Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies

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The Femme, the Mother, and the Lesbian Feminist: Rereading Queer Theory's Difficult Family Relationships
(2025-04-10) Brightwell, Laura Anne; Brushwood Rose, Chloë
The Femme, the Mother, and the Lesbian Feminist: Rereading Queer Theory’s Difficult Family Relationships argues that queer theory propels itself forward by abjecting phenomena it frames as the normative, the outdated, and the politically regressive. Queer theory’s methodological paranoia, often articulated by its commitment to antinormativity, creates problems for real-life queer subjects. I examine the implications of this framework for the queer femme, the mother, and the lesbian feminist. By re-evaluating the place of each figure in queer theory, I find a bridge to reintegrate critical considerations of femininities and culturally feminized experiences, including the maternal, into queer theory. Life writing by queer femmes is one site of queer feminist narrative that explores femininity beyond its characterization as a patriarchal imposition. Femme authors Dorothy Allison (1994; 1996), Beth Brant (2019a; 2019b), Joan Nestle (1998; 2003), and Minnie Bruce Pratt (1988; 1990; 2005) vindicate cultural figures and discourses that are associated with the feminine and the normative. These include the family of origin, the mother, the femme, and the lesbian feminist. I read queer theory’s flight away from feminism and femininity in the context of the field’s inaugural framing as the study of sexuality as opposed to a feminist concern with gender. I then explore femme writers’ counternarratives to the coming out story to argue that a return home might repair our relationship to that which has hurt us. Taking a reparative approach to abject mothers offers one way for queer to reconcile itself to its own horrifying mother, the lesbian feminist. Femme writers recuperate the ‘bad’ mother in their life writing to gesture toward a femme theory that finds points of solidarity between queer and straight feminine subjects. This dissertation offers a new orientation to queer theory’s own coming out story and a reparative approach to the ideas queers and feminists find ourselves troubled by, specifically the feminine, the maternal, and outdated feminisms. I weave intellectual genealogies and life writing to investigate the legacies of many families: families of feminist and queer thought; families of origin; chosen families; and created families, and each family’s effect on queer communities and individuals.
Open Access
Assembling The Digital Girl/girl: Making Meaning Through Social Media
(2025-04-10) Lentz-Marino, Eleni Christina; van Daalen-Smith, Cheryl
This dissertation explores the digital becoming of girls through the various ways in which they are (re)made on social media. By using the thoughts and experiences of real girls, we explore together how we “make the Girl/girl mean” in our collective North American culture and society. Through interviews and focus groups with 23 girls located in the Greater Toronto Area, I developed six themes that outlines how the Girl (hegemonic discourses) is currently defined. Throughout my exploration of these themes, I critically analyze these definitions through an extensive review of girlhood, feminist, and social science literature. I bring into conversation previous research and theory with the emerging knowledge produced by the girls in this study and myself. My research creates a context specific roadmap, or what we might call an “assemblage” of the Girl as she exists in this current moment. Further, I think through how these Girl/girlhood subjectivities and discourses work in service to oppressive systems. I then think critically about what the Girl means to the girls in my study and real girls in general. In thinking through the lived, material realities of girls, I offer recommendations that can help us chart paths for the future, in which girls can be supported to safely exist in and explore this one wild and precious life.
Open Access
In the Circle of Fire: Gendered Barriers in Fire Services in Ontario
(2025-04-10) Rizzi, Deryn Nicole; Luxton, Meg
The firefighting profession is described as inherently dangerous, rich in pride, honour and tradition. Firefighters are held in high regard, as they are known for their involvement in, and commitment to the community. Firefighting is a ‘public safety’ service, with a labour force that is predominantly white males. The public expect firefighters to fight fires and rescue those in distress, displaying heroism, strength and embodying masculinity (Yarnal et al., 2016). Although described as a masculine profession, the role of the firefighter is changing, and the composition of the service is beginning to evolve to reflect the community that it serves. This phenomenological study, guided by the principles of standpoint theory, investigates gender-based workplace dynamics within firefighting, uncovering ways in which nuanced stereotypes, bias and discriminatory practices contribute to a less inclusive and sometimes unsupportive environment for women in the Fire Services in Ontario. Thirty-two firefighters participated in semi-structured interviews. The themes presented are generalized to both genders, as well as themes unique to either male or female firefighters. This study’s findings reveal that while some themes are found to apply to both genders, others are distinct to women firefighters. This dissertation highlights the negative impacts the workplace has on women firefighters.
