Presentation Descriptions
Day 1
Friday, August 16
‘Girl-’ Discourse: Constructions of Feminine Identity by the Digital Generation
Charlotte Alcon, Florida State University
‘Girl dinner’, ‘girl math’, ‘hot girl walks’, and more have become colloquialisms in recent years with regular appearances on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. While oftentimes perceived as isolated and lighthearted fads, trends such as these are in reality functioning as part of a larger movement in which social media users attempt to define girlhood via specific actions and behaviors. This paper aims to analyze these trends as a digital and collective construction of gender spearheaded by the younger generations which comes as a direct response to the increasingly misogynistic and hostile political and cultural climates of today. The analysis begins by identifying and defining several of these trends in isolation, before synthesizing them into one cohesive and identifiable movement. The research borrows gender theory from the likes of Judith Butler, Candace West and Don Zimmerman, and others to explain exactly how this movement constructs gender in such a way and why its members feel these constructions to be necessary. In tandem with this theory, modern political and cultural climates are recognized as a possible impetus for such trends. While the potential advantages and drawbacks of the movement are acknowledged, this paper seeks to situate it as a celebration of femininity which owes itself to its generational predecessors in the form of the larger feminist movement. The paper will be presented as a talk supplemented with a PowerPoint that references images, quotes, etc. which support the primary claims of its argument.
Generating the Feminine and the Feminist: The Critical Possibilities of Beauty Bloggers and Vloggers
Michele White, Tulane University
Feminist scholarship and women’s online beauty cultures, while not always having the same interests, often address the part that femininity plays in generating, regulating, and delighting women. Feminists, including Susan Brownmiller and Susan Bordo, sometimes understand normative Western femininity as a cultural category that forms and controls women. Research by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Michele White, and others addresses such concerns while demonstrating how some women use beauty as generative methods of working within cultural limitations. In addition, Paula Black and Ursula Sharma and Anna Everett foreground the pleasures in articulating sites for less normative forms of beauty, including naturalistas’ hair vlogging. These researchers and Miliann Kang ask how such frameworks are sometimes linked to increased evaluations and labor expectations. In this research presentation, I focus on how women produce feminist and feminine nail blog and vlog posts as methods of articulating their identities and asserting expertise. I argue that this culture is generative, including foregrounding productive (and production) outcomes and intergenerational dialogues. These bloggers also critique some aspects of feminine culture and identify the expectations that prevent them from moving beyond certain applications and norms. Such cultural structures include the association of short and medium-length fingernails and traditional nail shapes with normative and white femininity. Long nails, duck and talon shaped fingernails, and jewels and other forms of decorations are sometimes correlated with raced subjects and denigrated. Classism can also be evoked in evaluations of hand poses, cuticle maintenance, and other aesthetic interests. Journalists may ignore these strictures when arguing that nail art is the only form of women’s grooming that isn’t organized around men’s interests and articulation of women as objects. However, such arguments about the ways nail art and artists can produce different gender positions and relations also suggest important ways of thinking about nail blogs, and feminist beauty vlogging more broadly. This includes emphasizing nail artists’ and beauty influencers’ expertise, embodiment, and foregrounding of the labor of and interests in their own hands (and nails). This research is informed by Sara Ahmed and is an elaboration of her concept of the willful arm (and hand and fingernail) that will not belong to others or be pushed down. I use Ahmed and these other referenced feminist frameworks to consider how women nail art bloggers’ and vloggers’ hands and nails are conceptually connected when they generate and reproduce work and recode femininity and bodily positions. I conclude by theorizing how these producers’ representations of feminine arms and nails politically function.
Generating Techno-femininity: Putting the Sparkle in the Machine in Online Pink PC Build Videos
Stephanie Harkin, RMIT
Where women were once historically at the forefront of computer programming, contemporary tech culture erases their participation. Today, however, tech-competency is showcased as feminine in online pink PC build videos shared on YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok. These videos contest dominant narratives that attach tech culture to geek masculinity (Jovic, 2023; Wajcman, 1991), especially emphasised through their embracing of hyperfeminine aesthetics. Generally speaking, computers in culture have symbolically epitomised modernity’s principals of rationality. Feminist scholars have moreover long noted STEM’s perceived alignment with this culturally masculinised virtue, and so it has hence been deemed incompatible with the irrational and emotionally-driven realm of femininity (Keller, 1985; Wajcman, 1991). Yet the PCs I examine embrace excess; they sparkle, dazzle, and enchant, exciting these binary boundaries. I argue that technological objects and cultures imbued with femininity encapsulate what I call “techno-femininity,” with the pink PC representing a salient expression of this merging. Techno-femininity overlaps though is detached from gender, and reflects a potential space for agency, expression, and resistance to hegemonic taste values (Sparke, 1996). Yet it diverges from the similarly termed cyber-feminism as it is not necessarily political when found in corporate and postfeminist contexts or practices restricted by economic mobility. To contextualise pink PC build videos, this paper introduces an earlier but interrelated iteration of techno-femininity in Apple’s iMac G3 series. The G3 holds a sustained legacy for feminine cultural generation and tech competency—its alluring transparent shell design carries over into the design of PC builds. Tracing the pink PC from the G3 to PC builds demonstrates the affective pleasures and resistant contestations made possible through techno-femininity.
