Eileen Gray : new angles on gender and sexuality

This dissertation investigates the early twentieth century work of Irish-born interior designer and architect, Eileen Gray. While the existing literature has tended to read Gray and her work primarily in relation to major male modernist movements and figures, this dissertation contends that considering her engagement with the alternative modernisms developed by other women artists and writers at the time will enrich our understanding of the wider social, cultural and historical implications of her work. In order to make sense of what scholars have long recognised as Gray's critically different architecture and design I analyse her work in relation to three of her female contemporaries: the artist Romaine Brooks, and writers Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes. Such an analysis reveals that Gray's critically different work was importantly related to the critically different aesthetics, genders and sexualities that Gray and many of her female contemporaries cultivated at the time.The first chapter argues that debates about domestic architecture and design were also importantly debates about modern bodies and subjects and provides the framework for the analyses that follow. Chapter 2 compares Gray's early lacquer works, La Voie Lactee (ca. 1912), Le Magicien de la Nuit (1913) and Le Destin (1914) to Romaine Brooks' two paintings from 1910, White Azaleas and The Screen, focusing on their use of decadent aesthetics. Chapter 3 considers Gray's first intricately designed house, E.1027 (1928), in relation to the content and cultural impact of Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness. Chapter 4 examines Gray's extremely private and less known house, Tempe a Pailla (1934), in relation to the obscure and non-communicative narrative strategies of Djuna Barnes' 1936 novel, Nightwood. Overall, the argument that binds my dissertation is that Gray's work both contributed and responded to changing conceptions of gendered and sexual subjects in the first half of the last century

Introduction: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

Metaphors are critical sites of analysis for feminist scholars of science and technology because of what they both conceal and divulge about the conditions of their historical emergence and the persistence of those conditions. As researchers and editors, we find ourselves oriented to work that takes up the task of contesting uncontested metaphors, considering how metaphor “invades” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 3) and evacuates meaning. This Special Section carries on the dynamic practice in feminist STS of taking the work, and ambivalent potentiality, of metaphor seriously. In this Introduction, we draw together scholarship that informs what we identify as the "metaphor-work" of feminist STS—the work of allegory, myth, metaphor, figurative and associative discourse, and their analysis—as central to the methods by which we make and remake meanings that matter to feminist technocultures. Throughout the metaphor-work collected here, the contributors propose that paradigm change comes through the collective refusal of some metaphors, through the re-evaluation of others, and the introduction of new metaphorical frames and figures to reorient our work.

Speculative Praxis Towards a Queer Feminist Digital Archive: a Collobarative Research-Creation Project

29 pagesThis essay, written as a collaborative process document, chronicles some of the challenges of creating digital spaces that can house and encourage trans- feminist and queer affective and cultural archives. Here, we imagine a digital archive that will animate the artistic, cultural, social, political, sexual, knowledge and subject experiments and possibilities opened up, and foreclosed, by a phenomenon like Meow Mix—the Montreal-based cabaret for “bent girls and their buddies”—while foregrounding the ethical and technological contradictions that characterize the digitizing process. Pursuing concerns of labour, preservation, design, and subcultural politics and aesthetics as essential to the digitizing process, we reproduce the interrupted, reflexive flow of this research-creation project

View to the U: An eye on UTM research

This is an audio recording from the podcast series "View to the U: An eye on UTM research".The guests on this edition of VIEW to the U are University of Toronto Mississauga Professors Neda Maghbouleh and Jasmine Rault. Neda and Jasmine define and explore their particular studies, covering topics such as race, immigration, ethics, place, sexuality, archives and digital humanities. Today we go beyond limits – not just of race and gender, but also moving past some traditional models of how research is realized or conducted, and perhaps “beyond the limits of imagination,” which comes up in the conversation

"Can I study you?" Cross-disciplinary conversations in queer Internet studies

We first met around a workshop table at the queer Internet studies (QIS2) in Philadelphia in February 2017. This conversation began when we realized that we all had some disciplinary knowledges, training and practice that can bear upon queer Internet studies, but simultaneously we felt unprepared for the methodological-ethical challenges posed by the Internet as a queer research environment. Michelle was trained in ethnography as an anthropologist and Jasmine and TL were trained in humanities perspectives — mostly through literature, performance studies and art history, though about five years ago they had begun to retrain in the fields of online archives, pedagogies and networks, which has led to a new collaborative research project on digital research ethics. We had all been trained in dyke/queer/feminist methods and critical theory, and continue to work in this area. And we all were experiencing some gut feelings about the need for better understandings of disciplinary practices — what we are doing, how do we apply what we know how to do, and why are we doing it — across disciplines as we enter the Internet as researchers, in a research situation. What follows is a conversation the three of us had over email and videoconference between July–October 2017, which revolved around the question of what ethnographic methods can bring to Internet research, and what might queer and feminist research ethics look like in the context of digital research environments