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pheloniusfriar) wrote2014-12-14 11:08 pm
pheloniusfriar) wrote2014-12-14 11:08 pm
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A first year exam...
I am still trying to get around to posting about the rest of my last trip to Germany... before my next trip to Germany in 5 weeks... but I dug down to the surface of the desk in my room and found a sheet of paper that reminded me I had wanted to post some definitions and a (very) short essay I had to write out for an exam in a first year feminist studies class I took a couple of summers ago (I only have one more core course, that I'm taking next term, and then a handful of electives and I will have completed the requirements for a degree in the subject... this class was also a required class for the degree program). I just tallied my marks from the latest course I took (WGST4804: Digital Lives in Global Spaces), and it looks like my final mark is going to be an A. Now if only I could pull a few of those with my physics degree ;). With any further adieu, here are some definitions and a short essay.
Define each of the following terms in paragraph-length answers: 1) Reproductive Justice, 2) Rape Culture, 3) Compulsory Able-Bodiedness, 4) Queer, 5) Fatphobia.
Reproductive Justice: This term was used by indigenous and women of colour in the US instead of the mainstream feminist term “reproductive rights” to explicitly acknowledge that many, or most, women are denied rights, or even anything but the most constrained of choices, when it comes to issues around reproduction due to “inequities inherent in our society’s institutions, environment, economics, and culture” (Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice). Where the rights discourse has focused on how to enshrine protections for women bodies, sexuality, and reproduction into the institutions and laws of our society, the reproductive justice movement uses an intersectional approach to recognize the rights movement’s reliance on patriarchal power structures (to enforce what it deems as justice) is inherently flawed and exclusionary, and so seeks to create an alternate discourse that will respect the differences and unique epistomologies of all women. By recognizing the unique stories of every woman, normative patriarchal gender roles are thus resisted. As examples of patriarchal and unjust practices, SisterSong notes “forced breeding programs for African-Americans that took place in plantation slave economies, non-consensual sterilization abuse of Indigenous women, African-American women and Latina women, testing of hormonal birth control on Puerto Rican women, continued disproportionate prescriptions of long-acting, arguably unsafe, hormonal birth control to women of color and welfare ‘reform’ that limits social assistance to women who have ‘too many’ children”. (Musial)
Rape Culture: Rape culture is a system of power in place to help maintain the hegemonic gender oppressions of both women and men required for the perpetuation of patriarchal societies. The use of the term rape culture moves past the mainstream discourse that women (and non-conforming men) “are raped”, to a position that says they must be raped to maintain the status quo. It therefore suggests the solution is not to teach women how to defend themselves, but rather that the very foundations of our society needs to be deconstructed and acted against. To maintain rape culture, this pervasive violence must be trivialized by the media as both unfortunate and unavoidable, and blame must be placed squarely on the victim for such acts – and they must also be blamed for their further transgressions in coming forward about it or becoming visible by failing to survive mentally or physically. An example of rape culture was given in the article by Boswell and Spade that discussed fraternities in US colleges where “1 out of 4 college women say they were raped or experienced an attempted rape, and 1 out of 12 college men say they forced a woman to have sexual intercourse against her will” (Boswell and Spade). As Doe says, to conform, “rape victims are supposed to be helpless. We require assistance and must play a passive role while the good men, the police, lawyers and judges, punish the one, isolated bad man who committed the crime” (Doe). Feminists resist this culture by demonstrating that is is not bad men that are responsible, but society as a whole, for rape as an accepted tool of asserting and maintaining hegemonic masculinity.
Compulsory Able-Bodiedness: To participate fully in our neoliberal hypercapitalist hegemonic patriarchal society, one must be completely able-bodied (and able-minded, and able-classed, and able-gendered, and able-coloured... all of which are critiques that the term “able-bodiedness” is exclusionary and prefaced on a particular discourse of disability/ability). While the string of adjectives used above seems somewhat abstract, our gendered bodies intersect deeply with each of those systems of power/oppression and understanding those intersections are critical to understanding how able-bodiedness gets constructed and maintained, and how then to challenge this rejection of natural human diversity. “Disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations; second, it is a relationship between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self. [...] the disability system functions to preserve and validate such privileged designations as beautiful, healthy, normal, fit, competent, intelligent — all of which provide cultural capital to those [...] who can reside within these subject positions.” (Garland-Thomson). McRuer suggests that queer theory is already developing tools to challenge compulsory able-bodiedness and that it is “thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness: that, in fact, compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness, and visa versa” (McRuer).
