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Section 3: Feminist Orientations

Section 3 builds on the earlier sections to understand how key feminist ideas travel to shape particular sites and processes. We examine understandings of place and space to reflect on how coloniality and transnational movements shape experiences of home and belonging. Tracing ideas as they travel through history and geography also unsettles what we take for granted when we encounter concepts as basic as gender. In a second section, we ask how gender and race produce a visual field by engaging questions of representations and infrastructures. Moving to section three, we draw on earlier discussions of power and epistemology to understand that what we might have taken as “scientific fact” is, in fact, produced through social and cultural understandings of gender. This intervention grounds the field of feminist STS (Science and Technology Studies) and shows how the location of scientists and their understanding of the world and their place in it shapes what most of us come to learn as science. Finally, looking around to the ecologies and environments that surround us, we reflect on how bodies and environments interact. You may be surprised to learn how our experiences of the world are not shaped by the boundaries of our physical bodies alone but are directed by our breath and breathing, the circulation of toxins, and our interactions with nonhuman kin. Some questions in this section include: How do we know what we know about gender and race? What histories and geographies shape current knowledge about them? How are scientific “facts” produced through social and cultural ideas? How are visual fields produced as gendered and raced? How do our bodies extend into our environments so that boundaries between them are blurred?

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Part XI: Critical Geographies of Place and Space

Documentary

Life and Debt, directed by Stephanie Black, focuses on Jamaica and features transnational feminist themes such as the relationship between colonial and slave political economies and the neocolonial relationships in today’s political and economic relationships between the Global North and the Global South. One of the film’s themes is the comparison between experiencing Jamaica as a tourist versus as a citizen. How does the director map out Jamaica? Who occupies the different spaces of the film and what roles do they play in those spaces (i.e., the airport, the resorts, the streets, the factories, farms and fields, the rooms where policy is made–whether national or international as in the case of the IMF)? How does privilege shape one’s access to different parts of Jamaica or to undertake international travel? One of the goals of the film is to challenge viewers in the English-speaking Global North to “world travel” to Jamaica to see it in a different way than the shiny gloss of tourist imagery invites. Using concepts from any of the four chapters in this section, explain how the film does this.

Supplementary Classroom Activity: “Queering the Map”

“Queering the Map” describes itself as “a community generated counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.” Explore some of the posts in an area familiar to you. What kinds of stories do people tell about their lives in that place? How does it resonate or not with your lived experience? Is there information missing from the map that you’d want to know? How has reading through the chapters in Part XI shaped how you think about the map and stories you’re reading? https://www.queeringthemap.com/

Reflection Questions for Readings in Part XI

Chapter 43. Anahi Russo Garrido, “Traveling the Topographies of Mexico City’s Lesbian Spaces”

  1. How do the “topographies of queer spaces” operate in New York City as described by Manalasan and in Mexico City, as discussed in this chapter? 
  2. What are the differences and similarities between the spatial concepts of el ambiente, lesbian spaces, and queer spaces in Mexico City?
  3. If you could speak with one of the interviewees in this chapter, who would you speak with and why, and what would you ask them about queer spaces in Mexico City?
  4. Draw a map of official and unofficial queer spaces on your campus (or town). Are these spaces considered “equally queer”? What are some of the factors that render these spaces “queerer” than others? Drawing from Russo Garrido’s essay, why may some spaces be considered queerer than others on your campus (or town)?

Chapter 44. Christina Holmes, “Mobility, Marginality, and Decoloniality in Feminist Theories of Place”