Open Access
Homelessness & Activism in Toronto & Montreal: Toward Community-Based Participatory Research & Emergent Strategy
(2024-11-07) LaCroix, Sarah Lynn; da Silveira Gorman, Rachel
This research explores generating a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project on technology, broadly construed, with housing justice and anti-poverty activist communities in Canada. This research employs stratified purposive sampling and semi-structured open-ended interviewing methods with Toronto and Montréal activists and is approached from the perspective of a CBPR methodology. 12 activists were interviewed for this research. Interviews indicate that barriers and access to technology centre on education, trustworthiness, usability, and dependability. However, activists also desire systemic and structural change grounded in communities. Activists indicate that elite academic researchers, people who represent the state, and corporations cannot solve issues surrounding homelessness and the Canadian housing market. Instead, activists recommend emergent project creation anchored in community as a possible avenue for mitigating aspects of these phenomena. As such, this research provides an appropriate foundation for multiple community projects beyond this text.
Open Access
Liberal Regrets: A Cultural Study of Canada's Redress Politics
(2024-11-07) Akhbari, Roxana; Karpinski, Eva
This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the cultural and political struggles surrounding Canada’s attempts to legitimize its sovereignty through redress practices. Despite contestation, Canada’s redress politics, affectively mobilized through apologies, systematically silences significant feminist decolonial perspectives articulated in fiction by or on behalf of members of communities wronged by the state. Unsettling this silencing dynamic, this study de-centers the settler colonial logic of selected apologies through the lens of selected novels that narrate relevant wrongs differently. Drawing upon overlapping fields, including studies in the colonial nature of liberal democracy, state redress practices, and law and literature, Canada’s 1998 merged statement and 2008 apology to Indigenous peoples as well as three apologies (in 2007 and 2017) to five Canadian citizens tortured abroad after 9/11 are juxtaposed with selected novels by Lee Maracle and Sharon Bala. The rhetorical tactics in the 1998 merged statement and 2008 apology are analyzed as the affective dimension of Canada’s reconciliation discourse, framing the government’s settler colonial agenda for renewing its relationship with Indigenous peoples. I examine how Maracle’s novels - Sundogs, Ravensong, Daughters Are Forever, and Celia’s Song – deploy feminist decolonial narrative tools from Salish tradition that challenge anti-Indigenous violence perpetuated in these statements, situating them within Canada’s broader settler colonial project. Similarly, the rhetorical tactics in the 2007 apology to Maher Arar, 2017 apology to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin, and 2017 apology to Omar Khadr are analyzed as efforts to legitimize state sovereignty by affectively reinforcing the gendered racial logic of Canada’s post-9/11 security discourse. I interpret Bala’s The Boat People, which depicts the plight of Sri Lankan Tamil migrant aboard the MV Sun Sea that arrived in Canada in 2010, as contesting the gendered racial logic of these apologies. Although the experiences of these migrants differ significantly from those of Arar, Almalki, El Maati, Nureddin, and Khadr, reading this novel as contesting the narrative of state sovereignty in the apologies to these citizens highlights the differential yet interrelated harms that Canada’s post-9/11 security discourse inflicts upon racialized citizens and non-citizens while situating this discourse within Canada’s ongoing settler colonialism.
