THIS SACRED LAND IS OUR SHIELD : Deploying the Sacred in Indigenous Art and Activism

My art historical and sociological thesis will take Cheyenne-Arapaho artist Edgar Heap of Birds’ Defend Sacred Mountains print series as the point of departure for examining the interventions of Native artists and grassroots activists in their decolonizing campaigns. Heap of Birds’ exhibition of sixty-four mono-prints, to be exhibited at Pitzer College Art Galleries in January 2018, calls attention to the ongoing injustices committed against four indigenous sacred sites across the United States: Bear Butte, South Dakota; Bear’s Lodge, Wyoming; San Francisco Peaks, Arizona; and Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Heap of Birds’ monoprints address and allude to indigenous struggles to undermine insensitive development, non-Native encroachment, and environmental despoliation on their sacred mountains. Consequently, one chapter will pay special focus to the case studies of contemporary legal and social battles occurring at these sites to counter land dispossession and reinforce tribal sovereignty. How tribal leaders and grassroots activists employ claims to these lands based on their sacred value and/or based on treaty rights will be explored on a case-to-case basis and guided by the theories of decolonization, survivance, and tribal sovereignty. Two other chapters will address Heap of Birds as a decolonial actor, one grounding his career in the theories of spatial politics and historical remembrance explored by other American Indian Movement era (AIM) indigenous artists such as George Longfish, Kay WalkingStick, Rebecca Belmore, and Demian DinéYazhi´; the second will consider the implications of Defend Sacred Mountains in relation to his wider oeuvre. In highlighting both grassroots and artistic responses to indigenous claims to these four sacred sites, this thesis hopes to explore the concrete and diverse interventions made in decolonial campaigns to reclaim tribal sovereignty and support cultural survivance

Feminist education for university staff responding to disclosures of sexual violence: a critique of the dominant model of staff development

Programmes for sexual violence prevention have focussed historically on university, school or college students rather than staff working at these institutions. The Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence project (USVreact), co-funded by the European Commission, worked across universities in Europe to address this gap in the provision and knowledge of programmes aimed at staff. Each institutional partner in the project designed a programme to enable staff to respond appropriately to disclosures of sexual violence. This paper focuses on one UK university to explore the use of and reception to education principles and feminist pedagogy with staff from across the institution. These diverse pedagogical approaches were significant to the design of the university’s innovative programme. The findings demonstrate the importance of a process of sexual violence pedagogy, as opposed to training, and highlight its positive implications for the whole university community

The harms of medicalisation: intersex, loneliness and abandonment

This article develops loneliness as a political and social justice issue by illustrating the harmful personal and social consequences of the medical jurisdiction over and constitution of variations in sex characteristics. Whilst connections between loneliness, health and illness have been well established, this work customarily identifies the ways illness can lead to, or be caused by, loneliness. Instead, I provide an account of the central role of medicalisation and medical management in producing loneliness. By doing so, I underline the imperative for medical practice to consider its influence upon social and personal, as well as physical, wellbeing. Drawing on stories shared through solicited diaries followed by in-depth interviews with seven people with sex variations and two parents in the UK, I show how accounts of loneliness help to illuminate the violence of abandonment, silencing and marginalisation that often goes unheard, together with hidden or normalised systems of harm.Building on concepts of ethical loneliness and ontological loneliness, I show how structural violations operate to injure trust and self-worth, leading to social unease. I argue for the importance of people with sex variations finding sites of comfort and acceptance, but note the ways that some forms of medicalisation can inhibit alliances and community formation, despite diagnoses also carrying the potential to facilitate informal support structures and collective identities. By bringing together intersex studies with discourses of loneliness, I develop a better understanding of loneliness as a product of social and systemic violence, and the ways in which medical discourses tie in with larger structures of oppression, coercion and control. This article concludes by underlining the need for structural change in our approach to and understanding of sex variations, and with a call for us to become more attentive to these stories of medical harm, to ensure that they are heard and to seek necessary justice

Troubling school toilets: resisting discourses of ‘development’ through a critical disability studies and critical psychology lens

This paper interrogates how school toilets and ‘school readiness’ are used to assess children against developmental milestones. Such developmental norms both inform school toilet design and practice, and perpetuate normative discourses of childhood as middle-class, white, ‘able’, heteronormative, cissexist and inferior to adulthood. Critical psychology and critical disability studies frame our analysis of conversations from online practitioner forums. We show that school toilets and the norms and ideals of ‘toilet training’ act as one device for Othering those who do not fit into normative Western discourses of ‘childhood’. Furthermore, these idealised discourses of ‘childhood’ reify classed, racialised, gendered and dis/ablist binaries of good/bad parenting. We conclude by suggesting new methodological approaches to school toilet research which resist perpetuating developmental assumptions and prescriptions. In doing this, the paper is the first to explicitly bring school toilet research into the realms of critical psychology and critical disability studies

