Cinema and Media Arts

This paper elaborates a theory of 'unbecoming' to explore how a queering of the subject might transform oppressive social conditions. In this analysis of the subject's deconstructive relation to the law I take up the interpellation scenario forwarded by Louis Althusser and Judith Butler's theory of performativity to argue that being 'unbecoming' potentially not only alters subjectivity, it also alters the very law that hails the subject into being. First, I deconstruct both subject and law in their relation to each other as performatives, for it is at this threshold of undecidability that the possibilities for political transformation emerge. Second, I demonstrate the creative and transformative political force of queer performativity to show that our agency as political beings lies not merely in affirmative representations of identity. Political agency also emerges in the creative force of a becoming that is also an unbecoming, where in and through our abjection from the social order we critique and transform it.

This article develops a principle of 'discursive justice' that combines Jürgen Habermas' theory of the public sphere, with the understanding of epistemic violence developed by Jean Francois Lyotard and Gayatri Spivak. This concept is considered in relation to Bedford v Canada, a Charter challenge to Canadian prostitution laws. The Bedford hearings provide the setting for lively public debate about the criminalization of prostitution, with interventions by sex worker-led organizations, Christian groups, abolitionist and non-abolitionist feminists, HIV activists, civil libertarians, Indigenous organizations and others. But there also emerged the troubling spectre of epistemic violence when sex work activists' credibility and status as 'knowers' came under question. Discursive justice is proposed as a principle that might help preclude epistemic violence and strengthen participatory democracy in the public sphere. 40 n Canadian Journal of Human Rights (2014) 3:1 Can J Hum Rts Cet article développe un principe de « justice discursive » qui combine la théorie de la sphère publique de Jürgen Habermas avec la compréhension de la violence épistémique formulée par Jean-Francois Lyotard et Gayatri Spivak. Ce concept est examiné en relation avec l'affaire Bedford c Canada, une contestation, fondée sur la Charte, des lois canadiennes en matière de prostitution. Les audiences en appel dans l'affaire Bedford créent un cadre pour un débat public animé sur la criminalisation de la prostitution, avec entre autres des interventions d'organismes dirigés par des travailleuses du sexe, de groupes chrétiens, de féministes abolitionnistes et non abolitionnistes, de militants de la lutte contre le VIH, de groupes de défense des libertés civiles et d'organismes autochtones. Cependant, on y a également vu s'y profiler le spectre troublant de la violence épistémique lorsque la crédibilité et le statut de « connaisseurs » des activistes du travail du sexe ont été remis en question. La justice discursive est proposée ici comme un principe qui pourrait aider à empêcher la violence épistémique et à renforcer la démocratie participative dans la sphère publique.

This paper takes form as a thought experiment. Where my current project more generally explores how sexually marginalized communities are imagining freedom, justice and political belonging in light of biopolitics, my aim in this presentation is to ‘think’ politics through the qualities of sexual ecstasy. This is not a study of orgasm per se, as a biological or cutural phenomenon, nor even of the right to sexual pleasure. Rather, it is an intervention in the realm of the political imaginary, or more precisely the biopolitical imaginary. I take up Beatrize Preciado’s theory of potentia gaudendi (orgasmic force)  in relation to Derrida’s development of the concepts justice to-come and democracy to-come . Under development is a messianic sexual politics, engendered at the site where biopolitics, deconstruction, and orgasm converge.

This version of "The Politics of Identity" focuses specifically on the shift from identity politics to a politics of difference, tracing the implications of postmodern global capitalism  and decolonizing methodologies for feminist subjectivities, theory and practice. What forms does the subject take in a postmodern and postcolonial context? What modes of resistance are possible for fluid, fragmented, transitory subjects in relation to neoliberalism? Drawing on women-of-colour feminisms, queer theory, psychoanalysis, marxism, critical theory and post-structuralism, students will explore the ways that the theoretical and political imagination can be decolonized through differential consciousness.  Offered at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, McGill University, Fall 2015.

This interdisciplinary 4th year seminar explores the crisis in political thought that emerges where politics intersects with sex in late capitalism. Sex is a key site of the modern regulation of life. At the same time, neoliberalism aestheticizes and commodifies even counterculture sexual identities. What becomes of dominant models of liberty, equality, and human rights, in this context? How are communities whose sex is out of bounds – border crossers, unruly queers, gender nonconformists, and cripsex radicals included and excluded in normative models of social justice? And how are they visualizing, creating, and investing energies in new and alternative forms of economic, social and political organization? Drawing on current queer, crip, feminist, critical race, indigenous, and critical sexuality theory students will explore the ways that sexual minorities are today shaping the political imaginary.

In this interdisciplinary seminar students critically engage with questions of sexuality and marginalization, drawing on several interpretive frameworks, from queer and critical sexuality
theory to feminism, crip theory, postcolonialism and critical race theory. We will consider sexual practices that fall outside of what Gayle Rubin terms the “charmed circle” of sexuality such as
bdsm, public sex, sex work, and pornography, and explore the role that intersecting systems of oppression play in sexual marginalization.

