught relationship between racialized minorities, Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism. To make its argument, the dissertation examines three sets of films: black westerns, South Asian diaspora films, and Jackie Chan’s martial arts westerns. In each chapter, I consider how existing film scholarship has read these respective films before offering an alternative interpretation that draws attention to their settler colonial contexts. For example, black westerns have been interpreted in terms of anti-racist historical revisionism; South Asian diasporic films have been analyzed in terms of their liminal position between Hollywood and Bollywood film industries; and Jackie Chan’s western parodies have been interpreted in terms of postmodern mimicry. My own analysis suggests that settler colonialism is exercised through cultural fantasies – which I term heterocolonialities – such as those of property ownership, heterosexual romance, family and “settling down”. I demonstrate that representations of the racialized cowboy in the minority-produced western play an ambiguous function in relation to ongoing colonialism. On the one hand, these representations normalize colonial violence when the heteronormative fantasies underpinning the western genre are left intact. On the other hand, representations of the racialized cowboy pose challenges to colonial violence by drawing attention to the discourses of race and whiteness informing the western genre. This ambiguity highlights the complex ways in which racialized minorities negotiate their position in settler societies, simultaneously challenging and supporting the logics of colonial power.
Open Access
It's My Right to Fix the City: Women, Class, and the Postcolonial, Politics of Neoliberal Urbanism in Ibadan, Nigeria
(2015-08-28) Ogunyankin, Grace Ooreofe Aduke Adeniyi; Peake, Linda Joyce
This dissertation offers an alternative to the current trajectory for Africa’s urban future, informed by the discourse that African cities are failing and in need of catching up to northern global cities in order to develop. I use an African feminist postcolonial urbanism theoretical framing to suggest that understanding the lived reality and politics of urban space from the viewpoint of women living in Ibadan provides a more nuanced and multidimensional understanding of Ibadan that eschews a developmentalist and interventionist framework. Specifically, this dissertation investigates whether and how women’s lived experiences have been changed by, as well as have informed, neoliberal urban planning discourses and practices in Ibadan. I argue that women believe that neoliberal urban planning projects inaccurately capture their reality and exacerbate their socio-economic conditions largely due to their exclusion from urban governance and local decision-making processes. I contend that cultural religious discourses and political violence play critical roles in women’s political exclusion. I also assert that despite women’s exclusion from formal politics, women engage in informal politics to challenge the imposition of neoliberal urban planning. I posit that women have alternative visions for the city that are rooted in a populist politics that challenge both the “feminism is un-African” narrative and the literature that stipulates that poor women are not really attentive to gender issues as they care more about “bread and butter” issues. Qualitative interviews with eight government workers as well as with two local politicians provide insight into the government’s limited and gendered approaches to women’s issues that often tend to label feminist social transformation projects as “un-African”. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 48 women in Ibadan, showed Ibadan women to be positioned as knowledgeable urban subjects who challenge the gendered and development interventionist approaches to African cities and who make gendered rights claims to the city.
Open Access
Negotiating A Neoliberal Funding Regime: Feminist Service Organizations and State Funding
(2015-08-28) Boucher, Lisa Mae; Cameron, Barbara P.
ABSTRACT This dissertation examines shifts in state funding for feminist service organizations in Canada. Specifically, it focuses on the implications of a neoliberal funding regime for these organizations. I argue that feminist service organizations should be understood as both social movement and nonprofit organizations. Examining their connections to both the nonprofit sector and the feminist movement provides deeper insight into the ways feminist service organizations’ are impacted by changes to funding. I contend that because of their dual positioning, feminist service organizations experience a neoliberal funding regime in multiple and complex ways. Under neoliberalism, nonprofit organizations have experienced cuts to core funding, an increase in short-term project based funding and a strict accountability regime. The democratic function of the nonprofit sector is no longer recognized as legitimate. This has been especially significant for feminist service organizations because their role as advocates for women was historically acknowledged by provincial and federal governments in Canada. However, this work has become increasingly stigmatized. I undertook a comparative analysis of two feminist service organizations in Ontario, Elizabeth Fry Toronto and Interval House Hamilton, to explore how these organizations experience a neoliberal funding regime. In particular, I considered how the funding relationship affects daily organizational work, advocacy and anti-racist, anti-oppressive (ARAO) practice. I also examined how feminist service organizations respond to the challenges posed by their political and funding climate. In addition to my research with these organizations, I examined policy documents produced by Status of Women Canada (SWC) and the Ontario Women’s Directorate (OWD), as well as the provincial and federal Public Accounts. This allowed me to analyse shifts in approaches to the nonprofit sector and government priorities. My research indicates that there is a shrinking space for social justice work. In particular, it is increasingly difficult for organizations to advocate, build community and engage in the more radical aspects of an ARAO framework. Despite this, my findings indicate that feminist service organizations can find ways to negotiate the challenges in their environments.