Open Access
Queering the Digital Divide: Contextualizing 2SLGBTQ+ Older Adults' Experiences with Accessing Remote Service Provisions in Ontario
(2024-11-07) Jonsson, Stephanie Lynne; O'Reilly, Andrea
The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped Western societies' relationship with Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Stay-at-home mandates in Ontario increased many people’s everyone's reliance on technology to work, socialize, and access services. In Western societies that are dominated by digital technologies, digital exclusion can have detrimental impacts on an individual’s health and well-being (Seifert et al. “Perceived Exclusion” 6). Unlike populations under the age of 55, older adults who lack digital literacy skills or who are digitally disconnected become socially excluded from an entire virtual universe (Seifert et al. “Double Burden” e99). Digital citizenship scholarship focused on the general older adult population in North America indicates that they lack the skills or devices needed to fully utilize the Internet (Perrin and Atske, Nimrod 159, Quan-Haase et al. 206). I am concerned with how equity-deserving groups, like 2SLGBTQ+ older adults, encounter unique challenges with accessing and utilizing ICT. Through a mixed-method quantitative and qualitative online study, I aim to contextualize how 2SLGBTQ+ older adults' experiences with new technologies are similar or different from their heterosexual counterparts. This dissertation identifies and unpacks the struggles 2SLGBTQ+ older adults faced during the pandemic with using ICT to better understand how service providers could have addressed digital divide gaps amongst this population during and beyond stay-at-home mandates. Exploring the intersections of queerness, aging, and technology and putting them into conversation with digital divide scholarship offered a nuanced look at how the internet is utilized by 2SLGBTQ+ older adults. This study explored the challenges rainbow seniors experienced with accessing social service provisions during the pandemic. Using participatory action research, I collaborated with 2SLGBTQ+ organizational leaders and activists to develop a comprehensive needs assessment that aimed to understand how rainbow seniors’ experiences with the internet differ from those of their heterosexual counterparts.
Open Access
The Affective Basis of Judgements and Narratives Surrounding Sexual Commerce in Western Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(2024-10-28) York-Bertram, Sarah Elizabeth; McPherson, Kathryn M.
This dissertation undertakes an affective reading of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Canadian primary sources through which to analyze the affective basis of judgments and narratives surrounding sexual commerce. Situated in the interdisciplinary subfield of the history of emotions, this dissertation centres sexual commerce as a site of colonial worldmaking in what are currently the southern regions of the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and traces emotional through-lines across fields in social space. Beginning with a self-reflexive prologue drawing from a method feminist theorist Clare Hemmings (2011) terms “situated horror,” this dissertation then turns to the Dominion of Canada’s post-1867 westward expansion, its legal mechanisms, and affective mobilizations. Across the empire, Britain tied legislative powers to feelings that reflected its goals, ideal social order, and habitus of its peoples. Like a mathematical equation, peace in the colonies would emerge through order and good government and law-abiding citizens would be its beneficiaries. That equation was integral to the shift from a fur trade economy to a settler colonial one oriented toward a British imperial and Canadian economic disposition. The corollary effect of the equation was the normalization of British and Canadian views on what constituted peace, their conceptions of capital, and the conceptual transplant of disorderly figures, such as the “rebel,” the “vagrant,” and the “prostitute” – or, broadly, people defined as “outlaws.” Three main sites of colonial worldmaking are examined in this work: that of the journalistic field in chapter four, that of the political field in chapter five, and that of the juridical field in chapter six. By tracing emotion in oft-cited, and not-so-oft-cited, primary sources that discuss concerns about and responses to sexual commerce, the emotions underpinning narratives and judgments surrounding sexual commerce become evident. This method offers an emotions history of western Canadian colonial expansion, revealing how sex workers, histories of sex work, and feelings about sexual commerce were integral to Canadian worldmaking. Responses to sexual commerce were informed by the Dominion of Canada’s worldmaking mission, concerns over human unfreedom, and dynamic social positionings in emergent settler colonial society. British imperial and Canadian whiteness were produced through gendered-racialized processes of differentiation at the local, municipal, provincial, federal, and imperial levels. White men’s feelings of satisfaction dominated in this history, as they intensified their gendered monopoly on resources, space, and authority in a region that had been known as Indigenous peoples’ territories. This analysis of masculinized emotions contributes to the feminist theorization of colonialism and sexuality.