Andi Schwartz, York University; Laura Brightwell, York University; Jenna Danchuk, York University
How can revisiting femme pasts be generative for the femme present and future? In this panel, we will present three papers that consider this question, examining mediated representations of politically charged femme-inist figures. This panel will examine the 1990s queer femme cultural producer in the podcast Still Brazen, the queer child in femme life writing, and “the goddess,” once a figure belonging to a bygone feminist era now re-emerging in the present in new forms. While these feminized figures are products of particular pasts, panelists will argue that revisiting their legacies can inform femme approaches to current and future dilemmas. Still Brazen’s guests revisit selections from the book Brazen Femme and find that issues like sex worker rights, transmisogyny, and fatphobia persist within femme communities, but are reconfigured by more recent cultural currents such as the formation of online community spaces, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the increasingly fascist global context. In the current political climate, the widespread trend to deny trans childrens’ rights pitches the presumably straight parent against the queer child, presenting their needs and desires as mutually exclusive. Revisiting femme writers’ insistence on returning home can inform debates on the viability of recovering the family of origin from its abjection as the site of heteronormativity, especially the hegemonic feminine, in queer studies and culture. Today, a new generation of queer and feminist witches and occult artists re-imagine the divine feminine on their terms, posing the intriguing question of why, despite her problems (Crowley 2011; Eller 2000; Haraway 1985; Puar 2011), does the goddess/xx continue to matter to those who care about gender, sexuality, and de-colonial justice?
Towards an Improbable Second Wave Herstory: The Male-Lesbian and the Salmacis Society’s Femme-Focused Trans Feminism
Chris Aino Pihlak, University of Toronto
What the hell is a male lesbian? Despite the term’s seemingly pejorative meaning, the herstory of this trans feminine subcultural identity re-stories the supposed monolithic transphobia of second wave feminism. Indeed, the genealogy of the male lesbian further illuminates the links between 1970s radical feminist and trans feminine subcultures oft conceived of as siloed groups. For a brief period in the 1970s many trans femmes understood themselves as male lesbians, and so held an imbricated identity which interlinked a womanly gender, male sexed body, lesbian sexuality, and ideological adherence to a uniquely sex-positive, femme-centred, and distinctly trans feminine feminism. Male lesbians were part of a trans feminine subcultural network that interlaced the Anglophone Global North. Male lesbians, supporters, and lovers organized themselves within an organization called the Salmacis Feminist Social Society which at its peak had thousands of members organized into chapters in most major American cities. But they did not limit themselves to trans feminine subcultures. Members forged links with larger second-wave feminist, New Left, swinger, and gay liberation movements. Despite its impact, scholastic analysis of this sex-positive, radical feminist, and trans feminine phenomena is virtually absent. In rectifying this absence, I will sketch the male lesbian’s formative socio-intellectual influences from mid-century trans feminine subcultures, its ontological semiotics, and its main organizational backer the Salmacis Society. It is my hope that this paper disrupts still-present pejorative understandings of second wave feminism as wholly trans misogynistic subcultures, and by doing so invigorate our present feminist generation.
Locating Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation”: Appropriation and Abstraction in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Braedon Balko, York University
Few epigraphs compete in influence with that of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: “‘You are all a lost generation.’ —Gertrude Stein in conversation” (TSAR, 1). Coined to describe the survivors of the postwar period, “the lost generation” has its roots in the talk of a queer Jewish woman but is disseminated in the paratext of a book by a writer who would become a symbol for the overbearing white male subjectivity of the American literature of the 20th century. Such an origin is fitting. The literary project of the canonical lost generation was fundamentally appropriative; T. S. Eliot’s main innovation was polyglot collage, Pound wrote faux translations of poems written in languages he didn’t know, and Stein’s own “Melanctha” is a concerning reproduction of overheard Black registers. The literature of the lost generation is largely predicated on repurposing the language and subjectivities of others towards an avantgarde aesthetic. Instead of exercising the Bakhtinian polyphony of the realist mode, some modernists tended towards abstraction while working with taken language. Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), an experiment in modernist feminist self-writing, offers a complex exemplar of this ethos; it is an autobiography of Stein masquerading as an autobiography of her wife Alice, and Stein appropriates the voice, speech patterns, vocabulary, and narrative styling of Alice B. Toklas to abstract Stein’s own authorship and sense of subjectivity. My paper considers the implications of the above questions from a feminist and materialist hermeneutic, with a focus on form and language, while simultaneously reflecting on the text’s content—the formation, deformation, and disintegration of the “lost generation” as focalized through the combined subjectivities of two queer women. As Marianne DeKoven determines in “Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon,” Stein’s “encoding of lesbian sexual feeling in her experimental work [and] her undoing of patriarchal portraiture in The Autobiography Alice B. Toklas … have made her profoundly important to contemporary feminist experimental writers” (9). The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is complicated in its riposte to the deeply gendered, heteropatriarchal, textually mediated construct of the Victorian “Great Man”. Stein’s critique is not as direct as Lytton Strachey’s in Eminent Victorians; on one hand she clearly subscribes to the 20th century reinvention of the “Great Man” as the cult of genius, but on the other, her text is predicated on an underlying Sapphic framework and a blurring of gender. This mélange of the conservative and the radical is also present in Stein’s insistence on framing Alice as her wife while implicitly accepting the role as husband, suggesting some adherence to heteropatriarchal norms complicated by queerness and gender nonconformity. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas also offers a rare instance in Stein’s oeuvre where her abstractive method results in an emergent femininity. Stein’s grammatical estrangement is, in Autobiography, supplanted with the linguistic focalization of a figure that Stein, perhaps problematically, manifestly associated with the feminine, resulting in a narrative voice that gives insight into Stein’s complex relationship with gender.
