By thinking with Feminist and Queer Studies, what new languages, objects of study, archives, and ... more By thinking with Feminist and Queer Studies, what new languages, objects of study, archives, and methods are enabled for those with other disciplinary trainings? This article uses as a case study a recent workshop that we—two Ph.D.s in Feminist Studies—convened for our colleagues who are affiliated with Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and had expressed their desire to be in conversation with current Feminist and Queer Studies debates. We selected seminar texts based on topics explored in recent special issues of Feminist and Queer Studies journals, including: feminist method, feminist technoscience and new materialisms, affect, and feminist and queer geographies. Following a week-long feminist and queer theory workshop, participants reflect on how our discussions regarding method, archives, and objects of study inform their own intellectual and political concerns and commitments. Ultimately, this article offers insights into the new engagements and vocabularies engendered by feminist and queer theory as it travels across and against varied disciplinary persuasions.
<p>This chapter explores the ways that feminist theorists, from both social constructionist... more <p>This chapter explores the ways that feminist theorists, from both social constructionist and poststructural perspectives, have addressed the question of what sexuality is. We suggest that core to all kinds of feminist thinking about sexuality is that it cannot be understood simply as a fixed biological essence and that it involves power dynamics, as captured by the phrase <italic>sexual politics</italic>. Yet there is no agreement among feminist theorists about the questions of whether women's sexuality is fundamentally different than men's, or whether women's experiences of sexuality are characterized more by danger or pleasure. We take up these debates to think through the history and future of feminist theories of sexuality.</p>
This article uses driving time to examine the geographic relationship of abortion facilities to c... more This article uses driving time to examine the geographic relationship of abortion facilities to crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in terms of race/ethnicity and population density. We analyze both the current reproductive justice landscape and predict how this landscape will change following the projected reversal of Roe v. Wade. Our results demonstrate that disparities in the presence of abortion facilities and CPCs manifest in terms of rural/urban classification and race/ethnicity. These disparities will become more pronounced in the post- Roe landscape. Four major findings include: 1.) Following the projected reversal of Roe, the ratio of abortion facilities to CPCs will change from 1:3 to 1:5; 2.) the number of people who live closer to a CPC than an abortion facility will nearly double post- Roe; 3.) people in rural areas live in disproportionate proximity to CPCs, although the number of people in large metropolitan areas living closer to a CPC than an abortion facility will incr...
Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies, 2016
Jene Newsome, an Air Force Sergeant stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in western South Dakota... more Jene Newsome, an Air Force Sergeant stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in western South Dakota, didn't tell. And no one asked. Until November of 2009, that is, when local police officers visited Newsome's home and spotted a marriage certificate on her kitchen table. The officers subsequently reported this piece of information to the military, essentially "outing" Newsome, who was honorably discharged in 2010 under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, " the military's former policy that dictated that lesbian, gay, or bisexual individuals could serve in the military so long as the military remained unaware of their sexuality. With assistance from attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union, Newsome filed a complaint against the Rapid City Police Department, stating, "I played by 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell. '. .. I just don't agree with what the Rapid City police department did.. .. They violated a lot of internal policies on their end, and I feel like my privacy was violated. "1 Newsome directed her criticisms at the individual police officers involved with her case, rather than the military or its policies. Despite Newsome's position, various liberal media sources, as well as national lesbian and gay rights organizations working to abolish "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, " used Newsome's story to express and foment opposition to the policy. One such liberal news source wrote, "MEET JENE NEW-SOME. .. The repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell, ' pending in Congress, can't come quickly enough. "2 The remainder of this report argued for the need to completely do away with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and, in the interim, make the policy less stringent so that third-party "outings"such as the one that occurred in Newsome's case-would not lead to the dismissal of military service members. Readers did not actually "meet"
In 2021, U.S. states enacted 106 different abortion restrictions, the highest number of any year ... more In 2021, U.S. states enacted 106 different abortion restrictions, the highest number of any year since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Inspiring the most public outcry is Texas's S.B. 8, which bans abortion after six weeks and allows private citizens to sue those performing abortions or aiding in this process. Abortion justice supporters should be enraged—but only in small part due to Texas’ ban, any of the other 105 enacted restrictions, or the likelihood that the Supreme Court soon will hand down a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. We should be enraged because the anti-abortion movement has chipped away at the accessibility of abortion to the degree that the legal right to abortion means far less than it should. Key to this chipping away has been crisis pregnancy centers—religiously motivated, anti-abortion non-profit organizations that critics describe as “fake women's health clinics.” Today, there are 2500 crisis pregnancy centers and just 738 abortion clinics in the U....