Open Access
Grammars of Care: On Care Full Writing as Black Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis
(2024-07-22) Stephen, Juanita Elizabeth; Sharpe, Christina
In Grammars of Care: On Care-Full Writing as Black Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis, I interrogate the processes through which care is theorized and enacted in order to make evident the ways in which anti-black state violence is narrativized as care and re-inscribed through formal education and professional practice. The method I activate in this project—what I call care-full writing—is informed and guided by the scholarship and creative practice of Black women and Black feminist writers that model strategies of writing as practices of care. Over four chapters, I use care-full writing to pursue a Black feminist project of Black study and care through reading and re-/writing stories of Black life. Moving across genres and into family archives, I study and engage a practice of autotheoretical research creation to expose violence re-languaged as care and as a means of writing a counternarrative of the practices and relations that attend to Black life.
Open Access
Points of Refusal: An Arts-Based Exploration of the Medicalization of Mad Trans Identity
(2024-07-18) Ferguson, Max; Noble, Bobby
This project discusses the impact of medicalization on transgender identity, examining how it enforces transphobic, white, abled, sane, cisgender, patriarchal norms, and effectively eugenics. By incorporating crip and trans theory, art, and embracing a mad aesthetic, I first highlight the concept of deliberate, productive failure through my inability to be read as transgender, showcasing my ability to pass as a white, cisgender, abled, sane man in photographs. I then apply the frameworks of mad aesthetics and disability art and justice to critique and transcend the photograph’s history as an object that pathologizes medicalized bodies through the gender binary, by using the concepts of crip technoscience and the glitch. This glitching of the technological software of the digital photograph leads to the creation of a final body of artworks that disrupt and visually disorient patriarchal readings and traditional perceptions of sex and gender, rendering the inability to language my transgender experience visible. By achieving this sense of visual disorientation and incongruence in my digitally created bodies, one that is not articulated through words, I expose the limited linguistic pathological transphobic roots of the medical model. Finally, I propose that through the artistic act of glitching the photograph and making bodies sexually illegible, we empower ourselves as mad trans people, and can do away with medical language when describing trans experiences. In other words, disability art and justice can advocate new ways of languaging trans corporeality through the space of the (digital) photograph. Through mad disability art and aesthetics, this project aims to challenge medicalized definitions of transgender identity and transcend their transphobic agendas.
Open Access
Adoption: From Reproductive Exploitation to Reproductive Justice
(2024-07-18) Andrews, Valerie; Latchford, Frances
Although adoption culture grew exponentially throughout the twentieth century in western societies, feminist analyses of the institution of adoption did not keep pace. It is only recently that feminists have attempted to locate adoption within feminism. Emerging in the early 2000s, critical adoption studies constitutes a wide variety of discourses and is interdisciplinary in scope. Notwithstanding such scholarship, the broader project of locating adoption within feminism remains on the margins of the feminist academy, and further, remains noticeably silent within reproductive justice theory. This research identifies reproductive oppression, exploitation and violence within adoption systems in domestic, transnational and colonial contexts, addresses the exclusion of the institution of adoption within the project of feminism, reproductive justice scholarship and movements, and examines the institution of adoption through a reproductive justice framework. This work interrogates the institution of adoption in ways that have been mostly absent in reproductive justice scholarship, praxis and movement and attends to the ways in which such analyses can operate to improve reproductive outcomes for marginalized women and girls in domestic, transnational, and colonial contexts.