Femme Abundance: Black Lesbian World-Making at the End of the World
Guadalupe Ortega, University of California, Santa Barbara
Femmes of color experience paradoxical visibility as they are often hypervisible, yet their femininity is disregarded by mainstream femininity as inauthentic. To retain their memories members of a San Diego older lesbian community established a digital community archival project, “Lesbians of San Diego,” to preserve lesbian culture. LSD’s muse is the lesbian of the 1970s, an aging lesbian who wishes for memorialization before complete memory loss or death. By publishing interviews, photographs, scans, and other memorabilia in the digital space, LSD members hope to not “lose” themselves and their memories. However, this digital archive is accompanied by challenges of racial diversity within the project as there are no Asian lesbians, and only a handful of Black and Latina lesbians, archived on the site. Black and Brown femininities challenge the construction of femininity solely centered on white patriarchal femininity, and this embodiment acts as a form of decolonization. Engaging with a Black lesbian archive grapples with multiple temporalities and informs queer futurity during ever-present apocalyptic times. Through the analysis of the Lesbians of San Diego’s archival records on African American lesbian art and organizations, I argue that a Black lesbian archive focusing on femme abundance creates a world-making project essential to queer environmental futurity. Black femme abundance fixates on healing, joy, and love rather than on attempting to put an end to the apocalypse. Black femmes in the archive ask us: what does it mean to love the apocalypse?
Doll Parts: Generating Feminine Satire under Capitalist Constraints
Alex MacKenzie, York University
What are the possibilities and limitations of what can be generated through popular culture through the medium of film when operating under the capitalist constraints of the film industry and associated capitalist products? This question will be examined within an academic presentation by doing a textual comparison of the films Josie and the Pussycats (2001) and Barbie (2023) to examine how both films operate as loving embraces of feminine coded interests such as pop music and dolls and stories that focus on the power of solidarity and friendship among women while also offering satire on the capitalist industries that produce the central objects at the subject of each film. My essay will also examine the complex relationship both films have with advertising and product placement. By comparing these two texts, we will be able to see how the streaming era and recent developments within the American film industry have redefined the possibilities of feminist critique within mainstream films. Through this presentation, I aim to investigate how the feminine is portrayed in mainstream films in ways that both generate feminist politics as well as capitalist products and the complex relationship between the two.
Birchbark Woman Skin
Jenn Cole, Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies and Trent University
Birchbark Woman Skin is a five minute film following the artist's work repairing a birchbark canoe. As she harvests spruce root, soaks the bark, and stitches jiimaan (canoe), the mixed Algonquin Anishinaabekwe from Kiji Sibi Territory shares family stories, teachings learned from intergenerational birchbark canoe builders, and insights into the consent-seeking, reciprocal friendship between these two femmes, one human, one not. The poetic offering focuses on cultural continuance through ancestral articulations of the artist's body in her home territory and protocols for respectful engagement with feminine bodies. Filmography: Cara Mumford/Score: Traplines.
Femme Friendship and Capitalism: Building Friendship and Abolishing Empire
malia hatico-byrne, San Francisco State University
Thanks to scholars like Ashley Coleman Taylor and Sydney Fonteyn Lewis, the queer, racialized, femmeidentity has gained renewed attention in Queer and Gender Studies, along with a proliferation of social media posts and zines dedicated to “femme friendship. In parallel discourse, numerous scholars explore "queer kinship," and "queer community," though they rarely focus in specifically on friendship, especially for those who identify as femme (Bradway & Freeman, 2022). My presentation addresses the function of friendship in queer communities, specifically for BIPOC femmes. This will be a presentation of my graduate thesis, in which I interviewed 9, self-identified, queer, femmes of color about their experiences with friendship. Following the feminist tradition of the personal essay as resisting patriarchy, I created a collection of essays based on the themes that transpired from interviews and my own experience.
Day 2
Saturday, August 17
“A Girl Resembles a Bunny” Complicating Playboy’s Idealised Construction of Femininity
Daisy McManaman, The University of York
Who is the Playboy woman? Throughout the companies sixty seven year publication history thousands of women graced its pages. Their smiling faces, glistening bodies and smouldering gazes look out through the magazines pages, each one a piece in the legacy of Playboy’s portrayal of feminine sexualities. A legacy which continues to impact how we view and represent feminine sexuality and beauty. Playboy’s vision of idealised femininity was harmful in many ways, in particular how it both reflected and perpetuated limiting beauty standards, and arguably contributed to a culture in which women’s bodies were sexualised for the pleasure of men (Levy 2005, Steinem 1963). However, within Playboy’s history there also exists moments which destabilise readings of Playboy’s representations of women as purely either end of the binary of sexualised/sexually empowered, good/bad, normative/subversive. Instead, this paper seeks to find meanings of complicated empowerment from within Playboy’s history utilising a multi-methodological approach including content analysis both within Playboy’s publication history as well as in other media forms, such as the 2005-2009 reality television series The Girls Next Door, interviews with Playboy staff members, as well as interdisciplinary art making. Literature on themes such as empowerment, class, race, beauty standards, hyper-femininities, critical femininities, and sex work (e.g Hoskin & Blair 2022, Grant 2014, Mac & Smith 2018, McCann 2018, Paasonen et al 2021) will inform a discussion which seeks to answer how are femininities constructed and portrayed in Playboy branded media. Furthermore, from within the patriarchal space of Playboy is it possible for possible for women to express their sexuality and hyper-feminine identities whilst maintaining their agency, and can we utilise representations of women in Playboy as a site for embodied feminine self expression?
Playful Provocations: Reimagining Femininities and Knowledge Transmission Through a Porn Trivia Board Game
Kathleen Cherrington, York University
In a world marked by intergenerational dialogues and the constant renegotiation of cultural norms, this presentation explores the generative capacities of art and popular culture in reshaping perceptions of feminine sexual expression. I designed a “Porn Trivia” board game as a pedagogical tool to delve into the historical and contemporary landscapes of pornography to uncover how it has been instrumental in generating art, resistance, and feminist knowledge across generations. From the Victorian era's clandestine erotic postcards to the overt sexualization in today's media, pornography's evolution mirrors shifting femininities and societal attitudes. My main argument posits “Porn Trivia” is not merely a form of entertainment but a critical intervention into the ways we generate, consume, and transmit feminist and feminine knowledges. Through questions that span historical, cultural, and political spectrums, we facilitate discussions on the generational shifts in femininity's portrayal and the potential of low theory and popular culture in crafting alternative feminist narratives.