Open Access
The Women's Movement in Sudan from Nationalism to Transnationalism: Prospects for a Solidarity Movement
(2015-08-28) Ahmed, Mawahib Mohamed Elamin; Giles, Wenona Mary
Abstract This dissertation is a study of the effects of nationalism and transnationalism on the evolution of the women’s movement in Sudan, also known as North Sudan. The women’s movement in Sudan is an urban movement that mainly functions in Khartoum city -the capital of Sudan. Khartoum is a meeting ground for women activists coming from different parts of the country: South, West, North and East. This study highlights the heterogeneity of the movement and indicates how women negotiate their differences and create alliances across the divides of ethnicity, religion and region. It also explores how women have succeeded in changing the meaning of gender relations over time and enacted these changes through their continued resistance to the patriarchy of nationalist projects, the postcolonial state, and society. This research aims to provide an understanding of women’s activism as part of the nationalism in Sudan. I also, analyze the new era of women’s activism during the 1990s & 2000s, and how women’s groups, under the banner of transnationalism, have managed to build solidarity with each other, which enabled them to achieve some of their goals. I argue that from nationalist to transnational influences, women’s activism in Sudan has evolved through a long journey of struggle to change the meaning of gender relations, in both public and private spheres, and over time. This journey demonstrates that Sudanese women are not merely passive constituents of society but active agents, often working on their own, bargaining to enact changes on gender relations, surpassing the obstacles posed by their differences, and extending alliances and networks to advance their cause. Overall, the dissertation contributes to feminist debates on the meaning of feminism in different contexts; the relationship between nationalism and feminism; the dialectical relationship between difference and solidarity; and the meaning of transnationalism in the local context of Sudan (i.e. transnationalism localized). The purpose of this study is to demonstrate a connection between knowledge and activism and to explore new possibilities for women’s resistance and struggle to enact social change.
Open Access
Filming Feminist Frontiers/Frontier Feminisms (1979-1993)
(2015-08-28) Cummins, Kathleen Anna; McPherson, Kathryn M.
Filming Feminist Frontiers/Frontier Feminisms is a transnational qualitative study that examines ten landmark feature films directed by women that re-imagined the frontiers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S through a feminist lens. As feminist feature films they countered Eurocentric and masculinist myths of white settlement and expansionism in the grand narrative tradition. Produced between 1979 and 1993, these films reflect many of the key debates that animated feminist scholarship between 1970 and 1990. Frontier spaces are re-imagined as places where feminist identities can be forged outside white settler patriarchal constructs, debunking frontier myths embedded in frontier historiography and the Western. A central way these filmmakers debunked frontier myths was to push the boundaries of what constitutes a frontier. Despite their common aim to demystify dominant frontier myths, these films do not collectively form a coherent or monolithic feminist revisionist frontier. Instead, this body of work reflects and is marked by difference, although not in regard to nation or time periods. Rather the differences that emerge across this body of work reflect the differences within feminism itself. As a means of understanding these differences, this study examines these films through four central themes that were at the centre of feminist debates during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. These are: female authorship, motherhood and the maternal, paid labour and the economy, and sexuality. The study examines whether these women’s frontier films were successful at pushing the feminist agenda forward. In order to answer this question, this study uses an interdisciplinary method of analysis deploying feminist theory, feminist historiography, frontier historiography, film theory, and genre theory. The films in this study are: Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil (1993), Sandy Wilson’s My American Cousin (1985), Anne Wheeler’s Loyalties (1986), Norma Bailey’s The Wake (1986), Merata Mita’s Mauri (1988), Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Nancy Kelly’s Thousand Pieces of Gold (1991), and Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993).