Open Access
A Chronological Study of Discourse on Prostitution Policy, Anti-prostitution Feminist Movements, and Sex Workers' Rights Movements in South Korea
(2024-07-18) Kim, Youn Joung; Kempadoo, Kamala
This research examines the history of sex workers' agency and resistance to prostitution policies and anti-prostitution feminist movements in defense of their rights in South Korea based on a transnational feminist approach. I first analyze the violent impacts of government prostitution policies and anti-prostitution feminisms on sex workers' human rights, showing how they reinforce social stigma and discriminate against sex workers. The nature and content of prostitution policies throughout history share the characteristics of regulating and managing sex workers. In the name of national interests, public health, and sexual ethics, these regulatory and control policies have exploited sex workers' labor and violated their rights. In response to government prostitution policies, mainstream anti-prostitution feminists have criticized and/or collaborated with government prostitution policies that violate the human rights of sex workers by strongly advocating for the prohibition of prostitution. Since the early 20th century, anti-prostitution women’s movements have claimed universal women's rights. By ignoring and denying the long history of sex workers identifying themselves as laborers, mainstream feminists reinforce anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution logics. I argue that sex workers are professionals with unique perspectives and experiences in the prostitution sector. This research demonstrates how they have resisted stigma and discrimination, government policies to control and prohibit sex work, and campaigns by mainstream feminists and their allies in government policy. Sex workers understand not only their work and the nature of labor in a patriarchal and capitalist society, but also how state systems and mainstream feminist initiatives violate their rights. The way to defend the human rights of sex workers must come from sex workers themselves.
Open Access
Reparative Engagments: A mad feminist approach to politicizing lived experiences of self-harm
(2024-07-18) Redikopp, Sarah Helena; Morrow, Marina
This dissertation intervenes into dominant understandings of self-harm as a pathological problem behaviour in need of treatment and cure, opting, instead, to take as its point of departure an understanding of self-harm as a resourceful, multiplicitous, and socially embedded bodymind practice oriented towards attending to “what hurts”. Using a combination of critical qualitative methods (i.e., narrative inquiry and critical discourse analysis) this dissertation analyzes fourteen interviews with women, trans, and nonbinary adults living in Canada who identify with self-harm, placing interviewees' experience in conversation with the analysis of medical and cultural texts (i.e., psy- clinical literature, Canadian mental health policy documents, the DSM-5, and young adult novels pertaining to self-harm). Bringing together insights from mad studies, feminist disability studies, feminist theories of trauma, emotion, and embodiment, and social justice perspectives in mental health research, the dissertation pursues a deeply intersectional, situated, and reparative engagement with lived accounts of self-harm. This engagement critiques curative approaches to self-harm and works to position this practice beyond dualisms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, choosing, instead, to conceptualize self-harm as something that both hurts and heals. The dissertation contributes to mad and feminist literatures an understanding of self-harm as a relational, political, and multiplicitous bodymind practice which is shaped by, and which responds to, the social, structural, and political contexts of everyday life.
Open Access
Solidarity Wishes: A Cultural Analysis of Political Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Stalled States of Desire
(2023-12-08) Pelletier, Gary Lee; Luxton, Meg
Solidarity Wishes argues that political solidarity is prone to getting stuck inside of stalled states of desire, what I conceptualize as “wishes,” for contemporary Canadian and American settler neoliberal subjects. This project illustrates how solidarity wishes commonly act as rhetorical, strategic, and performative psychological devices. I theorize that an ethics – or mentality – of sovereignty that ideologically structures many of these subjects’ social, political, and institutional lives is largely to blame for solidarity’s trapping within wishes. By centering an analysis of political solidarity through the framework of desire I illuminate how solidarity wishes and their expressions can be harvested by both individuals and groups to achieve something other than solidarity itself, a practice I liken to the psychoanalytic concept of “substitutive satisfaction.” Furthermore, as a meditation on solidarity as an object of desire, this dissertation queries what happens in the affective spaces between thinking and doing, feeling and experiencing, wanting and getting. I analyze examples from politics, popular culture, personal experience, academia, and activism to make my arguments, and I rely on queer theory, feminist theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as my theoretical frameworks. This dissertation gestures toward the political possibilities of rescuing political solidarity from these ambivalent subjective orectic states of wishes. It defends the theory that solidarity, in its most basic sense, is nonsovereignty manifested in a feeling toward another subject, a feeling that can, and hopefully will, ignite into productive solidarity practices. Solidarity Wishes argues that subjects must embrace their interdependency and adopt an ethics of nonsovereignty in order to transition their stagnant solidarity wishes into genuine desires for sociopolitical change and feasible practices toward transformative justice.