Dress Coded: Middle School Girls, Policies of Embodiment, and Agency
Lacey Bobier, University of Toronto Scarborough
Merging in-depth interviews with 34 middle school students and 27 middle school educators with content analysis of 103 middle school handbooks, this study highlights the voices of those whose everyday experiences of embodiment are most shaped by school dress codes: girls. Middle school dress codes produce gender and gender inequality by shaping a girlhood/womanhood that centers on a physical appearance that is constantly monitored and derided. Girls explain that one of the main lessons offered by dress codes is that, as one interviewee asserted, girls “have to deal with being looked at.” Clarifying everyday mechanisms of embodied inequality, this project shows how schools’ practices of body management sexualize and target female-bodied students, shaping their developing sexual subjectivity (i.e. the feeling of control over and pleasure in one’s sexuality). Girls, however, do not mindlessly accept policing and objectification of their bodies. Attending to girls’ accounts of their dress code violations, I show how girls, individually and collectively, negotiate and resist educators’ sexualized treatment of girls, highlighting the agentic, thoughtful choices they make to adhere to or resist dress policies. In so doing, I emphasize the pleasure girls find in their appearance, in supporting each other, and in resisting gendered double standards. Their negotiation and resistance of appearance mandates and accompanying rhetoric offer insight into how today’s young adolescent girls are working to generate a new form of girlhood that recognizes and prioritizes girls’ agency.
Femininities across Orlando: A Meta-Generational Text
Lila Rush, Florida State University
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando opens in the Elizabethan age with the titular character as a young boy; it concludes at the stroke of midnight in 1928, the year the novel was published, and Orlando is a woman. Orlando is the wonderfully queer story of a person who magically changes sex and lives for hundreds of years. As a literary work, Orlando spans generations. It has been taken up by various artists since its inception: it became a blockbuster lm in 1992, directed by Sally Potter, and just last year, leading queer theorist Paul Preciado adapted Orlando for his semi-autobiographical lm, Orlando: My Political Biography (2023). Orlando, then, is a meta-generational text--- one which each generation takes up to reexamine its gender moment. As we approach Orlando’s centennial, it is crucial to bring the novel and its iterations to contemporary discussions about sexuality and gender. As such, this paper examines how the femininities in Orlando change with each “generation” of the text, from Woolf’s original 1928 novel, to Sally Potter’s 1992 lm, and nally, to Preciado’s 2023 adaptation. Preciado’s adaptation will be of special emphasis, as it di uses the singular role of Orlando into at least a dozen ‘Orlandos,’ played by trans and nonbinary actors. These gender presentations complicate the rather straightforward femininity of Virginia Woolf’s and Sally Potter’s white, (mostly) heterosexual Orlandos. The paper will therefore investigate how the race, gender, and sexuality of femininity changes as Orlando spans time and interpretation, and how, with the critical intervention of Preciado’s 2023 lm, femininity is ultimately disentangled from whiteness, cisness, and heterosexuality. Ultimately, the paper gestures toward a capacious concept of femininity that emphasizes the diverse and counter-hegemonic queerity found in Preciado’s lm, highlighting where femininity began for Orlando and speculating where it might be going.
“I’m not a feminist”: Interrogating intergenerational perspectives of femininity and female family roles in the present Hungary through Photovoice
Boroka Godley, McGill University
In modern-day Hungary, feminism is generally limited to women from a narrow social spectrum, mostly made up of female intellectuals in university and NGO spaces. This is because the term ‘feminist’ has encountered deep apathy in Hungary since the end of Soviet Union in 1989, on account of its close association with women’s communist mass organisations, formed by male politicians in order to secure and maintain political power. Despite this, feminist knowledge transmission continues to take place amongst females of different generations within family units and defines female self-perception and female roles within society, including both the professional sphere and in family life. This paper will use participatory visual methodologies, in the form of Photovoice, to understand contemporary and changing views of feminism and female roles within society in current political landscape. Hungarian women and mothers will be asked to take a photograph that reflects their feelings on “What do you want to teach your daughter about being a woman?”, and to interpret and reflect upon these in group discussion. Using these prompts, this paper shall provide pivotal reflections on: 1. How women see their roles within society, both in the professional context and at home; 2. What messages women and mothers look to transmit to their daughters about femininity, feminism, and female roles within society; and 3. How women and mothers see themselves in relation to discourses related to femininity and feminism in the contemporary Hungarian political landscape.
Chaa da Cup with Harnaaz Kaur Grewal: Reshaping Research to Honor South Asian Women
Naaz Kaur Grewal-Greeno, University of British Columbia
South Asian women, constituting one of the largest immigrant populations in Canada, often find themselves overlooked in Western academic discourse, further perpetuating their invisibility both within the South Asian community and larger Canadian society. In response to this gap, Chaa da Cup with Harnaaz Kaur Grewal aims to provide a safe and inclusive platform for South Asian women to articulate their narratives, thereby challenging the effects of patriarchy prevalent in South Asian cultures and confronting intergenerational silence. In collaboration with the Fourth Annual Critical Femininities Conference, Chaa da Cup will present this research visually, bridging the gap between Western academic and lived experiences. The presentation will begin by addressing the limitations of Western academic research. It will then delve into the founder/primary researcher’s journey of decolonizing her approach, drawing inspiration from the tradition of sharing stories over chaa (tea) and Jo Ann Archibald’s storywork approach. By adopting a critical feminist lens, this project centers around the lived experience of these women, challenging the misrepresentation of their stories within dominant academic and cultural discourses. The decolonization practices also seek to destabilize research approaches rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. While 14 themes emerged from this qualitative study, one focus of this presentation will be on the impacts of intergenerational trauma and patriarchy and how these factors contribute to the ongoing silencing of South Asian women. Through visual storytelling, the presentation will reveal how cultural, social, and political factors shape South Asian women’s experience in Canada, empowering them to take back their story and confront the legacies of oppression.