Author(s): Thomsen, Carly Ann | Advisor(s): Rupp, Leila | Abstract: Unbecoming: Visibility Politi... more Author(s): Thomsen, Carly Ann | Advisor(s): Rupp, Leila | Abstract: Unbecoming: Visibility Politics and Queer Rurality critically analyzes calls for LGBTQ people to be "out, loud, and proud" through examining representations, discourses, and experiences of LGBTQ women in the rural Midwestern United States. Drawing from cultural representations and interviews I conducted with fifty-one women in rural South Dakota and Minnesota, I suggest that an estrangement exists between the desires, logics, and strategies of LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest and those of gay rights movements. This estrangement points to the need to consider the ideologies undergirding and the ramifications of LGBTQ visibility politics. I make three interventions in the interdisciplinary study of visibility: I argue that calls for visibility are symptomatic of and enable metronormativity, that visibility politics reproduce both post-racial and what I term post-spatial ideologies, and, finally, that becomin...
AbstractI suggest here that introductory Gender and Women’s Studies courses must teach students t... more AbstractI suggest here that introductory Gender and Women’s Studies courses must teach students the narratives that feminism tells about itself and of related activist movements and that we also must engage students in critiquing these very narratives. Drawing from Robyn Wiegman’s (2012) Object Lessons and Sara Ahmed’s (2012a) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, I argue that feminist teachers must critically interrogate our utilization of discourses of identity and diversity in the feminist classroom.ResumeJe suggere ici que les cours d’introduction aux Etudes sur le genre et les femmes doivent enseigner aux etudiantes les discours que le feminisme fait sur lui-meme et les mouvements activistes associes et que nous devons egalement inciter les etudiantes a critiquer ces discours. En m’appuyant sur les articles Object Lessons (2012) de Robyn Wiegman et On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012)de Sara Ahmed, j’affirme que les ensei...
Crisis pregnancy centers-anti-abortion non-profits that masquerade as abortion clinics-are increa... more Crisis pregnancy centers-anti-abortion non-profits that masquerade as abortion clinics-are increasingly using mobile units to expand their geographical and political reach. In this article, the first to consider mobile crisis pregnancy centers, we examine the methodological, epistemological, and political challenges that mobile units raise for scholars and activists alike. The mobile nature of on-the-go crisis pregnancy centers makes them difficult to both map and regulate. Taking these challenges as a starting point, we reflect on what we learned from our failure to map mobile crisis pregnancy centers. We first outline how mobile crisis pregnancy centers-the epitome of the wild, ungovernable, and unruly-call into question the glorification of these concepts in feminist and queer studies. We also suggest that mobile crisis pregnancy centers trouble the possibility of thinking feminist and political geography separately, as well as the positive affects associated with mobility in discussions of reproductive mobilities. We close with a qualitative analysis of mobile crisis pregnancy centers' online presence, examining the particular concerns that their mobility raises in terms of race, class, and place.