Open Access
LGBTQ Activisms and Hindu Nationalism in India: An Ethnographic Inquiry
(2023-08-04) Chatterjee, Shraddha; Murray, David; Mongia, Radhika
Contemporary Indian society is marked by increasingly violent majoritarianism that is redefining India as a Hindu nation. In recent years, the heightened persecution of religious minorities and an ever-expanding definition of “anti-national” has justified violence against a widening range of people. Paradoxically, in this atmosphere of shrinking public freedoms and increasing state-sanctioned ethnic violence, there has been a simultaneous expansion of LGBTQ representation in mainstream English media and nominal advancements in LGBTQ rights. As a result, a distinct form of LGBTQ support for Hindu nationalism has become popular, even as other LGBTQ activisms have amplified their efforts to resist Hindu nationalism. Within this context, this dissertation examines how and why LGBTQ activists support and resist Hindu nationalism, and how this reconfigures what it means to be queer in Hindu nationalist times. I address these questions through a queer feminist digital ethnography of LGBTQ activists in New Delhi and Mumbai, conducted between February and October 2020. My ethnographic findings indicate that LGBTQ support for Hindu nationalism is often advanced without Hindu nationalist support for LGBTQ rights. Based on this, I argue that what we see in India is aspirational homonationalism, where Hindu nationalist rhetoric is buttressed in the present to accrue LGBTQ rights and inclusion into the nation in the future. Further, LGBTQ complicity with Hindu nationalism signals deeper desires for national belonging, especially when juxtaposed against the persistent claim that homosexuality is “alien” to Indian culture. My findings also demonstrate that LGBTQ activists resisting Hindu nationalism are amplifying these efforts despite experiencing the larger atmosphere in contemporary India as dangerous and stifling. Queer feminist and Dalit queer and trans* activisms, in particular, resist the underlying narratives of LGBTQ inclusion that support Hindu nationalism, rejecting the violence of Hindu nationalism in the process. I conclude that LGBTQ complicity with, and resistance to, Hindu nationalism maps onto existing antagonisms between gay rights activisms, queer feminisms, and Dalit queer and trans* activisms. As aspirations for homonationalism become more deeply rooted within LGBTQ activisms, and as its critiques become more stringent, Hindu nationalism deepens pre-existing fissures within these activisms by becoming another axis of difference in larger struggles over what LGBTQ activisms should fight for, and what LGBTQ lives should look like.
Open Access
Feminist Responses to Right-Wing Governance in Hungary: The Emergence of Anti-Gender Feminism
(2023-03-28) Rekhviashvili, Ana; Murray, David A. B.
This dissertation employs ethnographic data about Hungary’s feminist activist and academic circles to explore the impacts of right-wing anti-gender politics on feminist activists and scholars in Hungary. The right-wing anti-gender context presented multiple challenges to the feminist actors, such as increased visibility of their work in a hostile climate and decreased political and financial support. Feminist actors coped with the restrictive political context by either openly opposing the right-wing politics, self-censoring, deploying strategic language and activities, or leaving the country. The right-wing Anti-gender climate also contributed to the intensification of the debates among various feminist groups. The debates focused on finding feminist strategies for surviving within the hostile, right-wing anti-gender context. I argue that the tensions brought to the Hungarian feminist movement by the right-wing, anti-gender climate contributed to the emergence and discursive dominance of what I call anti-gender feminism. Anti-gender feminist discourse is articulated as a “new” and “progressive” feminist strategy for overcoming the critiques of gender-related work by right-wing anti-gender actors. Anti-gender feminism is grounded in a particular articulation of leftist perspectives and claims that the feminist movement must center on the needs of the majority of women and appeal to the sensibilities of “everyday people”. According to this discourse, a leftist perspective allows for overcoming the failings of liberal feminist approaches, for example, West-imposed identitarian struggles. According to anti-gender feminist arguments, such approaches dismiss the structural reasons for inequalities affecting the wider public and result in hostility towards feminist initiatives. In its desire to appeal to the wider masses, and operate without interference from the right-wing government, anti-gender feminist discourse distances itself from other marginalized struggles such as trans and sex-workers’ rights and racial justice. It also brings feminist arguments dangerously close to the white-supremacist, nationalist-populist rhetoric of the Hungarian state.