Open Access
Unsettling Citizenship: Movements for Indigenous Sovereignty and Migrant Justice in a Settler City
(2015-12-16) Johnston, Krista Rose; Michaud, Jacinthe
The central argument in this dissertation is that immigration and citizenship policies are integral to settler colonialism in Canada and that this has tremendous implications for alliances between Indigenous sovereignty and migrant justice movements in the city of Toronto. Urban Indigenous sovereignty activists are focused on the regeneration and resurgence of Indigeneity, expressed as responsibilities to land and community. To the extent that migrant justice movements are compelled to engage primarily with and through immigration and citizenship policies, their struggles are incommensurable with those for Indigenous sovereignty (see Tuck and Yang). Yet, when migrant justice movements are able to expose the colonial investments of these policies, to contest the dominance of the settler state, and to decolonize relationships of identity, land, and belonging, important possibilities for alliance-building emerge. The urban context thus provides an important potential site for decolonization and alliance-building, yet it is not atomized from the state, nor from state practices. In unsettling citizenship, migrant justice and Indigenous sovereignty activists are also, to some degree, unsettling the city. Here, “unsettling” signals the simultaneous acts of disrupting the linkage between settler colonialism and citizenship, of asserting Indigenous sovereignty in the city, and of challenging the assumption that citizenship is the primary political subjectivity of the contemporary context. As Vaughan-Williams concludes, “The conundrum is how to think political community otherwise” (169). Although none of the activists I spoke with were prepared to dictate what decolonized relationships in the city should look like, many suggested that Indigenous approaches to identity, land, and belonging as interrelated responsibilities might provide important ways of re-imagining co-existence that respect autonomy and interdependence.
Open Access
Urgency Praxis, Sexual Violence and Feminist Knowledge Production in Guatemalan Truth-Telling
(2015-12-16) Rosser, Emily Catherine; Bunting, M. Anne
Since the early 1990s, feminist interventions in international law have sought to make sexual violence in wartime more visible, punishable and preventable. This dissertation focuses on the experiences of workers and the development of feminist analysis in the Interdiocesan Recuperation of Historical Memory project (REMHI, 1994-1998) and the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH, 1997-1999), two truth-telling processes in Guatemala that operated during these broader historical shifts. Often considered silence-breakers on sexual and other violations in the 36-year internal armed conflict, these historically-grounded processes provide a unique perspective on feminist transitional justice work, and important insights for those facing similar issues elsewhere. Drawing on interviews, textual analysis and a range of secondary sources, my dissertation makes three key contributions. First, given persistent international failures to turn gender visibility into accountability, I propose the conceptual tools of ‘participatory rhetoric’ and ‘worstness’ to clarify the representational limitations of a perpetual focus on visibility and ‘silence-breaking.’ Discourses of participation and victim-centeredness often conceal continuing structural limitations to marginalised women’s analytical involvement in rights work. Such conditions tend to channel women’s testimony into narratives of ahistorical victimisation, diminishing the historical significance of women’s wartime experiences and muting their postwar political demands. Second, I shift the methodological gaze of research on sexual violence from the trauma of victims to the mediating practices of rights workers. I argue that ongoing feminist efforts to expose sexual violence in Guatemala have driven broader challenges to the gendered hierarchies and exhausting practices of objective knowledge production favoured in human rights work. Using a discursive approach to rights, I show through a range of practices that workers in ‘peripheral’ sites like Guatemala are key actors, knowledge producers and innovators whose creative contributions should be major case studies informing transitional justice. Third, I highlight the practical adaptations and intense emotional labour required to perform high stakes truth-telling work successfully. With empirical support from interviews, I propose the framework of ‘urgency praxis’ to better account for the limited representational possibilities, the naturalised divisions of labour and the exhaustion of social movements that are products of this race-against-time form of rights defense.