Cycles of Tradition: Exploring the performance of femininity across generations
Tara Schell, Independant Scholar
This presentation will explore the performance of “traditional” femininity across generations, and the ways in which, particularly upper and middle class white women, have been able to leverage this performance as a means of aligning themselves with power structures and gaining public influence; in turn, creating a sanitized version of traditional power structures that positions them as palatable, and worthy of preservation. This work will begin with an analysis of the rhetorical tools used by prominent conservative women in the 1970s. I will present an overview of the ways in which influential women performed traditional femininity, while making major political gains. Through an exploration of figures like Phyllis Schlafly, I will underscore how performance theories can be applied to the public personas of such figures, and how this lens may help us further understand how such figures were able to gain influence, particularly among other women. Second, I will explore how this performance of traditional femininity can be seen re-generating itself today, particularly through the “tradwife” movement. Through an analysis of social media’s conservative influencer spheres, I will establish the ways that a performance-lens can help us make sense of the effectiveness of this particular brand of conservative influence. By drawing a line between women who were working to influence legislative decisions in the 1970s, and women who position their influence in the private sphere today, I will show how the performance of traditional femininity has, for particular women, been an effective means of aligning themselves with power, and how this performance has created the conditions for a more palatable version of conservatism.
Poetic Inquires into Generating Divine Femininities
Sasha Askarian, York University
Femininity within western culture(s) is historically embodied by white, female fragility. It signals non-abrasive scents and accents, the slight inward curve of a dainty nose, forgivable faces, summer homes and imported foreign labour alleviating dreadful drudgery. As racially marked women, we often know who we are by who we are not. Some of us make attempts to perform this femininity for social acceptance, often compelled by a deep need to be loved. This form of self-erasure is rooted in colonial-imperial notions of civility and racial and gendered dominance. Attempts to attain this unattainable woman-ness too often produces anxieties about our sense of desirability; leading to fruitless attempts to gain proximity to white western femininity. This presentation will offer a poetic performance and subsequent explanatory prose speaking to the harmful ideals of western femininity, especially evident in rise of new media channels and platforms. In particular, the poetic pieces will explore the trappings of trying to be loved by men who are transfixed by essentialist notions of the feminine. This work offers alternative femininities rooted in culturally significant concepts of the divine feminine. In embodying our own spiritual, cultural, and social teachings, we tap into sacred and divine powers that transcend colonial-imperial constructs.
Join artist stylo starr as we cut, paste and chill! stylo will speak briefly about her experience as a professional artist, and will share tips and tricks on how to create collages with found images, old photographs and books, recycled paper and other objects. Participants are encouraged to bring a childhood photo or other favourite photographic memory to work with and include in their collage.
A Eulogy for My Abuser
Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa, University of Guelph
A Eulogy for My Abuser is a 5-minute multimedia story about the sudden death of my estranged mother, an alt-right narcissist with mixed raced kids. The piece captures the transmission of intergenerational trauma through motherhood and uses frank discussions of death and loss to disrupt the essentialist-colonial logic that (white) woman are natural caregivers. Told in three district moments, the video pairs drawings (moment one), a media clip (moment two), and film (moment three) with the narrative of my grief. Combined, these moments explore, not the grief of my mother's passing, but the unspoken grief of having been her queer, biracial daughter, and the erasure of this grief at the time of her death. My narrative gestures to a larger grief common among many biracial, as well transracial,1 kids with white mothers: the entry of white supremacy into our most intimate relationship. Taking this grief as my starting point, my multimedia story uses death to reveal what colonial motherhood conceals: race, power, and trauma.
Generational Identity and the Matrilineal in Rose Macaualy’s Dangerous Ages (1921) and Gabriele Reuter Töchter. Der Roman zweier Generationen (1927)
Fatima Borrmann, KU Leuvan
The period around 1900 saw a surge in genealogical fiction. Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893) and Thomas Mann’s Nobel prize winning Die Buddenbrooks (1901) are some of the most well-known examples of a boom in literary fiction that dealt with family descent and generational lines. Though less well known, women writers of the time also engaged with portrayals of multigenerational families. Unlike their male counterparts, however, many of their novels are entirely dedicated to the matrilineal. Replacing the dominant patrilineal affiliation with a matrilineal genealogy is an enduring metaphor in feminist history and scholarship. Virginia Woolf famously wrote about the need to “think back through our mothers” (64) and, more recently, Luce Irigaray called for the rescue of the forgotten familial history of “mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers” from the exile of “the father-husband” (44). In this paper, I will compare two works where generations of women from the same family are depicted: Dangerous Ages (1921) by British writer Rose Macaualy, and Töchter. Der Roman zweier Generationen (1927) by German writer Gabriele Reuter. I will show how both writers explore the emancipatory potential of cross-generational solidarity. At the same time, however, I argue that the matrilineal is also problematised as too narrow for the often more emancipated generation.