  1. What is the relationship between ideological margins and physical margins in the work of the authors highlighted here?
  2. What kinds of personal experiences might make it easier or more difficult to world travel or to “choose the margin” as bell hooks puts it? Examine your own life: are there places where you are encouraged to practice the skills required for world traveling? Where do you receive messages that undermine or undervalue those skills?
  3. One of the claims made in this chapter is that feminist methodological decisions shape how we see and what we know (epistemological concerns) as well as how we understand people, places, and other things in the world, including what counts as a world (ontological concerns). Some of the specific methodological concerns raised in chapter include challenging dichotomous thinking (either/or to both/and, for example), using intersectional or decolonial lenses of analysis, and attending to the disciplinary differences seen in Lugones’ work as a philosopher and Manalansan’s work as an anthropologist. Choose any one of these three concerns and summarize its importance to feminist theory: for example, how does challenging dichotomous thinking help combat oppression?
  4. Travel (i.e., to the margin) is both a metaphor and a material practice in this essay and the work it cites. Consider the physicality of Lugones’ streetwalker who strives to gain a ground-level awareness of sociality as it makes sense among diverse inhabitants “hanging out” there. Similarly, Manalansan describes himself as a resistant flaneur mapping out the use of space across New York City. Is there an element of ableism in the use of these tropes grounded in movement? What could a crip theory/disability studies framework add to what it might mean to understand people who inhabit different worlds than we ourselves might or worlds that are different than those depicted here?

Materials developed and curated by Christina Holmes

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Part XII: Figures of Film and Media

Related Media/Cultural Texts

Articles
Hobson, Janell. 2018. “Lemonade Lessons: Beyoncé’s Feminism and the Art of Visual-Album Storytelling,” Films for the Feminist Classroom. Issue 8.1, Fall 2018
http://ffc.twu.edu/issue_8-1/lesson_Hobson_8-1.html

YouTube

  1. Eve’s Bayou 1997 Kasi Lemmons https://youtu.be/9r8de7NxsfU?si=-CMiElWT-OCgKli8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_FUL301oUg
  2. Beyoncé Lemonade 2016  https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxKHVMqMZqUSPF11Ghs0KqDfOGhB9Vw5E&si=Xr6_zs7PGf_7SmFh

Reflection Questions for Readings in Part XII

Chapter 47. Ayana K. Weekley, “Beautiful Activists: A Feminist Analysis of Gender and Race in Essence Magazine, 1970”

  1. Weekley examines the changing representations of Black women in the 1970s through coverage in Essence magazine. How does that discussion relate to representations of Black women today? Where might we see examples of the Black femme in popular culture today? What discursive work does she seem to be doing?
  2. What connections can you make between Keeling’s discussion of images of Black power to contemporary examples from the Black Lives Matter movement? How are these representations similar or distinct?
  3. Weekley argues that Essence magazine emphasized the femininity of women activists that were profiled. Do you think women activists today face similar pressures to either feminize their work or having their work feminized by the media?
  4. Weekley uses the work of Nguyen and Hobson to discuss how regimes of beauty and femininity are used to measure freedom, rights, or progress for women. Can you identify current examples where access to beauty becomes tied to ideas of equality?

Chapter 48. Zakiya R. Adair, “Boss: Beyoncé’s Rhetorical Performance of Black Womanhood”

  1. Mimi Nguyen argues that beauty is a technology of power. How so?  How can marginalized individuals subvert this power?
  2.  Is it possible for cultural products, pop music packaged for consumer consumption to be transgressive?
  3. How did the rise of neoliberalism impact late twentieth century feminism?
  4. How did late twentieth century shifts in Western feminism away from a radical critique of capitalism help to create twenty-first century pop feminism?

Materials developed and curated by Zakiya Adair

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Part XIII: Feminist Science and Technology Studies

Multimedia Resources

Excerpts from these four films, from the 1960s to early 2000s, could be useful in discussions around the kind of narrative framing regarding fertilization that Martin (1991) addresses. Prompts could include how visual, audio, and narrative components—like soundtrack, gaze, metaphors, and similes—potentially (re)shape gendered understandings of sperm cells, ova, passivity, and agency.

Finally, this press release from The Wellcome Sanger Institute (April 16, 2014) summarizes its Institute’s research, at the time recently published in Nature, on the role of the Juno protein—integral to the egg’s sperm receptor—in mammalian fertilization. There is a 3-minute linked YouTube video that explains these findings: https://youtu.be/LJNuZQCwWaU?feature=shared.