queer adj. 1. unnatural; odd; eccentric. 2. [slang] a. (esp. of a man) homosexual. b. of or pertaining to a homosexual or homosexuals. Although in recent years gay people have appropriated the word queer to refer to themselves, its use by others is still often offensive. 3. shady; suspect; of questionable character. trans. verb [slang] spoil; put out of order. (Barber) While this definition is taken straight from a dictionary, it captures several key elements of queerness. First, there is the notion that things that are queer are somehow deviant and unnatural, of suspect character, and are somehow dangerous. The definition also (somewhat surprisingly because of the context it provides) captures the fact that queer and queerness has been reappropriated by those against whom it was historically a slur. Further, it speaks to the subversive poststructuralist agenda of that reappropriation by a self-conscious and self-labeled self-othering that places queer as a location situated against dominant discourses of oppression and marginalization. Queer insists on the celebration of diversity in the face of hegemonic gender, and acknowledges that deviance is normal and conformity is constructed and oppressive. Sullivan writes “there are no objective and universal truths, but that particular forms of knowledge, and the ways of being they engender, becomes ‘naturalised’, in culturally and historically specific ways [...] thus making particular relationships, lifestyles, and identities, seem natural, ahistorical, and universal” (Sullivan). As such, queer is both a world view and an important critical social analysis tool.
Fatphobia: Literally, it is the fear of fatness. It is the terror of visibly being the wrong size, of taking up too much space, of being seen, of failing to conform, of being unable to dominate one’s own body, of being what we are told by our neoliberal society is the most offensive form of unhealthy. Media images on all sides tell us all that being skinny is the only way to conform, the only way to be beautiful, the only way to demonstrate our status and productivity, and the only way for women especially to perform their assigned gender role. “Our real human bodies are exceedingly diverse [...] and they are constantly changing. Yet many cultures, especially modern commercial cultures, do not seem to absorb or reflect these simple facts. Instead they idealize the human body” (Wendell). Wendell uses the term “rejected body” to “refer to those aspects of bodily life”, “bodily appearance”, and “bodily experience [...] that are feared, ignored, despised and/or rejected in a society” (Wendell). In our hegemonic society, if you are not skinny (conforming to the constructed idealization of the human body), then you are fat and are therefore transgressive and noncompliant and of the other. Fatphobia drives women of all ages to discipline their bodies and drives some to deadly obsession with their weight.
In a 2 page handwritten essay, reflect on how the terms you’ve just defined can help you develop a set of ideas that draw links between society, power relations, and one’s physical body. What are the themes that link these terms to each other? How can these themes be used to build a set of ideas about gender that are informed by feminist thinking? How can these terms be used to challenge normative ways of thinking? In your answer, you must make reference to the terms but do not need to define them. No outside sources are needed.
Through all of the terms we were required to define (reproductive justice, rape culture, compulsory able-bodiedness, queer, and fatphobia), Foucault’s themes of social authority creating and enforcing docile bodies through the use of hegemonic power structures and the social panopticon are central. In each of the cases examined, terms created by feminists were used in resistance instead of continuing to use and reinforce the language used in dominant patriarchal discourses. For instance, the term “rape culture” is used to indicate there is a societal/cultural institution being discussed that effects everyone, of all genders – whereas the term “rape” implies something done to one person, that it is an individual experience, that it is somehow a deviant act rather than a cornerstone of maintaining our society. By using new language, poststructural/postmodern distance can be created from the current status quo that can provide the space needed to explore and understand the mechanisms and ultimately the sources of the many intersecting systems of oppression used to maintain patriarchal power, and look back in on who benefits from this culture and how and to what end.
