Dr. Harshita Yalamarty
Across Seven Seas, I Followed You Here: Caste, Marriage Migration and Multiculturalism in the Indian Diaspora examines the marriage and migration decision-making processes of Indian marriage migrant women, as well as their experiences in Canada with regard to education, employment, their family lives and community building. The work uses an intersectional and transnational feminist lens to understand 24 respondents’ pre-migration contexts and their post-migration experiences as a journey rather than discrete events, as well as the social structures and discourses that enable and are enabled by them. To this end, the project was multi-sited; along with primary interviews with respondents in the Greater Toronto Area in Canada, the research also drew on interviews with teachers of personality development schools who offered “bridal grooming” courses for young women who intended to migrate abroad after marriage, and pre-departure immigration information sessions for Indian highly skilled migrants offered by the Canadian government in the cities of Delhi, Hyderabad and Chandigarh in India. Analyses of documentaries, TV shows, diasporic beauty pageants and migration policies such as the points system, supplemented the ethnographic research. The dissertation centers the voices of respondents within a relational analysis of the broader forces of Canadian and Indian statecraft, the conjoined projects of settler colonialism and multiculturalism, neoliberalism, caste practices and hierarchies, and the discourses of gender “equality” in the context of racialized South Asian model minorities in Canada. Understanding caste as an axis of hierarchical power relations within South Asian diasporas, the dissertation connects the critique of caste practices and inequalities to a broader critique of Canadian multiculturalism in how it has “flattened” and obscured power dynamics within ethnic, racial and migrant communities. This work opens up a space to investigate and enquire after intra-community intersectional dynamics of marginalization and oppression, by employing a transnational lens that simultaneously offers a critique of how race and settler colonialism structures racialized communities within Canada.
Dr. Reena Shadaan
Multiscalar Toxicities: Mapping Environmental Injustice in and Beyond the Nail Salon
The dissertation attends to the entanglement of toxicities at multiple temporal and spatial scales – from bodies to workplaces to homes to communities as well as across generations. This work centers the nail salon – a site of potential environmental and occupational health harms due to routine exposure to toxicants, labour exploitation, and verbal and other abuses. These hazards are rooted in structural inequities that position immigrant-settler women of colour in precarious and dangerous work environments as well as have broader roots in global structures of extraction. The dissertation employs multiple methods grounded in feminist methodologies, centering the experiential and embodied knowledges of 37 Toronto-based nail technicians through occupational health mapping – a worker-centered visual method that maps workplace hazards and potential solutions. While there is growing scholarship on occupational harm in the nail salon context, this work differs in that it positions the nail salon in relation to broader structural violences. This is in contrast to framings of harm that are body-bound, body-centric, or a result of our individual “choices.”
Dr. Maren Hancock
Stereo/Types: Canadian Women DJs Sound Off is a multi-dimensional study–conducted from the insider perspective of a professional DJ and explores the ways in which Canadian womxn DJs’ positionality in DJ culture is impacted by the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality. Particular attention is paid to the effects of homosociality and heteronormativity on womxn’s engagement with DJ technologies, and how we resist these forces by forming networks to establish our own physical and digital spaces in Canadian DJ culture. Although womxn’s access to DJ culture and our representation within the culture in terms of media portrayal, diversity, and sheer numbers has improved, the underground and activist scenes propelling these institutional changes are increasingly vulnerable to commercial cooptation that threatens to dilute any revolutionary potential.
Dr. Sheila Jennings
The Right To Support: Severely Disabled Children & Their Mothers examines how severely disabled children and their mothers, who are usually their primary caregivers, are treated by Canadian law and policy. She identifies and analyzes deficiencies in care and other supports the state makes available to them, providing an analysis of the role of the state as it increasingly privatizes responsibility for supports, including unpredictable and often complex forms of care, situating them in practice, with mothers. Using conceptual frameworks from feminist standpoint theory and drawing on Paolo Freire’s theory of critical consciousness, she analyzes legal cases, legislation and policies, as being founded upon a series of myths. She assesses paradigms that underlie current legal arrangements, in particular, the roles assigned to mothers of children with severe disabilities. Her analysis engages with administrative law, tort law and constitutional law, as well as child welfare and family law. Reforms could enable severely disabled children and their mothers to achieve more just outcomes are presented.