Open Access
Reconsidering Evidence: Evidence-based Practice and Maternity Care in Canada
(2016-05-30) Van Wagner, Vicki; Armstrong, Pat
Evidence-based practice (EBP) has been widely adopted as a scientific and objective approach to health care. Enthusiastic acceptance of EBP within maternity care appears to have had unexpected effects on the care of childbearing women. This qualitative study of an interprofessional group of maternity care providers explores EBP from a critical science studies perspective to understand the social inside the science. A literature review and interviews with family physicians, midwives, nurses and obstetricians were analyzed for themes. Initial hopes for EBP were high and often contradictory. Although many had hoped EBP would help limit rising rates of intervention in childbirth, informants noted that interventions, such as induction of labour and caesarean section, have continued to increase. Informants described patterns of uneven application and misapplication of evidence. They described how some evidence is applied quickly while other evidence is resisted. The rapid uptake of the findings of a single trial about breech birth was frequently contrasted with reluctance to implement evidence in favour of auscultation rather than electronic fetal heart monitoring. My findings reveal patterns of over application, for example, when research about post-term pregnancy is used as a rationale for induction of labour earlier than the findings justify. Informants described under interpretation when multiple or ambiguous interpretations are ignored and over interpretation when evidence is generalised to populations beyond its relevance. Informant interviews reveal underlying reasons that evidence is oversimplified and unevenly applied. Care providers are influenced by belief systems, powerful cultural trends to technologic solutions, discomfort with uncertainty, a focus on risk avoidance, and structural issues including payment systems and limited resources. Many informants expressed concern that the adoption of EBP has unexpectedly undermined support for physiologic birth. They described a profound sense of loss, including loss of skills, access to care and choices for women. Informants advocated reconsideration of EBP, calling for a conscious and reflective approach which acknowledges that scientific evidence alone cannot set goals and objectives of care. My findings are evidence of interprofessional interest in open dialogue about interpretations of evidence and revisions of EBP in the care of childbearing women.
Open Access
Spirited Women Tell Their Stories: A Study of Bangladeshi Female
(2016-09-20) Husain, Abhar Rukh; Gupta, Tania Das
This dissertation draws on the stories of 34 Bangladeshi women who went to seven Middle Eastern countries, including United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon and Jordan, as temporary workers during 1995-2010. I interrogate their interactions with migration brokers and employers and offer a complex understanding of their migration journey. My understanding adds to the structural aspect of their migration journey by highlighting the social context of rural Bangladesh from where these women migrate. I argue a nuanced view of these womens engagement with migration brokers from their social and familial circles and their conduct with their employers in Middle East requires a critical consideration of Bangladeshi rural realities. Understanding their behaviour in terms of their rural origins leads to feminist insights into power attentive to social context. By linking a macro-structural lens of power to a feminist meso lens of power in this dissertation, I comprehend their situation with brokers and employers in a nuanced manner and complicate dominant ways of understanding their migration journey. My approach bridges a feminist critical understanding of power relations and a macro-structural understanding of power relations between women and other institutional actors, including migration brokers and employers in womens migration journey. This study generates feminist knowledge by utilizing the methodological approach of Grounded Theory. From a feminist epistemological point of view, this knowledge is particularly important as it is generated by marginalized/ disenfranchised Bangladeshi women and uses their otherwise unappreciated perspectives as the basis of knowledge creation.
Open Access
The Princess and the Styrofoam Cup: Theologizing the Evangelical Purity Dialectic
(2016-09-20) Reimer, Vanessa Christine; Lee, Becky R.
This doctoral dissertation employs critical discourse analysis and feminist life writing to contextualize and critique North Americas purity culture, therein arguing that the contemporary popularization and commodification of girls purity are influenced by evangelicalisms burgeoning subcultural influence. This project accordingly explores how purity as discourse is constructed in a selection of evangelical guidance literature that is written for girls and young women, and it further draws from the authors lived experience as an evangelical subcultural insider to elucidate how girls and women may interpret and negotiate these ideologies. Beyond premarital sexual abstinence, this project reveals how evangelical-Complementarian theological frameworks demand that girls and women embrace their inferior status in the divine patriarchal gender hierarchy in order to achieve true purity and become Christs princess-brides. Such frameworks also address girls as evangelicalisms mothers of tomorrow who must physically and pedagogically reproduce the next generation of true believers for their religious subculture. The project concludes by proposing alternative feminist theologies that girls and women may utilize in challenging oppressive purity discourses, cultivating empowered spiritualities, and engaging in restorative social justice work.
Open Access
Networked Publics, Networked Politics: Resisting Gender-Based Violent Speech in Digital Media
(2016-11-25) Novoselova, Veronika Anatolyevna; Jenson, Jennifer, Dr.
