Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/35628

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Daughtering: Girls, Their Feminism, and Their Mothers
(2026-07-24) Maitland, Hannah Jane; Coulter, Natalie
This dissertation examines the everyday political lives of girls in the era of the spectacularized activist girl. It explores how girls negotiate and feel about their activism, their place within ongoing social movements, and their relationships with their mothers and communities. From September 2021 to April 2022, I conducted a series of semi-structured in-depth Zoom interviews with ten activist daughters (aged 11-20) residing in Canada, as well as their mothers and mother figures. The overarching goal of this project is to complicate popular images of girl activists as singular, heroic, and exceptional by centring everyday girls’ activist efforts without isolating their political actions from their family and community contexts. I argue that mother-daughter relationships have been underexplored in girls’ studies, and I interrogate how girls’ roles as daughters inform their political worldviews to explore the connections between the personal and political in girls’ lives. I analyzed the mother-daughter interviews through feminist affect theory and an adapted psychosocial model to gain a deeper understanding of not only what politicized girls and their mothers are doing, but also how their thoughts, feelings, and desires inform and resonate through these actions. The personal and political emerged as so intertwined that both mothers and daughters emphasized their early relationships with family members when narrating their stories of developing their activist and feminist consciousness. Whether these relationships served as positive or negative examples, they were still significant in shaping how the mothers and daughters situated their identities as feminists and activists. As the participants worked towards what they saw as an ideal (or at least possible) future, they had to negotiate what strategies, identities, relationships, and ideologies from their past and present that they wanted to reject and carry forward. Both mothers and daughters are in a constant state of becoming, where they never reach a finalized identity, political stance, or relationship dynamic. The mothers were no firmer in their beliefs than their daughters, and they were just as immersed in the process of figuring out how to navigate the world. This process of negotiation does not end with childhood and, in fact, girlhood persists.
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Queer Ambivalence: Fantasies of Belonging in the Lesbian Imaginary
(2026-07-24) Thurston, Hilary; Karpinski, Eva C.
This dissertation examines the representation of affective relations in theories and histories of attachment within lesbian cultures across 20th and 21st century Western contexts. Using critical discourse analysis through feminist affect studies and cultural studies frameworks at the intersection of psychoanalysis, attachment theory and trauma theory, it investigates widely disseminated representations of lesbians and queries the trope of ambivalent attachments in the lesbian imaginary. It asks, what are the affective dynamics that characterize the relationship between trauma, fantasy and attachment in the lesbian imaginary, and what are the personal, interpersonal and collective implications of this characterization? The author introduces a theory of systemic attachment trauma, queer codependency, and the concept of lesbian rage-fantasy to examine how affects produced by experiences of gender and sexual oppression can be managed by fantasies of belonging that facilitate collusion with hegemonic logics and promote political disavowal. Through interdisciplinary and intersectional analyses of lesbian life writing, novels, television series, and psychology literature, the author presents a genealogy of affective ambivalence in discourses and representations of lesbian attachments. The dissertation theorizes the affective transmission of gender and sexual oppression by analysing widespread lesbian tropes that circulate in the lesbian imaginary: the stories of lesbian u-hauling, lesbian longing, serial monogamy and lesbian processing, and lesbian figures like the codependent lesbian, the angry lesbian and the lesbian [love] addict. The chapters present a poststructuralist, decolonial, and critical deconstruction of the signifier lesbian that de-pathologizes lesbian feeling and makes intelligible the ways in which queer ambivalence can materialize in relation to systemic and interpersonal trauma.