Dr. Nael Bhanji
Trans Necrointimacies: Affect, Race, and the Chalky Geopolitics of Trans Memorialization explores the centrality of the memorialization of racialized trans death in structuring whiteness as emblematic of contemporary trans(normative) life. Taking my point of departure from the chalk outlines of dead bodies that frequently appear during rituals of trans memorialization, I analyze how the affective circulation of racial decay and necropolitical violence—a phenomenon I have termed transnecrointimacies—is central to the securitization of both whiteness and trans-homonationalism within the nation-state. In tracing the affective worldings that occur through the spectacularization and consumption of ‘ordinary’ racialized trans death, this dissertation animates the seemingly disparate narratives of counter-terrorism and trans politics, the trans body and the terrorist body, and vigilant reactions and the vigil that re-acts ordinary violences.
Dr. Anna Augusto Rodrigues
Pop-Up Pedagogy: Exploring Connections between Street Art, Feminist Literacy Practices and Communities investigated the potential of feminist street art to create informal spaces of learning on the streetscape while considering its pedagogical significance as a feminist literacy practice that could assist women, and those who identify as women, to participate in the shaping of community and global conversations. For this research, Dr. Rodrigues analyzed data from various sources which included interviews with feminist street artists, social media feeds, online articles and her own personal journal entries. In addition, she analyzed over 1400 images of street art she photographed over a period of five years while conducting fieldwork in Montreal and Toronto. In her dissertation, Dr. Rodrigues argues that feminist street art, as artifacts, and the actions associated with its production, can be considered a form of feminist public pedagogy that facilitates informal learning outside of traditional educational systems and also encourages women to contribute to the conversations happening in their communities, both online and in real life.
Dr. Funké Aladejeb
Girl You Better Apply to Teachers’ College: The History of Black Women Educators in Ontario, 1940s–1980s explores the wide range of ways in which Black women educators engaged with the Ontario educational system from the 1940s to 1980s. In an attempt to contribute to historical analysis on black identity, citizenship and racial difference in Canada, this dissertation investigates the ways in which black Canadian women confronted and navigated socially constructed boundaries of racial alienation, limited institutional support and inequality within Ontario school systems.
Largely using oral interviews, school board minutes, newspapers, yearbooks, and community records, “Girl You Better Apply to Teachers’ College” argues that black women educators’ sense of belonging in the professional sphere circumvented subtle and overt forms of racial and social exclusion in Ontario schools. In an effort to locate themselves within the Canadian national narrative, black female educators navigated concepts of citizenship and created a new kind of belonging that was parallel to and, at times, intersected with concepts of Canadian statehood.
Dr. Rebecca Hall
Diamonds are Forever: a Decolonizing, Feminist Approach to Diamond Mining in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories takes a feminist political economy approach to the impact of the northern diamond mining industry on Indigenous women. It reveals the ways in which Dene, Métis, and Inuit women’s labours that contribute to the social reproduction of their kin and communities have been both a site of colonial restructuring towards the demands of extractive capital, and of decolonizing resistance. Woven through this analysis is an examination of the relationship between structural and embodied racialized and gendered violence. Hall argues that the gendered structural tension between the extractive regime and the reproduction of place-based social relations contributes to disproportionately high levels of embodied violence against Indigenous women in the NWT.
Dr. Veronika Novoselova
Networked Publics, Networked Politics: Resisting Gender-Based Violent Speech in Digital Media
Dr. Helene Vosters
Good Mourning Canada? Canadian Military Commemoration and its Lost Subjects
Dr. Julie Dowsett
Feminism for Sale: Commodity Feminism, Femininity, and Subjectivity theorizes the underlying politics of what I call, invoking Marx, “commodity feminism,” defined as the reduction of feminist politics to a commodity that can be bought and sold on the market. I explore both the origins of commodity feminism in the 1920s, when the image of American suffragettes was used to sell cigarettes to rebellious “modern” women, and the rapid international expansion of commodity feminist marketing in the twenty-first century. I argue that the politics underlying commodity feminism are both liberal and conservative: a liberal feminist politics of independence and self-determination is endorsed alongside the conservative (and Freudian) idea that the democratic masses are a problem in need of control. The overarching argument of my dissertation is that commodity feminism resolves the feminism/femininity tension by revaluing feminized commodities and the women who use them, while at the same time transforming commodities into a form of social control. Feminism for Sale contributes to two emerging bodies of literature: the first on neoliberal or “choice feminism” and the second on the corporatization of activism. I foreground the role played by commodities and consumption in “choice feminism,” theorize its origins, explore its role as a contemporary “civilizing” discourse, and interrogate questions of agency, social control, and corporate behaviour in contemporary democracy.
