Guest post by student Erin L. It was via my Facebook newsfeed that I found out that one man had come forward, accusing Jian Ghomeshi of sexual assault. For those who aren’t familiar with the story, Jim Hounslow, one of Ghomeshi’s former classmates at York University, claims that the two were waiting for an elevator…
28.11.14 Caitlin B.: Gendered double standards?
The headlines read: equality has been achieved. There were simultaneously six female premiers governing over 85% of Canada’s population. The headlines argued: the rise of women in Canadian politics is unmistakable and unstoppable. One would hope this would mean gender is playing a reduced role in politics. Unfortunately that is simply not the case. Not…
22.5.2014 Sleep at Durham
A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to be able to give a talk on sexual assault and unconsciousness at Durham University, in a visit cosponsored by the Centre for Medical Humanities. Caitríona Ni Dhuill and Angela Woods also organized a workshop on “Sleep, Activity, Agency” that included presentations from me, Felicity Callard and…
13.2.2014: Guest post by Madeline Smith
Since I was in a car accident six months ago, I’m unwillingly hyperaware of the way I extend and control my body. Tools like cars, according to Drew Leder’s analysis of embodied experience, allow us to “redesign” our extended bodies to interact with the world. A car, understood as a tool that acts as an…
13.2.2014: Student guest blogposts
I am currently teaching an undergraduate seminar called “The Politics of the Body,” which focuses on the political potential of phenomenological approaches to embodiment. We’ve read a bit of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, a bit of Foucault to contrast, and discussed the (not at all phenomenological) idea that our bodies are our property. Now we are moving…
27.1.14: Good slow and bad slow?
Last week I went to hear journalist and self-help guru Carl Honoré answer questions about his TED talk “In Praise of Slow” (which is a short version of his book of the same title). It happened to be the day before I taught Foucault’s “Docile Bodies” chapter, from Discipline and Punish, in which he describes…
19.7.2013 Thinking about pain
A great interview with Lisa Folkmarson Käll on her new edited book, Dimensions of Pain.
Summer 2012
My blog has been on hiatus for a while. Mea culpa. For now, the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy has just produced a special issue on sexual harassment in the academy, which I think contains many useful reflections.
3.1.12: Singular Beauty
Photographer Cara Phillips graciously provided Meredith Jones and me with the striking cover image for our 2009 edited volume, Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer: Her book of photographs, Singular Beauty: Inside the World of Cosmetic Surgery is a series of beautiful and dramatic images of the inside of US urban cosmetic surgery offices. As Cara says…
22.12.11: Clune-Taylor on the DSD/intersex debate
Here’s another redirect, this time to a blogpost by PhD student Catherine Clune-Taylor: Disorders of Sex Development: De-Queering the ‘I’ in LGBTQI2-S