The key tools used in the fight against coercive binary representations of all aspects of social integration and individual embodiment are intersectional and postmodernist analysis, the recognition and celebration of diversity (e.g. queer theory), using critical discourse as a means of uncovering and rejecting essentialist/stereotyped thinking, and actively countering the Euro-centric liberal/individualist/colonial/imperialist set in motion during the so-called Age of Enlightenment with the recognition that much of our behaviour and beliefs have been socially constructed for the benefit of those whose power is dependent on the perpetuation of Western patriarchy. Intersectionality recognizes that each of us presents, performs, and embodies multiple identities in concert with those around us and the institutions of society. It insists that we are not defined by our class, our race, our gender, our sexuality, our age, our ethnicity, our level of able-bodiedness, our weight, our nationality, our attractiveness, etc. Rather, intersectionality says we are a complex embodiment and representation of all of these things and more, each facet of which intersects with the innumerable systems of control and oppression imposed on each of us. It further states that attempting to address any one system of oppressive power will not result in anyone being freed from oppression, but that we need to fight the roots of oppressive/coercive power that manifests itself in so many different ways. Queer theory posits that one requirement to win this struggle is to critique the very notion of definable “identity” as an either/or category (that we are male or female, straight or gay, white or non-white, able-bodied or disabled, thin or fat), and recast all identity-based discourses in terms of difference and spectral, dynamic and shifting, location. Postmodernist analysis is used to make visible the normative mythologies that are constructed to act as idealized representations of who and what we must be to be successful and fully included in this society – the template we must bend ourselves to in order to share in and benefit from the power and wealth that is supposed to come with inclusion in the status quo. These normative representations are supposed to be both invisible to those participating in its ongoing discursive reconstitution, and impossible to achieve so it remains an all-consuming pursuit to the detriment of realizing any form of social justice. By identifying the way patriarchy is generated and maintained, strategies can be devised to expose and resist. One particularly powerful means of achieving these goals is through the use of social critical theory (which leverages poststructuralist/postmodernist theory in particular) to demonstrates that the oppressions that are lived by all of us who live in this patriarchy are not generated by other individuals around us, but by institutionalized oppression created by society itself, and within which we each operate – supporting or resisting on a case-by-case basis unless we have had our consciousness raised through contact with other people and groups that have been able to see through the coherent fabrications we are bombarded with from all sides at all times.
Third wave feminism places itself in direct opposition to the discourses that sustain our patriarchal society. By showing that seeking reproductive rights within the patriarchal legal and nation-state (and even pan-national) systems is a misdirection (as Audre Lorde famously stated: “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”), but rather we need to seek reproductive justice by achieving an understanding of why and how that justice has been and continues to be denied with the ultimate goal of supporting maximally unconstrained, equitable, and informed access to choice. By showing that rape is not an individual event but a systemic institution required for the enforcement of hegemonic gender expression, it becomes a problem that affects us all in every aspect of our lives. By pointing out that a myth of compliant, and fleeting, able-embodiment underlies access to the public spheres of liberal/neoliberal/capitalist life, we again show that disability is not a manifestation of the individual, but rather a construct of our society. The same argument is now being made for the culture of thinness that has so crippled and obsessed our society (and is now being actively and effectively exported to other cultures around the world to help build more consumer-fundamentalist societies), and has led to our near ubiquitous fear of being seen as fat (regardless of our actual weight or level of fitness or health). Queer theory and the queering of identities, which began around gender and sexual politics, has leveraged intersectional analysis to grow into a powerful strategy to resist oppressive power structures that rely on hierarchies, binary categorizations, and essentialist social constructions. Feminism is in a profoundly transitional stage at the moment, but the many ongoing projects of generating alternate discourses that challenge patriarchal structures, while disjoint at this stage, seem to be cross-linking and producing effective means of disrupting the innumerable cultures of oppression we participate in (again, whether supporting or resisting) every instance of our lives.
Works Cited
Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. ‘A New Vision for Advancing Our Movement for Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice’. 2005. Print.
Barber, Katherine, ed. Canadian Oxford Dictionary. 2nd Edition. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
Boswell, A. Ayres, and Joan Z. Spade. ‘Fraternities and Collegiate Rape Culture: Why Are Some Fraternities More Dangerous Places for Women?’ Gender and Society 10.2 (1996): 133–147. Print.
Doe, Jane. ‘The Ultimate Rape Victim’. Open Boundaries: a Canadian Women’s Studies Reader. Ed. Lise Gotell & Barbara A Crow. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. 216–221. Print.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. ‘Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory’. Gendering Disability. New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 73–103. Print.
McRuer, Robert. ‘Introduction: Compulstory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence’. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 1–32. Print. Cultural Front.
Musial, Jennifer. ‘Different Songs, Same Harmony: SisterSong’s Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective’. The 21st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How to Do It. Ed. Andrea O’Reilly. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2011. 76–88. Print.
Sullivan, Nikki. ‘Queer: A Question of Being or a Question of Doing?’ A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 37–56. Print.