This 3rd year course offers students the critical tools to explore our theoretical and cultural conceptions of outlaws. Students are encouraged to employ theoretical analysis to critically examine the complex meanings of representations of the outlaw in culture, media and communication.

This seminar style capstone course examines current feminist theories of embodiment. Drawing on recent work in feminist, queer, trans, crip, and critical race studies, students will explore difference and variability among human bodies, the ways bodies move, transform, and relate to other bodies. The focus is on current critical approaches to such issues as sexual difference, gender and transgender, disability, racialization and body size and shape. We will interrogate what different modes of embodiment mean for subjectivity, the social world and social change. Students should be prepared to discuss sensitive issues related to sexuality, oppression and trauma, and to engage in creative exercises that involve embodied learning. Activities will be conducted in ways that are accessible to students with a diversity of body sizes, shapes, fitness levels and abilities. The course includes academic, creative and practical elements so that students can explore a range of learning styles and modes for disseminating knowledge. The course prioritizes embodied, non-hierachical, democratized learning and conscientization.

In this interdisciplinary seminar students will critically engage with questions of sexual citizenship and marginalization. Students will examine structures of marginalization and exceptionality in current queer, trans, critical race and crip discourses of disciplinary power, biopolitics and necropolitics, particularly as they have been informed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mmembe. The course explores the role such structures as heteropatriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, nation, race, disability and the carceral state, play in sexual marginalization. We also consider the role certain sexual institutions and practices, including, for example masturbation, marriage and non-monogomous kin systems, sex work and sex play, can shape access to or exclusion from citizenship.

This event will be held on Zoom with ASL interpretation available. Please RSVP to [email protected] with your name and institutional affiliation for the link and passcode. • 23 October 2020 • Social time at 4:00pm • Talks begin 4:30 •

There is an abundance of health research with women in street-based sex work, but few studies examine what health means and how it is practiced by participants. We embrace these tasks by exploring how a convenience sample of sex workers ( n = 33) think about and enact health in their lives. Findings reveal pluralistic notions of health that include neoliberal, biomedical, and lay knowledge. Health is operationalized through clinic/hospital visits and self-care practices, which emerge as pragmatic behaviors and ways to resist or compensate for exclusionary treatment in health care systems. Participants also use symbols of biomedical authority to substantiate their lay interpretations of certain conditions, revealing complex forms of moral reasoning in their health etiologies. We conclude that doing health and constructing rich narratives about it are constituent elements of the women’s everyday praxis and subjectivities in relation to the broader socioeconomic and political worlds of...

This article develops a principle of 'discursive justice' that combines Jürgen Habermas' theory of the public sphere, with the understanding of epistemic violence developed by Jean Francois Lyotard and Gayatri Spivak. This concept is considered in relation to Bedford v Canada, a Charter challenge to Canadian prostitution laws. The Bedford hearings provide the setting for lively public debate about the criminalization of prostitution, with interventions by sex worker-led organizations, Christian groups, abolitionist and non-abolitionist feminists, HIV activists, civil libertarians, Indigenous organizations and others. But there also emerged the troubling spectre of epistemic violence when sex work activists' credibility and status as 'knowers' came under question. Discursive justice is proposed as a principle that might help preclude epistemic violence and strengthen participatory democracy in the public sphere.

Outlawry is a legal penalty that banishes wrongdoers from the community; it refers to a refusal to obey the law and a withdrawal of legal rights. Although outlawry is obsolete in western criminal law, Giorgio Agamben links it to modern biopolitics. As outlawry is appropriated to preserve the law, and as the law takes life as its object, the subject of politics disappears. Yet biopolitics also occurs alongside a threat to sovereignty posed by outlawry, and a shift away from the subject as a site of emancipatory politics, toward a politics of difference. Taking a post-structural approach, this project examines outlawry as a deconstructive concept. Outlawry exposes the law's inability to be at one with itself, its undecidability, and its dependence on fiction and force to come into being and to maintain itself. Staging outlawry in the terms of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida, the first chapter develops outlawry as deconstructive concept with an undecidable relationship to justice. Chapter two looks to Judith Butler's performative subject and Louis Althusser's theory of subject interpellation to rethink the relations between subject and law in light of outlawry. Chapter three examines the overlap between sovereignty, outlawry and the beast (la bête) discussed by Agamben and Derrida, and considers political concepts that might deter the conserving power of outlawry in favor of its deconstructive force. Finally, I turn to Levinasian ethics and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming-minoritarian to sketch a politics of outlawry that revises the law according to an ethical responsibility to the Other, the political agency of those who are excluded from the law, and their demand that structures of power be altered. Outlawry need not result in sheer abjection; for both the subject, and the anarchic demos, it can be a source of political vitality and social transformation. Yet as the atrocities of modernity bear witness, from the Shoah to Guantanamo Bay, outlawry can lead to 'the worst.' Outlawry marks the fault line between justice and injustice; if we are to achieve an ethical future, we must remain politically vigilant, self-critical and open to alterity.