Bodily Limits to Autonomy: Emotion, Attitude, and Self-Defence

Many of us took pride in never feeling violent, never hitting. We had not thought deeply about our relationships to inflicting physical pain. Some of us expressed terror and awe when confronted with physical strength on the part of others. For us, the healing process included the need to learn how to use physical force constructively, to remove the terror—the dread. —bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Blac

Whose Crying Game? One Woman of Color\u27s Reflection on Representations of Men of Color in Contemporary Film

This film review of The Crying Game critically interrogates the politics of representation and domination which spectacleize Black male bodies. Working out of her location as an Asian American woman who is sensitive to the cinematic and everyday politics of exoticization, this cultural critic provides an analysis of the dynamic relations of power at work in the racial and heterosexual production and exploitation of Black gays in contemporary film. Drawing on the work of such critics as bell hooks, Robert Reid-Pharr, Kobena Mercer, and Judith Butler, she challenges us not to simply perpetuate the imperial gaze

Feminism and Feminisms: The Prospect of Censorship

Given the diversity and division of women according to class, face, ethnicity, religion, age and other social factors, we must expect and accept conflict and contradiction within feminism. I refer here broadly to feminism as a school of thought and as a political movement aiming to improve the lot of women (Black, 1989). Current theorizing about the social construct, gender, is inspired by the contradictions inherent in feminism (Scott, 1983). They fuel a constructive dialogue but they aIso contain the threat of censorship. There is the tendency to disregard the right to dissenting voices within feminism, to suppress internal questioning and contestation in favour of an appearance of consensus on a particular version of feminism. In bell hooks\u27 words: Feminism has its party line and women who feel a need for a different strategy, a different foundation, often find themselves ostracized and silenced- (hooks, 1984, p.9)

Love is in the Airwaves: Contesting Mass Incarceration with Prisoners\u27 Radio

Building on bell hooks’ conceptualization of love as a mode of political resistance, this article explores how prisoners’ radio employs love to combat injustice. Through an examination of two prisoners’ radio projects—The Prison Show in Texas and Restorative Radio in Kentucky—I argue that incarcerated people and their loved ones appropriate the radio to perform public and revolutionary acts of love, countering the oppressive forces of mass incarceration in the United States. By unapologetically positioning their love for prisoners front and center, ordinary Americans subvert systems of oppression which mark incarcerated folks as incapable and unworthy of love. Love is an intrinsic marker of humanity, so prisoners’ radio allows the incarcerated and their advocates on the outside to actively challenge the dehumanization that people face behind bars

What It Means to Love (Through A Black Lens)

This work will examine black love: its perceptions and understanding, through various sociological research and physical manifestations that will culminate in a dance performance. This examination of the evolution of black love through time will be researched in multiple mediums including writings, studies, and media usage personification and internalization. All sources will look at the critical evaluation of love in a cultural context, such as Bell Hooks "Black People and Love", popular musical artists such as Beyoncé and Jay Z, and many others. The performance will illustrate the physicality of black love with cultural references as it is perceived and felt.Dance Undergraduate Studies Student Funding Initiatives Arts Undergraduate Research ScholarshipNo embargoAcademic Major: Danc

The Skin I'm In

“The Skin I’m In” is a striking, engaging and well-argued podcast transcript that questions racial equality in today’s so-called “diverse” Canada. By referring to many contemporary scholars and activists, such as bell hooks, Desmond Cole, Afua Cooper, and others, the author exposes issues that black men face daily. Aside from the author's personal experience, the transcript contains news, interviews and popular culture references that many can relate to. It creates a big picture that, once again, reminds us of the question: “For how long will this kind of injustice prevail?

She inches glass to break: conversations between friends

She inches glass to break: conversations between friends is a project that aims to manifest, through research and practice, my own feminist language within the videos I have produced in my final year of my Masters of Fine Arts. My feminist language is Australian and intersectional, invested in combating sexism, racism and in deepening language and representation around sexuality in relation to Asian women. This project discusses my video She inches glass to break (2018) in length, which created intersectional feminist dialogue in response to feminist filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s film Ticket of No Return (1979) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Additionally, given this project’s investment in language, this body of work is influenced both by aspects of psychoanalysis – in which speech is central to a “therapeutic action” – and by feminist linguistics in which linguistic analysis reveals some of the mechanisms through which language constrains, coerces and represents women, men and non-binary people in oppressive ways

Afrocentric Ideologies and Gendered Resistance in Daughters of the Dust and Malcolm X: Setting, Scene, and Spectatorship

This study of scenes from the films Daughters of the Dust and Malcolm X, describes images of myth, gender, and resistance familiar to African-American interpretive communities. Key thematic and technical elements of these films are opposed to familiar Hollywood practices, indicating the directors\u27 effort to address resisting spectators. Both filmmakers, Julie Dash and Spike Lee respectively, chose subjects with an ideological resonance in African-American collective memory: Malcolm X, eulogized by Ossie Davis as our living black manhood (i) and the women of the Gullah Sea Islands, a site often celebrated for its authentically African cultural survivals. Both films combine images of an African past with an American present using a pattern of historically specific myths and tropes