Modes of intergenerational fem(me)inine and feminist knowledge transmission, relationships, communities and identities
Lisa Edwards, University of Guyana
Nigerian author, Luvvie Ajayi is often quoted, “until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” After the celebration of female academics in honour of International Women’s Day 2024, I came to realize that the lens through which a story is told is just as important as the story itself. As such, in interrogating one’s cultural identity, the remembrance of our ancestors is also a preservation of our own identity (Mohabir, 2021). It is from this standpoint that tracing our histories through a gendered lens, the lived experiences of our ancestors can become more powerful when making larger contextual analysis. These verbal stories, although told to deter certain actions and reproduce dominate cultural narratives can also embed spaces of resistance and solidarity. By tracing my own matriarchal lineage in the context of colonialism within the global south, these stories reveal nuanced ways in which the matriarchs in my family navigated life that can be described as radical. Despite this, these stories are often couched within the context of reinforcing harmful patriarchal values and traditions often limiting and confining identities and devaluing communities and relationships. By engaging critical feminist analysis, these stories can lead to a remembering of a politicalized consciousness (Mohanty, 2002) where realities are challenged from dominant single standpoint (Makdisi, 2002). In this presentation, I attempt to do so by re-engaging the lived experiences of the matriarchs within my family on the subject of marriage, childbirth and bodily autonomy
the paradox I am/within: Tripping in/towards Hope through a Gendered Disability Poetics
Alanna Veitch, Queen’s University
“the paradox I am / within” is from a poem I wrote during the first year of COVID after sitting with what Awkward-Rich (2022) calls bad feelings, or what Berlant (2011) considers the enduring present of precarity that opens out into anxiety. These lingering feelings hurled me back into this project that originated as a poetic analysis of how disabled people interact with a state whose politics are imbued with eugenic logics. Returning to the work, I ask: In what ways can a gendered disabled poetics bear the messiness of embodied difference and dream of hope amidst despair and violence? I look to Lorde (2007), Ferris (2004), and Kuppers (2007) to generate a nuanced account of the poetic theorizing and imagining taking place in my disabled poems. I first share the poem that titles my project to theorize how I (a disabled female subject) embody the paradoxes I wish to escape and that view disabled bodies as failed projects. I then reflect on why Sedgwick (2003) might view my approach to social encounters as paranoid. Next, I settle into some discomforting poetry to gesture towards the difficulty of re-covering my naked body—what Saketopoulou (2023) calls limit consent—and to acknowledge the ghosts that generate and haunt the second life. Lastly, I lean on Muñoz’s (2009) theory of utopia to trip as my body does in/towards a more liveable future. My project embodies the messy, uncomfortable, and unresolvable realities of disability that generate hopeful imaginings for the present-future.
Writing myself into existence: navigating fat, femininity, and an AuDHD diagnosis after menopause
Emily Bruusgaard, Trent University
In “Can Femme Be Theory,” Rhea Ashley Hoskin argues that “narrative works are the lifeblood of femme scholarship.” Through this medium, she argues, “femmes write themselves in existence.” (Hoskin 2021) In this paper I will be exploring the generative possibilities of femme(ininity) after menopause. The aging, post-menopausal body is too often defined by what it is not: no longer productive under capitalism, no longer fertile, no longer marketable, no longer a vehicle for pleasure, and by extension, no longer justifiable to a patriarchal male gaze. And all too often, the attempts to reconstitute the post-menopausal body fall back on the one variable society defines as controllable: thinness. I believe there is a subversive and freeing power to fat midlife and older age that has yet to be fully explored. With my very recent diagnosis with autism/ADHD as a guide, I would like to propose a different kind of embodiment. Patriarchal femininity, as Hoskin and Taylor have argued, is always already out of reach, but no more so than when that body is so unapologetically not invisible and not consumed with maintaining the illusion of youth. Unmasking has, for me, given me the language and the tools to re-animate my relationship to my body from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. Using my experiments with stimming, sensory-seeking, and sensory deprivation, I will discuss the generative possibilities of fat femme after menopause that lie outside the discrete categories of patriarchal femininity.
Tits Ridiculous, Or, How to Queer Your Mammogram
Sarah Jensen, University of Toronto Scarborough
This presentation traces my experiences with breast imag(in)ing, showing the different ways queerness, femininity, and kinship are generated and degenerated in these processes. Following my trans sibling’s breast cancer diagnosis, I’ve spent the past decade undergoing annual breast imaging, which has generated—rather astoundingly—more than 50,000 medical images of my breasts. It’s also been my practice to take my own pictures immediately before and after the mammograms, MRIs, and ultrasounds. The two sets of images document my own ever-shifting connection to the spectre of cancer. I try, in these brief, in-hospital photo sessions, to remember how much queer joy I get from my body and to capture how much my queerness is inseparable from my breasts specifically. Perhaps in some futile attempt combat the threat of being robbed of these particularly fraught markers of femininity, or maybe just a “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” approach to titular love, these annual visits to Princess Margaret Cancer Centre are also when I become the most playful with femme-ness. At the same time, I’m constantly reminded of and irritated by the “pinkification” of breast cancer and how it can make screening, diagnosis, and treatment a distressing experience for myself and many other trans and queer folks. Drawing on the work of Audre Lorde, Anne Boyer, and Natasha Brown, this presentation is formatted in two parts: (1) a video poem, using a combination of photographs, medical images, sounds, and text; and (2) a narrative essay describing the video and its context.