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Queer and Disabled Afterlives of Racial Eugenics
(2026-07-24) Stanley, Angela; da Silveira Gorman, Rachel
This dissertation paints a picture of resistance, joy, hope and desirability of racialized, queer disabled subjectivity in a society that is built on the ability to breed out these “undesirable” traits through positive and negative eugenic and newgenic means. By interrogating the presumed fixity of dating and hook- up ‘preferences’, the institution that is marriage, child bearing and rearing and the construction of the ideal family, we can become more critical of these systems both in the scholarship and also our personal choices. I have argued that the ways in which we engage our sexual subjectivities is heavily influenced either consciously or unconsciously by these eugenic ideals. Additionally, I have presented the ways that discussing eugenics through discrete lenses do us a disservice especially as we try to dismantle these ideals through our organizing and activism. Integrating personal anecdotes, archival work as well as employing various methodologies, this dissertation challenges us to think about the interconnectedness of racism, ableism and queerphobia as we date, hook up, contemplate marriage and building our families, make informed choices and perhaps model our collective activism in ways that address these systemic issues. The goal of this work is not to say that there is a utopia that exists where we can all retreat to remove ourselves from the current system. It is here to show that the decisions we make do not exist in a vacuum, especially those close personal and private decisions we make about our intimate and sexual lives. It demonstrates that there are ways of being that we can engage with that do not continue the cycle of oppression of those at the margins. It is a call to action for scholars to think more critically about their work and whose stories we leave out. This is especially important due to the current socio- political climate of increased hostility toward those whose work and embodiment do not continue to prop up the empires of North America in a way that privileges the White, cis- hetero patriarchy.
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Between Odinani and the Cross: Decolonizing Gendered Power Through Dual Spiritual Identities in Postcolonial Igbo Women’s Lives”
(2026-07-24) Okadigbo, Ifeyinwa; Mianda, Gertrude
This research situates spirituality as both a historical archive and a contemporary site of agency. My research interrogates the colonial assault on gendered power through spirituality in Igbo communities of Nigeria, by revealing how Christianity, western education, and colonial governance, imposed a rigid patriarchal framework that systematically altered Igbo women’s sacred roles that gave them priority to gendered spiritual power. The concept of gendered spiritual power in this study is not confined to visible political authority but extends into the mystical and symbolic realms, where power is exercised through rituals, nature, the naked female body, pronouncements, blood, narratives, and intergenerational memory. My thesis posits that because of the “assault” on gendered power through spirituality, contemporary postcolonial Nigerian Igbo women have had to exist in a state of “dual spiritual identities, which can be understood as a form of spiritual compartmentalization. In this state of “spiritual compartmentalization”, Igbo women have revealed that they navigate both traditional/Odinani and Christian spiritualities, side by side but separately, to respond to the push and pull that accompanies the goal of colonial modernity, while sustaining traditional existence and utility. This research draws on an African decolonial feminist approach and explores how historical trauma from colonization reshaped gendered power, relegating Igbo indigenous/traditional spiritual practices to the margins while privileging western forms of religiosity as “civilized.” My analysis situates spirituality as a locus of gendered power and resistance, proposing that the negotiation of dual spiritual identities reflects both the persistence, and adaptability of Igbo cosmologies and their reconfiguration in postcolonial Nigeria. In doing so, this work reclaims the validity of traditional gendered spiritualities and challenges the ongoing coloniality that continues to delegitimize African women’s authority in both spiritual and cultural spheres. Ultimately, this thesis aims to contribute to African decolonial feminist scholarship by reclaiming the epistemic and spiritual legacies of Igbo women. I insist that the unique survival and persistence of traditional Igbo spiritual rituals, serve as acts of remembrance and resistance against colonial erasure, while foregrounding a holistic cosmology where Igbo women are active custodians of spiritual knowledge, agency, and power.
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Capital and race in an age of financialized urbanization
(2026-03-10) Mikhail, Melody; Peake, Linda J.