While much has been said about the diversity industry and about transexclusionary radical feminis... more While much has been said about the diversity industry and about transexclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), little has examined their relationship to one another or to academic feminist, queer, and trans studies. This article considers a "queer attack on feminist studies" at our small liberal arts college as a case study for thinking through these relations. A handful of students and diversity staff termed feminist studies faculty TERFs not because of any actual transphobic behavior, but because of our work to question gender systems and ideologies. By examining how some students and diversity office staff alike mobilized the TERF, as well as the ideologies that allow for slippages among the terms "lesbian," "feminist," and "TERF," we outline how the lesbian and the feminist are in danger of becoming permanently reactionary figures. In so doing, we reflect on the relationship between performing diversity work and policing academic studies of gender and sexuality, ultimately arguing that the mobilization of the TERF can function both to further extend the work of the diversity industry and also to call into question academic feminist, queer, and trans studies.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2020
UCSB), worked with their student government to make UCSB the first university in the country to b... more UCSB), worked with their student government to make UCSB the first university in the country to ban crisis pregnancy centers from falsely advertising on campus. Six years later, UCSB remains the only school to have passed such legislation. While this activist success makes End Fake Clinics a remarkable case, the group's core members do not remember this process as the most important or valuable aspect of their participation in the group. Instead, members cited the friendships they made with one another, their feeling of belonging to a collective built on shared political inquiry, and their finding ways to put feminist and queer theory into practice as inspiring and sustaining their activism. In this article, we expand on the limited feminist scholarship on crisis pregnancy centers and the little queer theoretical scholarship on reproduction by archiving and analyzing the activism of End Fake Clinics, a unique queer reproductive justice student group that initially came together to fight crisis pregnancy centers. Crisis pregnancy centers are religiously informed antiabortion nonprofits that claim to offer free services-including pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, counseling, and maternity and baby items-to those experiencing an unintended pregnancy. Crisis pregnancy centers target women they see as "abortionminded" (Kelly 2012, 214), often advertising on high school and college campuses. They deploy a range of deceptive tactics, including opening crisis
Nearly thirty years ago, Kimberl e Crenshaw published the theory of "intersectionality," in which... more Nearly thirty years ago, Kimberl e Crenshaw published the theory of "intersectionality," in which she argued that racism and sexism collide to make black women's marginalization distinct from that experienced by both white women and black men, and further that our legal institutions did not recognize these distinctions (Crenshaw , 1991)). This is, of course, the history most often tethered to the theory. But perhaps we need new ways to think about "intersectionality" and "intersectional feminism." These now ubiquitous terms are deployed in aspirational, critical, and contradictory ways by activists, scholars, bloggers, and politicos alike. Discourses of intersectionality have even entered the marketplace; Queer Supply, a Toronto-based artists' collective and clothing purveyor, claims, for example, "that the rejection of oppressive social structures can be achieved through self-love and community support. Queer Supply is about celebrating the intersectionality that strengthens us." Queer Supply certainly puts the "sell" in celebrating intersectionality-indeed, one need only purchase a t-shirt to achieve intersectionality's imperative. Given the term's ubiquity, it has become difficult to discern not only what constitutes this imperative but also the term's very definition. Patrick Grzanka's Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader and Patricia Hill Collins's and Sirma Bilge's Intersectionality provide readers with tools for thinking in new ways about the paradoxes, promises, and perils of deployments of intersectionality. Patrick Grzanka's Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader provides, as its name suggests, an introduction to the concept of intersectionality. The book is
By thinking with Feminist and Queer Studies, what new languages, objects of study, archives, and ... more By thinking with Feminist and Queer Studies, what new languages, objects of study, archives, and methods are enabled for those with other disciplinary trainings? This article uses as a case study a recent workshop that we—two Ph.D.s in Feminist Studies—convened for our colleagues who are affiliated with Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and had expressed their desire to be in conversation with current Feminist and Queer Studies debates. We selected seminar texts based on topics explored in recent special issues of Feminist and Queer Studies journals, including: feminist method, feminist technoscience and new materialisms, affect, and feminist and queer geographies. Following a week-long feminist and queer theory workshop, participants reflect on how our discussions regarding method, archives, and objects of study inform their own intellectual and political concerns and commitments. Ultimately, this article offers insights into the new engagements and vocabularies engendered by feminist and queer theory as it travels across and against varied disciplinary persuasions.
<p>This chapter explores the ways that feminist theorists, from both social constructionist... more <p>This chapter explores the ways that feminist theorists, from both social constructionist and poststructural perspectives, have addressed the question of what sexuality is. We suggest that core to all kinds of feminist thinking about sexuality is that it cannot be understood simply as a fixed biological essence and that it involves power dynamics, as captured by the phrase <italic>sexual politics</italic>. Yet there is no agreement among feminist theorists about the questions of whether women's sexuality is fundamentally different than men's, or whether women's experiences of sexuality are characterized more by danger or pleasure. We take up these debates to think through the history and future of feminist theories of sexuality.</p>
This article uses driving time to examine the geographic relationship of abortion facilities to c... more This article uses driving time to examine the geographic relationship of abortion facilities to crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in terms of race/ethnicity and population density. We analyze both the current reproductive justice landscape and predict how this landscape will change following the projected reversal of Roe v. Wade. Our results demonstrate that disparities in the presence of abortion facilities and CPCs manifest in terms of rural/urban classification and race/ethnicity. These disparities will become more pronounced in the post- Roe landscape. Four major findings include: 1.) Following the projected reversal of Roe, the ratio of abortion facilities to CPCs will change from 1:3 to 1:5; 2.) the number of people who live closer to a CPC than an abortion facility will nearly double post- Roe; 3.) people in rural areas live in disproportionate proximity to CPCs, although the number of people in large metropolitan areas living closer to a CPC than an abortion facility will incr...
Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies, 2016
Jene Newsome, an Air Force Sergeant stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in western South Dakota... more Jene Newsome, an Air Force Sergeant stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in western South Dakota, didn't tell. And no one asked. Until November of 2009, that is, when local police officers visited Newsome's home and spotted a marriage certificate on her kitchen table. The officers subsequently reported this piece of information to the military, essentially "outing" Newsome, who was honorably discharged in 2010 under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, " the military's former policy that dictated that lesbian, gay, or bisexual individuals could serve in the military so long as the military remained unaware of their sexuality. With assistance from attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union, Newsome filed a complaint against the Rapid City Police Department, stating, "I played by 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell. '. .. I just don't agree with what the Rapid City police department did.. .. They violated a lot of internal policies on their end, and I feel like my privacy was violated. "1 Newsome directed her criticisms at the individual police officers involved with her case, rather than the military or its policies. Despite Newsome's position, various liberal media sources, as well as national lesbian and gay rights organizations working to abolish "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, " used Newsome's story to express and foment opposition to the policy. One such liberal news source wrote, "MEET JENE NEW-SOME. .. The repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell, ' pending in Congress, can't come quickly enough. "2 The remainder of this report argued for the need to completely do away with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and, in the interim, make the policy less stringent so that third-party "outings"such as the one that occurred in Newsome's case-would not lead to the dismissal of military service members. Readers did not actually "meet"
In 2021, U.S. states enacted 106 different abortion restrictions, the highest number of any year ... more In 2021, U.S. states enacted 106 different abortion restrictions, the highest number of any year since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Inspiring the most public outcry is Texas's S.B. 8, which bans abortion after six weeks and allows private citizens to sue those performing abortions or aiding in this process. Abortion justice supporters should be enraged—but only in small part due to Texas’ ban, any of the other 105 enacted restrictions, or the likelihood that the Supreme Court soon will hand down a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. We should be enraged because the anti-abortion movement has chipped away at the accessibility of abortion to the degree that the legal right to abortion means far less than it should. Key to this chipping away has been crisis pregnancy centers—religiously motivated, anti-abortion non-profit organizations that critics describe as “fake women's health clinics.” Today, there are 2500 crisis pregnancy centers and just 738 abortion clinics in the U....
Author(s): Thomsen, Carly Ann | Advisor(s): Rupp, Leila | Abstract: Unbecoming: Visibility Politi... more Author(s): Thomsen, Carly Ann | Advisor(s): Rupp, Leila | Abstract: Unbecoming: Visibility Politics and Queer Rurality critically analyzes calls for LGBTQ people to be "out, loud, and proud" through examining representations, discourses, and experiences of LGBTQ women in the rural Midwestern United States. Drawing from cultural representations and interviews I conducted with fifty-one women in rural South Dakota and Minnesota, I suggest that an estrangement exists between the desires, logics, and strategies of LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest and those of gay rights movements. This estrangement points to the need to consider the ideologies undergirding and the ramifications of LGBTQ visibility politics. I make three interventions in the interdisciplinary study of visibility: I argue that calls for visibility are symptomatic of and enable metronormativity, that visibility politics reproduce both post-racial and what I term post-spatial ideologies, and, finally, that becomin...
AbstractI suggest here that introductory Gender and Women’s Studies courses must teach students t... more AbstractI suggest here that introductory Gender and Women’s Studies courses must teach students the narratives that feminism tells about itself and of related activist movements and that we also must engage students in critiquing these very narratives. Drawing from Robyn Wiegman’s (2012) Object Lessons and Sara Ahmed’s (2012a) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, I argue that feminist teachers must critically interrogate our utilization of discourses of identity and diversity in the feminist classroom.ResumeJe suggere ici que les cours d’introduction aux Etudes sur le genre et les femmes doivent enseigner aux etudiantes les discours que le feminisme fait sur lui-meme et les mouvements activistes associes et que nous devons egalement inciter les etudiantes a critiquer ces discours. En m’appuyant sur les articles Object Lessons (2012) de Robyn Wiegman et On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012)de Sara Ahmed, j’affirme que les ensei...