Wendell, Susan. ‘The Flight from the Rejected Body’. Open Boundaries: a Canadian Women’s Studies Reader. Ed. Lise Gotell & Barbara A Crow. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. 245–251. Print.
Non course readings used:
Barber, Katherine, ed. Canadian Oxford Dictionary. 2nd Edition. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. ‘A New Vision for Advancing Our Movement for Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice’. 2005. Print.
Define each of the following terms in paragraph-length answers: 1) Reproductive Justice, 2) Rape Culture, 3) Compulsory Able-Bodiedness, 4) Queer, 5) Fatphobia.
Reproductive Justice: This term was used by indigenous and women of colour in the US instead of the mainstream feminist term “reproductive rights” to explicitly acknowledge that many, or most, women are denied rights, or even anything but the most constrained of choices, when it comes to issues around reproduction due to “inequities inherent in our society’s institutions, environment, economics, and culture” (Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice). Where the rights discourse has focused on how to enshrine protections for women bodies, sexuality, and reproduction into the institutions and laws of our society, the reproductive justice movement uses an intersectional approach to recognize the rights movement’s reliance on patriarchal power structures (to enforce what it deems as justice) is inherently flawed and exclusionary, and so seeks to create an alternate discourse that will respect the differences and unique epistomologies of all women. By recognizing the unique stories of every woman, normative patriarchal gender roles are thus resisted. As examples of patriarchal and unjust practices, SisterSong notes “forced breeding programs for African-Americans that took place in plantation slave economies, non-consensual sterilization abuse of Indigenous women, African-American women and Latina women, testing of hormonal birth control on Puerto Rican women, continued disproportionate prescriptions of long-acting, arguably unsafe, hormonal birth control to women of color and welfare ‘reform’ that limits social assistance to women who have ‘too many’ children”. (Musial)
Rape Culture: Rape culture is a system of power in place to help maintain the hegemonic gender oppressions of both women and men required for the perpetuation of patriarchal societies. The use of the term rape culture moves past the mainstream discourse that women (and non-conforming men) “are raped”, to a position that says they must be raped to maintain the status quo. It therefore suggests the solution is not to teach women how to defend themselves, but rather that the very foundations of our society needs to be deconstructed and acted against. To maintain rape culture, this pervasive violence must be trivialized by the media as both unfortunate and unavoidable, and blame must be placed squarely on the victim for such acts – and they must also be blamed for their further transgressions in coming forward about it or becoming visible by failing to survive mentally or physically. An example of rape culture was given in the article by Boswell and Spade that discussed fraternities in US colleges where “1 out of 4 college women say they were raped or experienced an attempted rape, and 1 out of 12 college men say they forced a woman to have sexual intercourse against her will” (Boswell and Spade). As Doe says, to conform, “rape victims are supposed to be helpless. We require assistance and must play a passive role while the good men, the police, lawyers and judges, punish the one, isolated bad man who committed the crime” (Doe). Feminists resist this culture by demonstrating that is is not bad men that are responsible, but society as a whole, for rape as an accepted tool of asserting and maintaining hegemonic masculinity.
Compulsory Able-Bodiedness: To participate fully in our neoliberal hypercapitalist hegemonic patriarchal society, one must be completely able-bodied (and able-minded, and able-classed, and able-gendered, and able-coloured... all of which are critiques that the term “able-bodiedness” is exclusionary and prefaced on a particular discourse of disability/ability). While the string of adjectives used above seems somewhat abstract, our gendered bodies intersect deeply with each of those systems of power/oppression and understanding those intersections are critical to understanding how able-bodiedness gets constructed and maintained, and how then to challenge this rejection of natural human diversity. “Disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations; second, it is a relationship between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self. [...] the disability system functions to preserve and validate such privileged designations as beautiful, healthy, normal, fit, competent, intelligent — all of which provide cultural capital to those [...] who can reside within these subject positions.” (Garland-Thomson). McRuer suggests that queer theory is already developing tools to challenge compulsory able-bodiedness and that it is “thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness: that, in fact, compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness, and visa versa” (McRuer).