Dr. reese simpkins
Making Trans Multiple: Movement, Materiality, and Becoming draws on the new materialist turn in feminist theory to theorize trans as movement, in general, and a becoming movement of “matter-energy-flow,” in particular. Wary of normative conceptualizations that understand trans only in terms of identity, identification, and subjectivity, the text is careful to push trans beyond these normative conceptualizations, while not divorcing completely from the lives and experiences of trans people. Using a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework the text argues that trans has relevance beyond traditional considerations of sex and gender; consequently, the text extends trans into fundamental conceptualizations of materiality and acknowledges matter’s dynamic properties. The creation of a dimension of dynamic, transed materiality prompts a (re)consideration of embodiment, affect, and assemblage. As such, Making Trans Multiple intervenes in key debates regarding the production of subjectivity and identity, the nature of desire and its link to affect, and the resonances between Transgender Studies and intersectional, feminist theories.
Dr. Nalia Keleta-Mae
(Re)Positioning Myself: Female and Black in Canada
Dr. Lee Wing Hin (Vivia)
"I’m Not Homophobic, I’m Chinese”: Hong Kong Canadian Discourses of Heterosexuality, Homosexuality, and Multiculturalism in Same-Sex Marriage Debates, 2002-2006
Dr. Ruth Knechtel
The Mother and the Androgyne: Comparative Strategies of the New Woman
Dr. Jennifer Johnson
All's Fair in Love, War and Negotiations: Gender, Nation and Spaces of Corporate Capital at the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
Dr. Sharon Beckford
(Un)recovered Persephones: The Gendered Quest for Individuation in a Selection of Literature by Black Canadian Women Writers
Dr. Madelina Sunseri
Theorizing Nationalisms: Intersections of Gender, Nation, Culture and Colonialism in the Case of Oneida’s Decolonizing Nationalist Movement
Dr. Ilya Parkins
Material Modernity: A Feminist Theory of Modern Fashion
Dr. Heather Milne
Rites of Passage: Women’s Travel Writing in Canada, 1885-1914
Dr. Angela Failler
Edible Interpretations: From Melancholy Feminisms to Mourning Anorexia
Dr. Jacqueline Petropoulos
Women Writing Race: The Politics of Identity and Theatrical Representation in Canada during the 1980s
Dr. Candida Rifkind
Labours of Modernity: The Literary Left in English Canada, 1929-1939
Dr. Carla Rice
Becoming Women: Body Image, Identity and Difference in the Passage to Womanhood
Dr. Carol Ricker-Wilson
Textual Fantasies: Urban High School Women as Critics and Narrators of Popular Romance
Dr. Sherilyn MacGregor
Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Gendered Politics of Care
Dr. Ruth Fletcher
Post-Colonial Legal Forms: A Feminist Critique of Irish Abortion Law
Dr. Verna Linney
The Flora Delanica: Mary Delaney and Women’s Art, Science and Friendship in Eighteenth Century England
Dr. Christine Ramsay
Masculinity and Processes of Intersubjectivity in the Films of David Cronenberg
Dr. Maja Korac
The Power of Gender in the Transition from State Socialism to Ethnic Nationalism, Militarization, and War: The Case of Post-Yugoslav States
Dr. Marietta Messmer
"I have a vice for voices": Reconstructing Emily Dickinson's Epistolary Subject Positions
Dr. Andrea O'Reilly
Ship and Harbor: Inn and Trail: Toni Morrison on Motherhood
Dr. Greg Malszecki
‘He Shoots! He Scores!’ Metaphors of War in Sport and the Political Linguistics of Virility