Desire Paths and Other Emotional Landscapes
Tamara Frooman, York University
In her dissertation on autotheory, Lauren Fournier argues: “in auto-theory, theorized personal anecdotes or embodied actions constellate with fragments from the history of philosophy to form potent analyses ... Embodied experience becomes the primary material for generating theory.” I believe that theory, in turn, generates life by expanding ideas and encouraging creative thought. Autotheory’s power lies in its ability to harness this symbiotic relationship between creative and theoretical frameworks. My work engages with themes of spaces, places, people, and timelines. I co-author dialogues with my younger and older selves, articulating my identity as a girl, as a woman, as a mother in relation to my great-grandparents and future children. I struggle to conceptualize a stable and coherent self over time, and this battle takes place primarily inside the traditionally feminine space of the home. I use autotheory to interrogate my temptation to fill the lack I sense at the core of my being with gendered behavior like housekeeping, homemaking, and childbearing. Are these authentic desires or do they stem from a fear of the patriarchal outside world? When I picture the future I see myself as a ghost, drifting through empty rooms echoing with the laughter of my children—but I never see them. I catch glimpses of their baby heads, their baby hair whisped in sunlight as they run out towards the world, and I am trapped in the doorway as if by some fantasy curse. There is an energy field around the home and I never leave it, in these future imaginaries. I want to be a mother who encourages creativity and joy. I fear I will be a mother who only accepts these qualities if they exist within the strict limits of what my OCD deems acceptable. I am wracked with time, straining forward into this nightmare I am trying to mitigate. I am straining backwards too, towards my own past and the ones my parents lived, and their parents. I try to make sense of these lives before mine because I am trying to solve the mystery of who I am, why I lack such a fundamental sense of personality, why I feel like a black hole but no one else can see it. How did I create this illusion, and from what? How can such contradictory truths coexist?
Day 3
Sunday, August 18
Quilting Queer, My journey through textile
Alyssa Pisciotto, Independent Artist
Quilting Queer, My journey through textile, is an artist talk that focuses on my relationship and integration of textiles into my artistic practice. As an artist that comes from a long line of quilters and seamstresses this knowledge and appreciation has been passed down to me through generations. I am fortunate that my great grandmother, grandmother and mother taught me the art of quilting, instilling a sense of excitement and importance to the medium! Taking this practical knowledge and assessing it through the lens of my artistic practice has opened many doors to further explore the artistic history of this medium. Looking at queer, feminist, BIPOC, and disabled stories told through quilting brought this seemingly utilitarian “craft” into the high art realm. Using the skills that were passed down to me as a jumping point I have created works that are non-traditional and blatantly queer. By using intersectional themes important and relevant to me as a person I am able to honour the history of this craft as well as the generational wealth that comes with passing down this knowledge. As I learn and grow, I hope that I am able to continue this tradition with the next generation. Images and artwork will accompany this talk in the form of a power point slideshow.
Threading Memories of Violence and Resistance: The Interplay of Affect and Embodiment in Colombian Women’s Textiles
Diana Barrero, University of Toronto
Needlework has been predominantly construed as a feminine activity relegated to the domestic sphere. Yet, marginalized women across Latin America have used needlework as a form of resistance against socio-political, economic, and military oppression. For example, during the Pinochet dictatorship, Chilean working-class women living in the outskirts of Santiago produced arpilleras, textile-based images created using burlap squares and decorated with colourful threads and fabrics. These arpilleras documented the women’s everyday social reality including soup kitchens, protests, political violence, and human rights abuses (Agosín, 1985; Bacic, 2008, 2014; Moya-Raggio, 1984). Over the past two decades, textile-based memory initiatives have developed in Colombia to assist women make sense of their lived experiences of conflict-related violence. Similar to the Chilean arpilleras, Colombian women have been using textile making as a way to make their demands for truth and justice visible (Arias López, 2013; Parra Parra, 2014; Rangel Barragán, 2016). For this paper, I draw from feminist new materialist perspectives to explore the affective and embodied dimensions of needlework as part of women-led textile-based memory initiatives in Colombia. In particular, I explore the way that the meanings attached to needlework as a cultural and political practice shift between older and younger generations. By focusing on women’s embodied knowledges and practices, my paper contributes to understanding the gendered and racialized dynamics that shape contemporary memorialization practices in Colombia.
Becoming Meduya and Rediscovering My-Self: A Reflection Upon Healing and Inspiration Through Critical Craft
Johnathan Clancy, York University
I turned to crafting as a sanctuary in a period of multifaceted and tumultuous transitions experienced in the Spring and Summer of 2020, beginning a project that would not see completion until the Spring of 2023. Embracing my love of textiles, sewing, and embroidery—feminine coded forms of art and craft—in the generation of a feminine alter-ego, “Meduya”, I fine peace, purpose, and creative potential amidst a time of trauma, shame, and lack. In this process, I reconnect with parts of myself that had felt lost in the wilderness of the year 2020. This piece aims to synthesize readings from critical femininities, fashion studies, and critical craft studies to analyze how creative work, through the femme-coded mediums of craft, can engage in practices of personal and social healing and regeneration. Using this project of a case study, the presentation will also demonstrate the value of ‘slow fashion’, which focuses more on a personalized creative and crafting process over exploitative and mass-manufactured capitalist modes of production.
Perpetual Horror
Kerith Manderson-Galvin, Independent Artist
Kerith Manderson-Galvin will present a live excerpt from their performance, “Perpetual Horror”. This excerpt is the only text featured in the 75 minute solo work. This is the opening 20 minutes: a continuous delivery of rapid-fire moments in time. The sequence is an accumulation of recorded dates in history-from the invention of the cuckoo clock to the first use of the word “unending”; Born Slippy by Underworld to recurring floods in Manderson-Galvin’s old home-made up of references to films,shape-shifting myths, literature, music, autobiography, and the present time and place of the performance. This is performed with Manderson-Galvin’s trademark veracity and Femme visuals: spilling out of a pink cut-out bikini as pink slime slides down the legs of a ghost chair. Manderson-Galvin uses text in this performance to generate a continuous movement and a feeling of Queer femininity in performance that is disordered, disorienting and uncontainable. The sequence moves through time faster than they can comfortably speak the words. It begins: “I’m going to read this because it turns out there are a lot of words and I feel like there is no way I will say them all in the right order.” Audience and performer are moved at an unrelenting pace through time and fixed realities, away from conventional theatre and femininity, until the performer and performance leave language and transform. “Perpetual Horror” was a Judge’s Pick for Melbourne Fringe 2023 and will be remounted for the inaugural Festival of Australian Queer Theatre 2024.