queer adj. 1. unnatural; odd; eccentric. 2. [slang] a. (esp. of a man) homosexual. b. of or pertaining to a homosexual or homosexuals. Although in recent years gay people have appropriated the word queer to refer to themselves, its use by others is still often offensive. 3. shady; suspect; of questionable character. trans. verb [slang] spoil; put out of order. (Barber) While this definition is taken straight from a dictionary, it captures several key elements of queerness. First, there is the notion that things that are queer are somehow deviant and unnatural, of suspect character, and are somehow dangerous. The definition also (somewhat surprisingly because of the context it provides) captures the fact that queer and queerness has been reappropriated by those against whom it was historically a slur. Further, it speaks to the subversive poststructuralist agenda of that reappropriation by a self-conscious and self-labeled self-othering that places queer as a location situated against dominant discourses of oppression and marginalization. Queer insists on the celebration of diversity in the face of hegemonic gender, and acknowledges that deviance is normal and conformity is constructed and oppressive. Sullivan writes “there are no objective and universal truths, but that particular forms of knowledge, and the ways of being they engender, becomes ‘naturalised’, in culturally and historically specific ways [...] thus making particular relationships, lifestyles, and identities, seem natural, ahistorical, and universal” (Sullivan). As such, queer is both a world view and an important critical social analysis tool.
Fatphobia: Literally, it is the fear of fatness. It is the terror of visibly being the wrong size, of taking up too much space, of being seen, of failing to conform, of being unable to dominate one’s own body, of being what we are told by our neoliberal society is the most offensive form of unhealthy. Media images on all sides tell us all that being skinny is the only way to conform, the only way to be beautiful, the only way to demonstrate our status and productivity, and the only way for women especially to perform their assigned gender role. “Our real human bodies are exceedingly diverse [...] and they are constantly changing. Yet many cultures, especially modern commercial cultures, do not seem to absorb or reflect these simple facts. Instead they idealize the human body” (Wendell). Wendell uses the term “rejected body” to “refer to those aspects of bodily life”, “bodily appearance”, and “bodily experience [...] that are feared, ignored, despised and/or rejected in a society” (Wendell). In our hegemonic society, if you are not skinny (conforming to the constructed idealization of the human body), then you are fat and are therefore transgressive and noncompliant and of the other. Fatphobia drives women of all ages to discipline their bodies and drives some to deadly obsession with their weight.
In a 2 page handwritten essay, reflect on how the terms you’ve just defined can help you develop a set of ideas that draw links between society, power relations, and one’s physical body. What are the themes that link these terms to each other? How can these themes be used to build a set of ideas about gender that are informed by feminist thinking? How can these terms be used to challenge normative ways of thinking? In your answer, you must make reference to the terms but do not need to define them. No outside sources are needed.
Through all of the terms we were required to define (reproductive justice, rape culture, compulsory able-bodiedness, queer, and fatphobia), Foucault’s themes of social authority creating and enforcing docile bodies through the use of hegemonic power structures and the social panopticon are central. In each of the cases examined, terms created by feminists were used in resistance instead of continuing to use and reinforce the language used in dominant patriarchal discourses. For instance, the term “rape culture” is used to indicate there is a societal/cultural institution being discussed that effects everyone, of all genders – whereas the term “rape” implies something done to one person, that it is an individual experience, that it is somehow a deviant act rather than a cornerstone of maintaining our society. By using new language, poststructural/postmodern distance can be created from the current status quo that can provide the space needed to explore and understand the mechanisms and ultimately the sources of the many intersecting systems of oppression used to maintain patriarchal power, and look back in on who benefits from this culture and how and to what end.
