Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies by Subject "Affect"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Frictions and Flows: Affective Economies of Fire Dance in the Thai Tourism Industry(2018-11-21) Pollock, Tiffany Rae; Murray, David A. B.This dissertation examines Thai fire dance, a form of labour in the Thai tourist industry, as a platform through which fire dancers confront and negotiate the tensions of increasing tourism, marginalization, capitalist expansion and neoliberal ideologies. In particular, this research highlights the ways in which affective, embodied and spatialized practices in fire art communities form political interventions and group solidarities that are also intimately entangled in the reproduction and recreation of social hierarchies and unequal relations of power. While fire dance communities hold utopic potentials and moments of sharing across spectrums of social difference that allow for the reimagination of geopolitical, cultural and ethnonational boundaries, they are also spaces and practices fully implicated in the issues they seek to address. The affect born and danced into being in these communities is the nexus through which these complex negotiations are worked out through the body, and is the basis for micropolitical and messy solidarities to form in the midst of capitalist and neoliberal times and spaces.Item 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.