Reflection Questions for Readings in Part XIII

Chapter 51. David A. Rubin, “Feminist and Queer STS”

  1. How does queer feminist STS challenge the myth of scientific objectivity?
  2. How do Martin and Haraway critically interrogate specific scientific arguments in similar or dissimilar ways?
  3. What new perspectives on feminist and queer STS research do Wilson and Roy offer?
  4. How might you use queer feminist STS in your everyday life?

Chapter 52. Clare Jen, “More than Cyborgs: Metaphors for Thinking, Surviving, and Gathering”

  1. What is your “biological” understanding of human fertilization processes? What is your “cultural” understanding? How did you arrive at these understandings? In what ways are your understandings of the “biological” and the “cultural” interconnected? In what ways are they not interconnected?
  2. What is your understanding of a “cyborg?” What situations can you think of in which there are stabilized boundaries between “human” and “animal” (also “organism” and “machine,” “physical” and “nonphysical”)? Are there situations in which these boundaries become less stable? Explain these situations. In what ways are these boundaries reinforced?
  3. In what ways do you think the arguments made by Martin (1991) and Haraway (1991) are relevant in today’s world? In what ways are these arguments not as relevant? Explain.

Materials developed and curated by Clare Jen

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Part XIV: More-than-human Attunements

Classroom Activity: Breathing Practices

  1. Have students practice a breathing exercise. Here are four breathing exercises listed on this website from Southern Utah University: https://www.suu.edu/blog/2021/10/mindfulness-techniques-students.html
  2. Nico Marie (“Black Yogi Nico Marie” on YouTube) has several great short breathing videos, such as Belly Breathing: https://www.suu.edu/blog/2021/10/mindfulness-techniques-students.html
  3. Box Breathing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPXy0974vu0&list=PLu7v76kvZZtQGm2IcINTylpp8EvadElXg&index=26

Related Media/Cultural Texts

Documentaries

  1. “Seasons of Life,” a short (11 minute) documentary about women in Nagaland foraging and fermenting bamboo shoots, available on Dolly Kikon’s website:  https://dollykikon.com/projects/seasons-of-life/ together with more information about the project, and on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrI4e07MYKk.
  2. Short video of author-activist-scientist Sandra Steingraber that explains connections between environmental toxins, family structures, activism, and science, focusing on fracking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDZK07L1E5U (1.5 minutes) by Food & Water Watch

Written primers

  1. The Intersectional Environmentalist, https://intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/
  2. Collection toolkits on Intersectional Environmentalism, https://intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/toolkits, including one on ecofeminism: https://intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/toolkits/ecofeminism-and-environmental-liberation

Article

Jane Fonda, “You Can’t Have Healthy People on a Sick Planet” https://time.com/6554076/jane-fonda-cancer-climate-change/

Films for the Feminist Classroom Essay

“Contextualizing Labour and Environmental Justice through a Transnational Feminist Frame” including several documentaries that can be used to teach environmental feminism http://ffc.twu.edu/issue_11-2/lesson_Adair-et-al_11-2.html

Reflection Questions for Readings in Part XIV

Chapter 55. Dylan McCarthy Blackston, “Transing Difference”

  1. Sandy Stone urges trans people to embrace the dissonance of their refigured bodies. What are the stakes of that project?
  2. Relatedly, what are some feminist theorizations of difference? Why are these theorizations important?
  3. How might we better connect the invaluable critical frameworks of trans studies, Black feminist studies, and Indigenous studies in order to intervene in social and institutional indifference to pollution, increasingly prevalent environmental disasters, and climate change?
  4. What new story of interconnected care are you writing?

Chapter 56. Stina Soderling, “A Feminist Study of Breathing”

  1. Do you identify as a mammal? Why (not)? What does this mean to you? Is this a feminist matter?
  2. Take a moment to breathe. What do you learn? What questions might you ask? (How) are these feminist questions?
  3. The chapter mentions ways that breathing is interrupted, challenged, or made impossible. What would you add to this list of examples?
  4. Did the chapter lead you to think about any “unlikely feminist objects,” things you did not before see as related to feminism and feminist studies?

Materials developed and curated by Stina Soderling