Philip Berezney, Molly Fulop, Phyllis Johnson, Katia Ellise Klemm, Danie Muriello
Since 2019, The LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project has brought together racially, socioeconomically, and gender diverse cohorts of approximately 30 LGBTQ+ younger and older adults for storytelling, dialogue, and collaborative artmaking. These conversations and collaborations create opportunities for queer knowledge exchange related to personal and community histories, modes of access to queer culture and education, and creative resistance strategies for navigating the hostile sociopolitical climate. Discussions of fem(me)inine and feminist identities and perspectives are both embedded within and unearthed in these intergenerational interactions as relationships develop between Dialogue Project members and individual members come to know themselves better through these connections.
In this panel presentation, five Dialogue Project members (a doctoral student research assistant, two elder co-facilitators, an undergraduate research assistant, and a current participant) will engage in discussion on how The Project impacted their understandings of gender, artmaking, intergenerational collaboration, and personal identity. Through this discussion, panelists will share their reflections on the theme of ‘Generation’ through the lenses of their intergenerational connections and their physical generation of artworks exploring fem(me)inine kinship, lineage, and identities. In doing so, the panelists will consider The Dialogue Project as a site for the development of intergenerational fem(me)inine and feminist solidarities toward fostering epistemic agency and enacting epistemic resistance.
MOTHERLODE: A MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE AND CARE AS RESEARCH AND ART
Jessica Barr, Trent University
I recently created a zine called “MOTHERLODE: A MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE AND CARE AS RESEARCH AND ART”. It is inspired by New York-based artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1969 “MANIFESTO! Maintenance Art” (subtitled “CARE”), written as Ukeles was grappling with the demands of both new mothering and trying to maintain and grow her art practice and career. Her manifesto and praxis (feminist gifts to the art world) boldly presented her care work as art, demanding recognition for the (motherlode of) labour involved in “maintenance.” The zine, which I hand embellished with detritus (e.g. granola bar wrappers, kid drawings, single toddler socks, and other bits of life-rubbish) from my life single-parenting a spirited child, reflects on care/maintenance work as art/research, pointing to the ways in which this often invisiblized labour falls disproportionately onto women, particularly BIPOC women, both domestically and in institutions. Care work is generative and yet also often invisible, thankless, and exhausting (as Ukeles wrote: “Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time…”). For the Critical Femininities Conference, I would like to share reflections from the zine, scanned to include its unique bits of kid-garbage, plus additional research-creation around care work; I may also create an accompanying domestic soundscape, and possibly invite participants into a guided activity – or rather 'inactivity' – a moment of repose, a pause in which we can withdraw from the labour of the day to guide our maintenance activity inwards, supporting and maintaining our own energies...
Femme Futures - Transfeminist Ethics, Ambivalences of Care, and Abolition
Mijke van der Drift, Royal College of Art and Nat Raha, Glasgow School of Art
In this paper, we will discuss how transfeminist ethics forges alternate futures as a means to escape neoliberal impasses and encapsulation in structures of extraction (Drift and Raha 2020), with a particular focus on femmeness, making gender, and gendered ambivalences of care. We will discuss Femme as the counterpoint to normative femininities — where femmeness interrupts normative demands, which are refigured to undermine norms. We conceptualise gendering as a mode of re/making and generating relations—rather than fitting into a category—as key to understanding new forms of being in the world, and to dissolving hierarchies of care, extraction and resource hoarding (austerity). This transfeminist ethics thus challenges common understandings of positionality in regards to gendering—which we will discuss as mobile, agental and materialist, generated by activity, rather than imposed by structures. Femme futures are both concrete and idealistic. Their concreteness emerges through mutual relations of care and solidarity; while their idealistic nature emerges through nonnormative direction—where the abolition of normative forms of life are at stake, rather than the reform of social structures (such as via inclusion). Consequently, we will propose that this ethics is at its heart an abolitionist strategy. Rather than hoping for the possibility of negation in the abstract, Femme futures are shaped by engaging in relationalities that undo hierarchies. Here, care emerges through the form of the collective labour of encouragement and building solidarity.
Femme Care, Resistance, and Building Intergenerational Alliances through Turkish Diva Bulent Ersoy
Rita Duru, Indiana University Bloomington
In this paper, I aim to trace practices of resistance, collective care, and femme alliances in Turkey’s music scenes by focusing on intergenerational encounters of performers who belong to different genres of music and carry political differences. For that purpose, I study Bülent Ersoy who is a famous Arabesque, Turkish Classical, and Pop singer as a key figure. Ersoy, known as the Turkish Diva, undergoes a gender transition process at the beginning of the 1980s when the military coup was happening and is depicted as a striking case of transsexuality* in history. I trace her social and medicolegal transition history to understand how shifting politics affect Ersoy’s positionalities and her artistic expressions. On the other hand, today lubunya and femme artists in contemporary Turkey carry Ersoy's voice into underground feminist punk and queer scenes. As robust examples of this intergenerational encounter, I analyze two femme punk and darkwave bands who reworked Ersoy's two well-known songs. Throughout the paper, I trace the motivations and potentialities behind and within this encounter. For my investigation, I use trans/feminist affect theory as my analytical tool. Accordingly, I argue that resistance, collective care, and intergenerational femme alliances became possible through the existence of shared affects. Furthermore, I seek to disrupt our understanding of and relationship with the trans* past and the meanings of resistance by exploring the coalitional works here. The format that I follow for my presentation is going to be a PowerPoint presentation with images and audiovisuals from archives.
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