Diagnosing Sex: Stories of Intersex, Relationships & Identity

This thesis provides necessary insight into the stories of people with atypical sex development or intersex characteristics. It is one of the first sociological studies of its kind to take the UK as its only geographical focus, and therefore makes a valuable contribution to exploring the social understandings of intersex and its medical care provisions in a local context. In light of the contested pathologisation of these sex traits, this thesis pursues a greater understanding of participants’ own accounts of the bodies, experiences and identities under question. The study uses a two-tiered qualitative process of solicited diaries followed by in-depth interviews with nine participants. Starting with the broad themes of social relationships and identities, this research places an original focus on how feelings of loneliness are experienced, anticipated and understood by participants, as well as the framing of (in)authenticity in participants’ approaches to sex classification, their engagement in and attitudes towards sexual activity, and their understandings of parenthood and experiences of infertility. My research indicates that participants’ understandings of their diagnoses are framed by notions of an idealised or ‘normal’ future. Normative expectations, including certain ways of being and life course milestones, are proffered as socially valuable at the expense of their alternatives. In some cases, this has led participants to feel an absence of control, and a sense that their lives or bodies are failing, unworthy or inconceivable. I show how the potential for stigmatisation and ostracism imposes a requirement to ‘pass’ as binary sex. Feelings of difference and deviance can lead people with atypical sex characteristics to feel like they do not ‘fit’ or ‘belong’; that – despite their relationships – they are alone. These conclusions offer insight into how social and medical support can be improved, and provide valuable contributions to intersex scholarship, reproduction studies and broader sociological debates on personal, political and institutional relationships

The toilet debate: Stalling trans possibilities and defending ‘women’s protected spaces’

As one of the few explicitly gender-separated spaces, the toilet has become a prominent site of conflict and a focal point for ‘gender-critical’ feminism. In this article we draw upon an AHRC-funded project, Around the Toilet, to reflect upon and critique trans-exclusionary and trans-hostile narratives of toilet spaces. Such narratives include ciscentric, heteronormative and gender essentialist positions within toilet research and activism which, for example, equate certain actions and bodily functions (such as menstruation) to a particular gender, decry the need for all-gender toilets, and cast suspicion upon the intentions of trans women in public toilet spaces. These include explicitly transmisogynist discourses perpetuated largely by those calling themselves ‘gender-critical’ feminists, but also extend to national media, right-wing populist discourses and beyond. We use Around the Toilet data to argue that access to safe and comfortable toilets plays a fundamental role in making trans lives possible. Furthermore, we contend that – whether naive, ignorant or explicitly transphobic – trans-exclusionary positions do little to improve toilet access for the majority, instead putting trans people, and others with visible markers of gender difference, at a greater risk of violence, and participating in the dangerous homogenisation of womanhood

The People vs the NHS: Biosexual Citizenship and Hope in Stories of PrEP Activism

Discourses of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) revel in its radical potential as a global HIV prevention technology, offering a promise of change for the broader landscape of HIV prevention. In 2018, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired The People vs The NHS: Who Gets the Drugs?, a documentary focused on the ‘battle’ to make PrEP available in England. In this article we explore how the BBC documentary positions PrEP, PrEP biosexual citizen-activists, as well as the wider role of the NHS in HIV prevention and the wellbeing of communities affected by HIV in the UK. We consider how biosexual citizenship ( Epstein 2018) is configured through future imaginaries of hope, and the spectral histories of AIDS activism. We describe how The People crafts a story of PrEP activism in the context of an imagined gay community whose past, present, and hopeful future is entangled within the complexities and contractions of a state-funded health system. Here, PrEP functions as a ‘happiness pointer’ ( Ahmed 2011), to orient imagined gay communities towards a hopeful future by demanding and accessing essential medicines and ensuring the absence of needless HIV transmissions. This biomedical success emerges from a shared traumatic past and firmly establishes the salvatory trajectory of PrEP and an imagined gay community who have continued to be affected by HIV. However, campaigns about the individual's right to access PrEP construct the availability and consumption of PrEP as an end goal to their activism, where access to PrEP is understood as an individual's right as a pharmaceutical consumer

School toilets: queer, disabled bodies and gendered lessons of embodiment

In this paper we argue that school toilets function as one civilising site [Elias, 1978. The Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell] in which children learn that disabled and queer bodies are out of place. This paper is the first to offer queer and crip perspectives on school toilets. The small body of existing school toilet literature generally works from a normative position which implicitly perpetuates dominant and oppressive ideals. We draw on data from Around the Toilet, a collaborative research project with queer, trans and disabled people (aroundthetoilet.wordpress.com) to critically interrogate this work. In doing this we consider ‘toilet training’ as a form of ‘civilisation’, that teaches lessons around identity, embodiment and ab/normal ways of being in the world. Furthermore, we show that ‘toilet training’ continues into adulthood, albeit in ways that are less easily identifiable than in the early years. We therefore call for a more critical, inclusive, and transformative approach to school toilet research

Toilet Signs as Border Markers: Exploring Disabled People's Access to Space

Signs prescribing our permission to enter or abstain from specific places, such as those on toilet doors, mark murky borders between quasi-public and private space and have profound impacts upon our lives and identities. In this paper we draw on research which centred trans, queer and disabled people’s experienc-es of toilet in/exclusion to explore how the signs on toilet doors shape disabled people’s experiences of toilet access away from home and therefore their use of public space more broadly. We argue that the use of the International Symbol of Access (ISA) both delivers a false promise of accessibility and maintains the borders of disability through (re)enforcing a particular public imaginary of dis-ability. We note the forced reliance on toilets in institutional and commercial settings when away from home and argue that, under capitalism, accessibility is persistently restricted by its potential to be lucrative