The key tools used in the fight against coercive binary representations of all aspects of social integration and individual embodiment are intersectional and postmodernist analysis, the recognition and celebration of diversity (e.g. queer theory), using critical discourse as a means of uncovering and rejecting essentialist/stereotyped thinking, and actively countering the Euro-centric liberal/individualist/colonial/imperialist set in motion during the so-called Age of Enlightenment with the recognition that much of our behaviour and beliefs have been socially constructed for the benefit of those whose power is dependent on the perpetuation of Western patriarchy. Intersectionality recognizes that each of us presents, performs, and embodies multiple identities in concert with those around us and the institutions of society. It insists that we are not defined by our class, our race, our gender, our sexuality, our age, our ethnicity, our level of able-bodiedness, our weight, our nationality, our attractiveness, etc. Rather, intersectionality says we are a complex embodiment and representation of all of these things and more, each facet of which intersects with the innumerable systems of control and oppression imposed on each of us. It further states that attempting to address any one system of oppressive power will not result in anyone being freed from oppression, but that we need to fight the roots of oppressive/coercive power that manifests itself in so many different ways. Queer theory posits that one requirement to win this struggle is to critique the very notion of definable “identity” as an either/or category (that we are male or female, straight or gay, white or non-white, able-bodied or disabled, thin or fat), and recast all identity-based discourses in terms of difference and spectral, dynamic and shifting, location. Postmodernist analysis is used to make visible the normative mythologies that are constructed to act as idealized representations of who and what we must be to be successful and fully included in this society – the template we must bend ourselves to in order to share in and benefit from the power and wealth that is supposed to come with inclusion in the status quo. These normative representations are supposed to be both invisible to those participating in its ongoing discursive reconstitution, and impossible to achieve so it remains an all-consuming pursuit to the detriment of realizing any form of social justice. By identifying the way patriarchy is generated and maintained, strategies can be devised to expose and resist. One particularly powerful means of achieving these goals is through the use of social critical theory (which leverages poststructuralist/postmodernist theory in particular) to demonstrates that the oppressions that are lived by all of us who live in this patriarchy are not generated by other individuals around us, but by institutionalized oppression created by society itself, and within which we each operate – supporting or resisting on a case-by-case basis unless we have had our consciousness raised through contact with other people and groups that have been able to see through the coherent fabrications we are bombarded with from all sides at all times.
Third wave feminism places itself in direct opposition to the discourses that sustain our patriarchal society. By showing that seeking reproductive rights within the patriarchal legal and nation-state (and even pan-national) systems is a misdirection (as Audre Lorde famously stated: “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”), but rather we need to seek reproductive justice by achieving an understanding of why and how that justice has been and continues to be denied with the ultimate goal of supporting maximally unconstrained, equitable, and informed access to choice. By showing that rape is not an individual event but a systemic institution required for the enforcement of hegemonic gender expression, it becomes a problem that affects us all in every aspect of our lives. By pointing out that a myth of compliant, and fleeting, able-embodiment underlies access to the public spheres of liberal/neoliberal/capitalist life, we again show that disability is not a manifestation of the individual, but rather a construct of our society. The same argument is now being made for the culture of thinness that has so crippled and obsessed our society (and is now being actively and effectively exported to other cultures around the world to help build more consumer-fundamentalist societies), and has led to our near ubiquitous fear of being seen as fat (regardless of our actual weight or level of fitness or health). Queer theory and the queering of identities, which began around gender and sexual politics, has leveraged intersectional analysis to grow into a powerful strategy to resist oppressive power structures that rely on hierarchies, binary categorizations, and essentialist social constructions. Feminism is in a profoundly transitional stage at the moment, but the many ongoing projects of generating alternate discourses that challenge patriarchal structures, while disjoint at this stage, seem to be cross-linking and producing effective means of disrupting the innumerable cultures of oppression we participate in (again, whether supporting or resisting) every instance of our lives.
Works Cited
Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. ‘A New Vision for Advancing Our Movement for Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice’. 2005. Print.
Barber, Katherine, ed. Canadian Oxford Dictionary. 2nd Edition. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
Boswell, A. Ayres, and Joan Z. Spade. ‘Fraternities and Collegiate Rape Culture: Why Are Some Fraternities More Dangerous Places for Women?’ Gender and Society 10.2 (1996): 133–147. Print.
Doe, Jane. ‘The Ultimate Rape Victim’. Open Boundaries: a Canadian Women’s Studies Reader. Ed. Lise Gotell & Barbara A Crow. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. 216–221. Print.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. ‘Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory’. Gendering Disability. New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 73–103. Print.
McRuer, Robert. ‘Introduction: Compulstory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence’. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 1–32. Print. Cultural Front.
Musial, Jennifer. ‘Different Songs, Same Harmony: SisterSong’s Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective’. The 21st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How to Do It. Ed. Andrea O’Reilly. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2011. 76–88. Print.
Sullivan, Nikki. ‘Queer: A Question of Being or a Question of Doing?’ A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 37–56. Print.
Wendell, Susan. ‘The Flight from the Rejected Body’. Open Boundaries: a Canadian Women’s Studies Reader. Ed. Lise Gotell & Barbara A Crow. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. 245–251. Print.
Non course readings used:
Barber, Katherine, ed. Canadian Oxford Dictionary. 2nd Edition. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. ‘A New Vision for Advancing Our Movement for Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice’. 2005. Print.