This dissertation is a qualitative study of digital media that identifies and analyzes feminist responses to violent speech in networked environments across Canada and the United States between 2011 and 2015. Exploring how verbal violence is constitutive of and constituted by power relations in the feminist blogosphere, I ask the following set of research questions: How do feminist bloggers politicize and problematize instances of violent speech on digital media? In what ways are their networked interactions and self-representations reconfigured as a result of having to face hostile audiences? What modes of agency appear within feminist blogging cultures? This work engages with feminist theory (hooks, 2014; McRobbie, 2009; Stringer 2014), media studies (boyd, 2014; Lovink, 2011; Marwick 2013) and their intersections in the field of feminist media studies (Jane 2014; Keller, 2012). Drawing on interviews with the key players in the feminist blogosphere and providing a discursive reading of selected digital texts, I identify networked resistive strategies including digital archiving, public shaming, strategic silence and institutional transformations. I argue that feminist responses to violent speech are varied and reflect not only long-standing concerns with community building and womens voices in public context, but also emerging anxieties around self-branding, professional identity and a control over one's digital presence. This research underscores the importance of transformative capacities of networked feminist politics and contextualizes agentic modes of participation in response to problematic communication.
Open Access
Downers: Crip Affect and Radical Relationalities
(2017-07-27) Neuman, Sydney Rachel; Karpinski, Eva
Taking up prior formulations of crip affect, I explore the positionality of the downer as one whose body complicates global economies of social and political encounter. Engaging with neoliberal formulations of embodiment and the co-constitutive forces of heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2006), I look at the ways in which many theoretical and political disability justice projects position disability as complementary to consumer capitalism, producing normative frameworks into which certain abnormal embodiments can be incorporated. I propose that the downer, as a relational body that proliferates social dis-ease and economic dysfunction, mobilizes crip affect ironically and creatively. Through processes of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Kim 2015; Puar 2015), downers resist assimilation into biomedical frameworks, and in doing so, propose generative forms of social, economic, political, and corporeal unintelligibility. This article is, itself, an exercise in becoming downer. It renders habitable an ostensibly uninhabitable positionality.
Open Access
Intersections of Welfare and Child Welfare Systems and Single Mothers' Activism in the U.S.
(2017-07-27) Nakagawa, Shihoko; Gazso, Amber M.
This study examines the lived experiences of single mothers involved with child welfare services and mothers activism against child welfare services, in order to more deeply understand the intersections between and meanings of the welfare and child welfare systems in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the U.S. This study had two research questions: 1) how have the material and symbolic dimensions of change worked together in shaping the post-1990 restructuring of both areas of welfare services? And 2) how have mothers responded to these reforms? Specifically, what is the nature of mothers activisms against child welfare services given post-1990 welfare restructuring? This study used a theoretical framework that draws on scholarly understandings of governance, feminist theorizing of policy change, and anti-racist feminism and decolonizing theory. This qualitative study employed a mix of data collection and analysis strategies. The primary data was collected through in-depth, faceto-face semi-structured interviews with 16 study participants, who were parents (mostly mothers) involved with child welfare services and/or activism and their advocates. My analysis of the interviews was directed by strategies of critical discourse analysis and narrative analysis, based on feminist standpoint epistemology. The findings of this study reveal that the combination of two systems after welfare reform created the material and symbolic conditions that blame and punish single mothers for having children without resources. Enacting a neoliberal gender order that expects that women assume social reproduction privately, children can be removed from single mothers when they cannot uphold this expectation. This study also found that mothers activism against child welfare services showed their feminist struggle to demand welfare rights as social and economic justice. This study highlighted that patriarchal gender orders have been institutionalized through the implementation of social welfare policy, and mothers have organized activism to challenge such gender orders.
Open Access
Personal Touches, Public Legacies: An Ethnography of LGBT Libraries and Archives
(2017-07-27) Cooper, Danielle Miriam; Murray, David A. B.