Open Access
Across seven seas, I followed you here: Caste, marriage migration and multiculturalism in the Indian diaspora
(2022-12-14) Yalamarty, Harshita Sai; Das Gupta, Tania
This dissertation explores the experiences of marriage migrant women from India to Canada in relation to migration policies and changing expectations of education, employment, and domestic and care labour. I engage with the narratives of twenty-four Indian marriage migrant women who arrived in Canada as international students, economic immigrants or as spouses of economic immigrants. Using an intersectional and transnational feminist lens, I unpack their complicated agency in decision-making processes around marriage and migration to Canada, inflected by structures and processes of caste, class, race and gender. Neoliberal and Canadian multicultural discourses consider these twenty-four mostly Hindu, Telugu-speaking, middle-class and upper-caste women as the ‘new Indian woman’, ‘model minority’ and ‘designer migrants’. However, I put these discourses in tension with the challenges presented to the women by the Canadian immigration system and the pressures they face in navigating conjugal, familial, community, and caste norms. I further this analysis with multi-sited and mixed methods, using interviews with bridal grooming schools and critical engagement with diasporic pageant competitions for married women, and media and cultural portrayals of marriage migration. This dissertation further examines caste practices in the Indian diaspora in Canada to understand the intersection of race, caste, class and gender across the transnational space of India, Canada and the Indian diaspora, and the replication of caste discourses in the practices of diasporic communities at various levels – domestic, professional, and at the community level. I argue that the horizontal culturalization of racism within Canadian multiculturalism, in conjunction with an understanding of caste as cultural practice rather than a hierarchical structure, enables a particular privileged configuration of Indian economic immigrants to assume the ‘model minority’ mantle within Canadian society.
Open Access
Analogical Reasoning and the Regulation of Race and Same-Sex Sexualities in Canada, 1969–2005
(2022-12-07) Verhaeghe, Av; Wahab, Amar S.
In this dissertation, I conceptualize the Canadian states regulation of sexuality as a racial project. To do so, I trace the historical development of analogical reasoning as a mode of racial and sexual governance in Canada between 1969 and 2005. I take a case study approach and use critical discourse analysis to examine House of Commons transcripts and Supreme Court of Canada decisions from three moments that are frequently cited as turning points in Canadian LGBTQ2S history: Parliament's 1969 decision to decriminalize anal sex that occurred in private between two consenting adults over 21 years of age; the Supreme Court's 1995 ruling in Egan v. Canada in which the Court decided sexual orientation was analogous to the grounds of discrimination enumerated in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one of which is race; and Parliament's 2005 decision to legalize same-sex marriage. I analyze how prime ministers, members of parliament, and Supreme Court judges developed and mobilized the analogical logic that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is like racism. I argue that this use of analogical reasoning serves the Canadian states interests in two ways. First, because state actors analogized contemporary discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to examples of racism that were either based in the United States or in Canadas past, the analogies invisibilized the ongoing realities of racism and white settler colonialism in Canada, securing Canadas self-construction as "post-race" and delegitimizing critiques of Canadian racism. Second, I suggest that the construction of race and sexual orientation as analogical rather than intersecting phenomena has been part of an effort to diffuse more radical demands for justice by people working against multiple and intersecting forms of racial and sexual repression. Ultimately, I argue that the reforms I describe in this dissertation, which were supposedly aimed at enhancing the inclusion of LGBTQ2S people in Canadian society, strengthened, rather than undermined, heteronormativity, racism, and white settler hegemony in Canada.