Crisis pregnancy centers-anti-abortion non-profits that masquerade as abortion clinics-are increa... more Crisis pregnancy centers-anti-abortion non-profits that masquerade as abortion clinics-are increasingly using mobile units to expand their geographical and political reach. In this article, the first to consider mobile crisis pregnancy centers, we examine the methodological, epistemological, and political challenges that mobile units raise for scholars and activists alike. The mobile nature of on-the-go crisis pregnancy centers makes them difficult to both map and regulate. Taking these challenges as a starting point, we reflect on what we learned from our failure to map mobile crisis pregnancy centers. We first outline how mobile crisis pregnancy centers-the epitome of the wild, ungovernable, and unruly-call into question the glorification of these concepts in feminist and queer studies. We also suggest that mobile crisis pregnancy centers trouble the possibility of thinking feminist and political geography separately, as well as the positive affects associated with mobility in discussions of reproductive mobilities. We close with a qualitative analysis of mobile crisis pregnancy centers' online presence, examining the particular concerns that their mobility raises in terms of race, class, and place.
While much has been said about the diversity industry and about transexclusionary radical feminis... more While much has been said about the diversity industry and about transexclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), little has examined their relationship to one another or to academic feminist, queer, and trans studies. This article considers a "queer attack on feminist studies" at our small liberal arts college as a case study for thinking through these relations. A handful of students and diversity staff termed feminist studies faculty TERFs not because of any actual transphobic behavior, but because of our work to question gender systems and ideologies. By examining how some students and diversity office staff alike mobilized the TERF, as well as the ideologies that allow for slippages among the terms "lesbian," "feminist," and "TERF," we outline how the lesbian and the feminist are in danger of becoming permanently reactionary figures. In so doing, we reflect on the relationship between performing diversity work and policing academic studies of gender and sexuality, ultimately arguing that the mobilization of the TERF can function both to further extend the work of the diversity industry and also to call into question academic feminist, queer, and trans studies.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2020
UCSB), worked with their student government to make UCSB the first university in the country to b... more UCSB), worked with their student government to make UCSB the first university in the country to ban crisis pregnancy centers from falsely advertising on campus. Six years later, UCSB remains the only school to have passed such legislation. While this activist success makes End Fake Clinics a remarkable case, the group's core members do not remember this process as the most important or valuable aspect of their participation in the group. Instead, members cited the friendships they made with one another, their feeling of belonging to a collective built on shared political inquiry, and their finding ways to put feminist and queer theory into practice as inspiring and sustaining their activism. In this article, we expand on the limited feminist scholarship on crisis pregnancy centers and the little queer theoretical scholarship on reproduction by archiving and analyzing the activism of End Fake Clinics, a unique queer reproductive justice student group that initially came together to fight crisis pregnancy centers. Crisis pregnancy centers are religiously informed antiabortion nonprofits that claim to offer free services-including pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, counseling, and maternity and baby items-to those experiencing an unintended pregnancy. Crisis pregnancy centers target women they see as "abortionminded" (Kelly 2012, 214), often advertising on high school and college campuses. They deploy a range of deceptive tactics, including opening crisis
Nearly thirty years ago, Kimberl e Crenshaw published the theory of "intersectionality," in which... more Nearly thirty years ago, Kimberl e Crenshaw published the theory of "intersectionality," in which she argued that racism and sexism collide to make black women's marginalization distinct from that experienced by both white women and black men, and further that our legal institutions did not recognize these distinctions (Crenshaw , 1991)). This is, of course, the history most often tethered to the theory. But perhaps we need new ways to think about "intersectionality" and "intersectional feminism." These now ubiquitous terms are deployed in aspirational, critical, and contradictory ways by activists, scholars, bloggers, and politicos alike. Discourses of intersectionality have even entered the marketplace; Queer Supply, a Toronto-based artists' collective and clothing purveyor, claims, for example, "that the rejection of oppressive social structures can be achieved through self-love and community support. Queer Supply is about celebrating the intersectionality that strengthens us." Queer Supply certainly puts the "sell" in celebrating intersectionality-indeed, one need only purchase a t-shirt to achieve intersectionality's imperative. Given the term's ubiquity, it has become difficult to discern not only what constitutes this imperative but also the term's very definition. Patrick Grzanka's Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader and Patricia Hill Collins's and Sirma Bilge's Intersectionality provide readers with tools for thinking in new ways about the paradoxes, promises, and perils of deployments of intersectionality. Patrick Grzanka's Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader provides, as its name suggests, an introduction to the concept of intersectionality. The book is
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Papers by Carly Thomsen