Personal touches, Public legacies: An ethnography of LGBT libraries and archives examines lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) information organizations in Vancouver, Canada and surrounding areas. In order to develop a deeper understanding of the diversity in, changes to and challenges for LGBT information organizations, a multi-sited ethnography was conducted between June and September 2014. Organizations featured in the study include: two autonomous LGBT information organizations (the BC Lesbian and Gay Archives and Out on the Shelves Library), two LGBT information organizations founded within universities (the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony at Simon Fraser University, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria), an LGBT-focused collection within Vancouvers public municipal cultural milieu (the Ken Brock collection at the City of Vancouver Archives and the Museum of Vancouver) and, a temporary, autonomous home library with a queer mandate (the STAG Library). This study puts feminist, LGBT and queer studies in dialogue with archival studies and library and information studies (LIS). The chapters are organized by overarching themes associated with information organizations and address specific theoretical discussions that accompany those themes: location (Chapter 2), collection development (Chapter 3), organization and dissemination (Chapter 4) and mandate(Chapter 5). The findings not only explore how LGBT information collections and organizations interrogate and reimagine the definitional boundaries of what constitutes an information collection and information organizations more broadly but also examine how concepts of gender, sexuality and queerness are understood in the realm of the information organizations under study. The divide between normative and non-normative information collection and organizational practice is not simple or stable, but, like the concept of queer, is ever shifting. The findings demonstrate that queer information organizing persists in LGBT information organizational contexts, but not in ways necessarily anticipated by existing literature on the topic. This study also highlights how the relationship between the LGBT communities and the public is in great flux as some LGBT communities become increasingly considered a part of the mainstream public. It is precisely this oscillation and tension between concepts of the personal and the public that define LGBT information organizing activities in this current moment.
Open Access
"If It Is Sincere, It Will Rouse Hostility": The Freewoman, Feminisms, and Print Culture in Early Twentieth-Century England
(2018-03-01) Milo, Sage M.; Brooke, Stephen J.
This dissertation is an examination of The Freewoman (1911-12) as a feminist publication, and its editor Dora Marsdens (1882-1960) particular role in the journal. It examines periodical culture and feminisms, and the possibilities that periodicals open up for feminist thought and politics through the characteristics of this publishing genre. These include a focus on the emotional community created in and through The Freewoman, as well as its self-reflexive grappling with its role as a periodical. Using The Freewoman and archival collections and life-writing related to it, this dissertation asks: how did periodicals function as sites for articulating feminist thought in ways that reached beyond the limitations of formal politics like suffrage? How did they foster the diversification and expansion of feminism in progressive directions? How might attention to the emotional aspects of periodicals and the communities created in and through them enrich the historical narratives of first-wave feminism, and feminisms more broadly? And what possibilities does a reflexive and intentional use of the capacities of a medium and genre (in this case the independent periodical) open for feminist politics? This dissertation highlights the importance of dissent and conflict to feminism, through The Freewoman. I argue that the periodical contributed to the diversification of early-twentieth century feminism not only through its subject matter but importantly through insisting on dissent, conflict, and difference as essential to the progress, if not the very existence, of feminism. Using the characteristics of the periodical as a publishing genre, The Freewoman created a space and a community that were intensely political, while allowing for the expression of opinions and emotions that were perceived as destructive. It is in the alternative space that The Freewoman created, I offer, that its uniqueness and importance lie. Through its resistance of artificial unity and its emphasis on dialogue and conflict as a constant state, rather than a troubled moment that should be resolved, I see The Freewoman also as creating a queer space or counterpublic, in the sense of challenging normativity in a range of areas.
Open Access
"Empowered to Change the World for the Better": Gender, Citizenship, and Justice in Three Environmental Education Programs for Girls
(2018-03-01) Lowe, Leyna Shay; Sandilands, Catriona A. H.