Open Access
Girl Music of the Indie Rock Persuasion: Amplifying Indie Through 2000s Girl Culture
(2022-08-08) Bimm, Morgan Elizabeth Robertson; Rose, Chloe Brushwood
The 2000s, a decade that is often considered lacking in defining culture or trends, represents a key period for the distillation of ideas about authenticity and access in North American music cultures. A liminal space between analogue distribution practices and the ubiquity of streaming services, the 2000s saw a turn towards television, film, and early internet cultures as the primary spaces of tastemaking and musical discovery. These unconventional sites challenged existing hierarchies and modes of gatekeeping that reproduced particular music genres, and rock music in particular, as the domain of straight, white masculinities. This interdisciplinary research explores the various facets of this cultural mainstreaming, excavating the central role of women, girls, and girl culture in this shift. I draw on qualitative research interviews conducted with female music supervisors, bloggers, and DJs to bolster this analysis of cultural intermediaries; each chapter of the dissertation also focuses on a different cultural site. In the first chapter, I place existing work on indie music cultures in conversation with girls’ studies scholarship on bedroom cultures to argue that an indie rock rhetoric of retreat and marginalization lacks a feminist citational politics. In the second chapter, I explore the shifting role of music supervisors as tastemakers and provide a critique of ‘fanboy auteur’ narratives. In the third chapter, I explore films released as indie crossover hits during the 2000s, connecting indie music and indie film theory but also arguing that, with more distance from the moment of indie rock’s initial cultural mainstreaming, cultural producers could camp its gender politics. In the fourth chapter, I explore girls’ music blogs from a particular music scene (New York City) as resistive sites where the exclusionary legacies of rock music criticism were challenged. In the fifth and final chapter, I explore how the 2000s also expanded physical music scenes into digital space with the meteoric rise of MP3 and file-sharing technologies that offered an important challenge to masculinist music cultures. This dissertation demonstrates that a wider cultural aversion to feminized cultural texts and practices flattens the stories we tell about 2000s indie rock — and the legacies it left behind.
Open Access
Fattening Queer Femininities: The Pitfalls, Politics, and Promises of Queer Fat Femme Embodiments
(2022-03-03) Taylor, Allison Elizabeth; Mitchell, Allyson
This dissertation identifies and documents how women and non-binary people in Canada negotiate and resist fatphobia, heteronormativity, and femmephobia, alongside other oppressions. More precisely, using qualitative research methods— a combination of narrative inquiry, photo elicitation, and autoethnography— this dissertation explores how women and non-binary people in Canada who identify as queer, fat, and femme experience and challenge these intersecting forms of oppression. I argue that queer fat fem(me)ininities are sites of intense regulation and policing and, at the same time, sources of collective resistance, resilience, and healing. I focus specifically on the ways in which queer fat femmes strategies of resistance, resilience, and healing contain glimmers of more livable worlds for queer fat femmes, where they are valued and desired. Ultimately, by bringing together the fields of fat studies, critical femininities, and queer theory, and through the use of interview, photographic, and autoethnographic data, this dissertation offers thickened understandings of the significance of queer fat femme embodiments, first, for queer, fat, and fem(me)inine people themselves and, second, for (re)conceptualizing normative notions of fatness, fem(me)ininity, and queerness more broadly.
Open Access
Mapping the Oedipus Complex in Nuruddin Farah's Blood in Sun Trilogy
(2021-03-08) Ali, Hannah; Britzman, Deborah P
This thesis investigates the presence of the Oedipus Complex amongst transnational families Nurruddin Farah cultivates in his second trilogy. My analysis differentiates the complexs tension from its nuclear structure to examine how the interplay between love, hate, and envy are expressed as geopolitical contradictions during political stress. By methodologically employing psychoanalysis, I centre the social and cultural provisions of the superego and describe transnational subjectivities as developing in a third space marked by resistance and linguistic preservation. Through this, I contribute to postcolonial critiques of psychoanalysis by situating the subaltern as not an exception but as a historical case that politicizes and cultures Oedipalization. Finally, I consider Farahs novels as intergenerational accounts of Somali history that gifts the proceeding generation with unimagined possibilities about civilization and its fate.