This thesis reframes the question of value within a financialized, urbanized and racializing mode of social organization, to re-animate the radical political stakes of Marxian theory for our time. I argue that the current moment needs a reconsideration of wage-labour within the Marxian labour theory of value to make a more ‘unitary’ theory of value possible, which does not relegate race to an ‘extra-economic’ factor external to Marx’s critique. To do this, I bring together urban political economy, critical urban racial capitalist analysis, Black Studies and feminist social reproduction analysis, to demonstrate that capital should be understood today as what philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva terms a “juridico-economic” relation rather than a purely economic one. Through four interconnected chapters, I show how financialization and urbanization foreground property ownership, and the commodification of the asset-form, for coordinating value-in-process (Chapter 1). This contemporary situation demands we expand beyond narrowly examining capitalism’s class dynamics to consider more broadly how class-stratified society reproduces itself, with the fundamental tension existing between those who own and those who do not. With this central opposition in view, I then turn to examine contemporary critical urban racial capitalist analysis, which inadequately reconciles race with a Marxian class critique by treating it as supplementary to economic class relations (Chapter 2). I suggest that instead, the Afropessimist challenge must be addressed should the radical potentialities of a Marxian labour theory of value be preserved. Specifically, Afropessimism challenges the metaphysics of self-recognition that Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish is based in, which holds that the dis-alienation of labour-power is only made possible by regaining self-ownership. But this perspective disavows the ongoing inheritance of the juridical realities of slavery, which denies the possibility of self-ownership to many (Chapter 3). This disavowal even animates more expansive feminist theories of social reproduction, which by uncritically accepting the labour theory of value, reproduce heteronormative methodological nationalisms, or global theories of class that subordinate race to class. Instead, I claim that the critical paradigm of ‘mobilities,’ understood as juridically delimited degrees of the freedom to live, is a more appropriate framing to articulate the political stakes of labour and its commodification within the urban reproduction of value-in-process today that does not reproduce the disavowal of constitutive juridicality (Chapter 4).
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The Death of Subculture: Abstracted Digital Embodiments of Desire
(2025-11-11) Nelson, Jade ZiHan Beth; Mulé, Nick J.
The internet has become the primary method for connecting people, sharing information and exchanging cultural content on both a global and local level, with Queer digital publics attempting to capture the plurality and temporality of subcultural Queer life. This paper, however, will focus on the limitations and boundaries of these Queer digital publics, and the ways in which they contribute to and produce globalized homonationalism, transhistorical narratives and erode local identities, in attempt to create a universalized Queer identity and an imagined liberation. These manufactured nationalist formations inscribe and validate subjecthood through the engendering, absorption, erasure and disenfranchisement of racial-others to whom are typically farthest from whiteness, leading to the seeming retreatment of local and regional memories and subcultures. Using metaphorical archives and the concept of myth, mythos, ands mythologies, I will argue that Queer mythos is generated thought the assemblages of collective ownership and the binding between metaphorical archives and memory markets and will examine how these myths develop through different digital mediums. Additionally, this paper will consider the ways in which ephemera and aesthetics, through fashion, can construct cultural canon, memory production, and the global circulation of desire. New digital traditions could show the West how little we actually know about Queer life and subcultures, supporting comprehensive coverage for those who do not associate with Queerness but experience ideality relevant to where they may exist.
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Translating Celestial Solidarity: Diasporic Chinese Alignments with Indigenous Struggles in Aotearoa New Zealand and so-called Canada
(2025-07-23) Fu, Mengzhu; Dua, Enakshi
In conditions of ongoing colonization and Indigenous resurgence, non-Indigenous peoples of colour have had to confront their positionality, complicity, and responsibilities to Indigenous peoples. In the past two decades, there has been growing support and attention from Chinese diasporas towards Indigenous struggles in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and so-called Canada. To strengthen Indigenous and diasporic Chinese solidarities, this dissertation explores how Chinese diasporic peoples have come to align with decolonization and Indigenous movements, how place-based histories influence Chinese and Indigenous relations and solidarity, and the potentials of transnational exchanges of strategies between Chinese diasporas. Using interdisciplinary qualitative and arts-based methods drawing from autoethnography, interviews, and focus groups involving 46 participants, I synthesized learnings into an aspirational framework I call ‘celestial solidarity.’ ‘Celestial’ was used as a racial slur against early Chinese immigrants. I reclaim this term to draw wisdom from the skies and to argue that thinking through celestiality allows us to take an approach that recognizes multiple co-existing ontologies, and respect the independence of Indigenous nations while attending to the interdependence of life and liberation. I draw out the key themes into three tenets and practices of ‘celestial’ solidarity: 1) honouring all that is unseen, including the spiritual realm, the ancestors, and the unconscious, 2) integrating spatial and temporal solidarity and 3) generating portals between worlds and beyond borders - this is a call for transnational relationship-building and internationalism to ‘fight colonialism from East to West.’ I argue that the practice of translation, in the most expansive sense, is central to all three tenets to foster Indigenous understandings of the land, and build power and solidarity locally and transnationally.
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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.
Access status: 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.
Access status: 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.
Access status: 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.
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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.
Access status: 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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