This dissertation explores possibilities for environmental citizenship for girls. When environmental education emerged as a field of study in the 1970s, it articulated an environmentalism for young people based in the language of citizenship. However, environmental justice and feminist environmental education researchers have pointed out that this citizenship was homogenized, with little consideration given to gender, race, class, and sexuality, and that this citizenship was based on obedience to normative environmental prescriptions rather than on democracy and justice. At the same time, girls are often excluded from the vocabularies of citizenship because of their age, gender, and other intersecting factors, and their marginalization has been exacerbated by the myriad of programs for girls which, since the 1990s, have been empowering them with the message that they must change themselves rather than struggle for their social rights. This dissertation argues for a feminist project of environmental citizenship that politicizes gender and the intersecting categories of difference in girls lives, and also taps into environmental educations democratic potential to argue that girls need to be exposed to possibilities of social transformation and justice. To bring gender and girls into environmental education, this dissertation rests on evidence gathered in field observations, interviews, and focus groups conducted with three environmental education programs for girls: the Girl Guides of Canada-Guides du Canada (Toronto), Green Girls (New York City), and ECO Girls (Ann Arbor), to demonstrate that gender, race, and class matter in girls access to the sciences, the outdoors, and environmental programming. Using a feminist environmental justice lens, it assesses each of the programs different models of ecological citizenship, arguing that an intersectional perspective and an openness to analyzing power, privilege, and difference generate more robust environmentalisms and ecological citizenships for girls. Specifically, the research considers that individual approaches to empowerment will not achieve the kinds of social change that are necessary for gender equality and environmental justice, and that forms of public engagement that are rooted primarily in service, leadership, and civic-mindedness as opposed to activism, advocacy, and collective mobilization are alone not enough to expose girls to the possibilities of full citizenship, social transformation, and democratic engagement.
Open Access
Contagious History: Affect and Identification in Queer Public History Exhibitions
(2018-08-27) De Szegheo Lang, Tamara Ondine Elisabeth; Mitchell, Allyson Amy
For LGBTQ people, history is never simply the past, what has passed, or what is dead and gone. Uncovering neglected LGBTQ pasts has been heralded not only as a project for historians but as an explicitly political endeavour. Histories that document LGBTQ lives and cultures have not traditionally been included in school curricula, collected in government archives, or passed down through family narration. Instead, their development and dissemination have been taken on primarily by LGBTQ individuals and communities themselves. This dissertation examines how community-based LGBTQ archives and public history projects reach out to broad publics. It focuses on the role of affect, feeling, and emotion in fostering interest in and connection to these histories. This dissertation explores three sites: the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History (Brooklyn, New York), the GLBT History Museum (San Francisco, California), and the site-specific art exhibition, Land|Slide Possible Futures, which was exhibited at the Markham Museum and Heritage Village in 2013 (Markham, Ontario). Research at these sites involved analyzing exhibits in terms of both content and form, interviewing curators and others involved in creating the exhibits, and writing reflective field notes. These three sites speak to a contagious public history that is necessarily critical. This is because contagious public history questions dominant historical narratives, demonstrates the construction of historical narratives and public history exhibitions, and questions traditional forms of expertise. This work highlights three factors that enable this form of public history: the encouragement of amateur historians; the use of objects in relationship-formation; and the creation of affective atmospheres. As a whole, this dissertation argues that there is much we can learn from community-based LGBTQ archives and public history projects. It insists that considerations of affect and emotion are central, not incidental, to a critical public history project. Though this work focuses primarily on representations of LGBTQ history, its contributions can reach into other areas because affect and emotion are central to all public history, whether or not they are recognized explicitly. History is political, but it is also emotional.
Open Access
Queer Feeling: Affective Bonds, Intimate Possibilities
(2018-08-27) De Szegheo-Lang, Naomi Indigo Justine; Mitchell, Allyson Amy
Taking a broad and shifting definition of intimacy, this dissertation looks to queer and/or unexpected forms of intimacy that have taken hold of the public imaginary through contemporary popular cultureprofessional cuddling, feminist pornography, interspecies friendships, and object-oriented sexualities. By analyzing representations of these intimate connections that are found in online public cultures and in responsive forms of queer and feminist art, this project offers a way to rethink our approach to intimate knowledge formation, including challenging dominant structures of relation, kinship, and affection. Through grounded sites of intimate encounter, this project suggests that critically valuing unexpected or dissenting moments of affective connection is fundamental in resisting oppressive and restrictive social orders, including intensified neoliberalisms, ongoing colonial and imperial state projects, and renewed heteronormativities and homonormativities. Methodologically, this work blends scholarly writing with personal narrative and practice-based research methods in a proposal of practice-based affective research: a hybrid methodology which accounts for the ongoingness of affect-based research and values the personal sparks that guide ones objects of study. Located at the crossroads of cultural studies, digital humanities, queer theory, and affect theory, this research aims to diversify the scope of what we understand to be intimate knowledge by augmenting marginalized knowledges, re-imagining intimate futures, and broadening possibilities for living lives in resistance to the status quo.