Feeling Photography 3

On October 16th and 17th, 2009, I was fortunate to attend Feeling Photography, an international, interdisciplinary conference about emotions and photography held at the University of Toronto’s Monk Centre for International Studies. This is the third in a series of articles about the talks I attended. I will finish this series with a consideration of Lisa Cartwright’s presentation on “compulsive [photographic] expression” in the photography of Catherine Opie.

Lisa Cartwright opened the closing plenary with a thoughtful focus on Catherine Opie’s documentary photography of individuals embedded in community. Starting with Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), a startling piece depicting Opie topless in a Madonna pose, breastfeeding a child, Lisa focused on Opie’s autobiographical accounts of a life unfolding in a queer family. Opie’s physical deviation from the “feminine” norm (e.g., tattoos snaking along her right bicep; her large physical presence; her short hair signifying a butch aesthetic) as it meets perhaps the most intimate gesture of sustenance serves to disrupt, and I think, successfully extends, the viewer’s understandings of mothering practices. The softness of her unclothed body is undeniable, and beautifully works with and against her neutral expression and the supposedly neutral genre of documentary photography. (The photograph can be found here.)

Cartwright moved on to discuss Opie’s other works, including Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), the visual documentation of a performance in which it seems that Opie (aided by a collaborator?) has cut a childlike domestic scene in the skin of her upper back (image seen here). Still bleeding at its seams, the image contains a house, sun and clouds, and a lawn on which two women stand holding hands. I interpreted this difficult image as linking only one slightly normatively divergent element of the scene—i.e., a triangle of skirt for the second figure—as the source of the bleeding wounds that surround and shape the human figures. Cartwright discussed the teenage practice of cutting as a reference point for the image, highlighting Opie’s work for its educational potential for youth. Drawing from visual theory, Cartwright challenged assumptions about cutting as a solitary act; like photography itself, cutting is a reaching out for relationship, always an expressive performance seeking connection and community. Opie’s image is an invitation for engagement, dramatically embodying a teenager’s need to clearly and directly express her pain.

Feeling Photography 2

Submitted by Paula

On October 16th and 17th, 2009, I was fortunate to attend Feeling Photography, an international, interdisciplinary conference about emotions and photography held at the University of Toronto’s Monk Centre for International Studies. This is the second in a series of articles about talks I attended at this event.

One of two closing plenary speakers, Ann Cvetkovich, explored the idea of a queer archive through a care-full examination of the work of two queer feminist photographers, Tammy Rae Carland and Zoe Leonard. By considering works that document the intersection of personal and historical loss, Cvetkovich articulated a “queer archival practice” that transcends sexual identification. She defines this practice as any work that documents felt experience as historically important. (This raises interesting questions about queering the feminist archive, revisiting feminist history and literature as primarily queer practices, rather than the more common tendency to include queer studies under a gender studies or feminist banner. Cvetkovich implicitly invites all viewers and makers into this queer aesthetic, illustrating the community building alternatives to traditionally exclusive archives.)

Ann concentrated on Carland’s recent project, An Archive of Feelings, in which she carefully documented ordinary domestic objects from her mother’s apartment. Arranging items such as doilies, recipe cards, and letters against a white surface, Carland intuitively composed a kind of visual poetry about the life that joined these objects as a personal archive. (You can see her work here.) Her archive of feelings has been recorded in book form, mimicking the format of traditional archival publications, and has also been represented in part as a poster, which echoes Roland Barthes in asking: “Who will record the history of tears?” I think Cvetkovich beautifully complemented the conference’s opening talks, adding this intimate documentation of “ordinary” loss to David Eng and Diana Taylor’s considerations of extraordinary political trauma—two streams of this history of tears.

Ann then moved to Zoe Leonard’s Analogue, a photographic archive of public spaces in decline. In this ongoing series, Leonard moves from more personal considerations of gender and sexuality to archiving public spaces of New York City’s Lower East Side, her home for over twenty years. These documented spaces of aging small storefronts and hand-drawn signs, threatened by increasing encroachment of global consumerism and gentrification, wed the personal and historical experiences of the New York queer community. As still lives, the thousands of images within Analogue grieve and commemorate both the architectural aesthetic of community and the absent figures whose lives were so intertwined with them. Like Carland’s references to a life absent from her photographs, Leonard catalogues a queer archive of feelings against the backdrop of individual lives—in this case, she considers the historical affect (or feeling) of public spaces rather than personal artifacts, examining the spaces where humans and objects work on each other.

Feeling Photography

Submitted by Paula

On October 16th and 17th, 2009, I was fortunate to attend Feeling Photography, an international, interdisciplinary conference about emotions and photography held at the University of Toronto’s Monk Centre for International Studies. This is the first in a series of articles about the talks I attended.

The event was anchored by keynote lectures from David Eng, American scholar of critical race theory, queer studies, and visual culture, and Diana Taylor, Canadian-born but New York based artist and scholar within the fields of feminist theatre and performance and trauma studies. Both presented pieces concerned with trauma, testimony, and memory, highlighting the role of photography within artistic accounts of World War II Japanese internment camps (Eng) and an Argentinean torture camp in the “dirty war” era in the late 1970s and 1980s (Taylor). These talks illustrate the possibilities for art as popular education, fusing aesthetic experience with a concern for political justice that can be seen in many feminist artworks around the world. Though not highlighted in the content of the talks, both Eng and Taylor bring longstanding commitments to queer and gender activism to their work that I suspect informed their nuanced understanding and concern for historical trauma.

Eng focused on Japanese American artist Rea Tajiri’s short documentary History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991), a lyrical and enigmatic study of the absences and silences haunting her family history on account of its traumatic disruption by internment in work camps in the American desert. Considering the film as a “documentary of affect”, or of the experience of lived emotions, Eng explored Tajiri’s creative strategies in representing the forgotten and unspoken grief—a kind of an archaeology of absence that commemorates the difficult and creates embodied empathy in the viewer. Naming the interplay of film, still images, and text as a key aspect of her strategy, Eng explores the emotional effects of these three overlapping but never quite aligned formal elements. He paid particular attention to the link between image and language, noting that though emotion and language are often depicted as non-reconcilable opposites, Tajiri employs text and image collectively to transform our readings of history and repair family ties. (For a clip of this piece, see http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?HISTORYAND)

In her talk Trauma in the Archive, Diana Taylor examined the ties between photograph and performance in her tour of an Argentinean torture memorial. Taking an embodied and activist approach to her topic, Taylor focused on her photos of the tour guided by Pedro Matta, a survivor of the torture camp, and on the tour itself as a performance of memory. Tracing the path and content of the tour, she questioned the line between personal testimony and archival distance. She pointed out that trauma lives in the body, not in language or historical records, and placed her belief in the promise of memory through the embodied performance enacted daily by Matta. In her activist and artistic practice, Taylor has chosen to explore and protect collective remembering through bringing the body back into currently two-dimensional accounts of historical failures of justice. “Forgetting is full of memory,” she pointed out, emphasizing the importance of embodied enactment of trauma to the preservation of traumatic memories into the future, a future that was made impossible for those Argentinean civilians and left-wing guerillas shattered by torture in Argentina’s dirty war. Like Eng, Taylor considered photography as important, but only part, of a collective, multi-media remembering through film, text, and performance.

October is Women’s History Month: Thank you Lyn Gough

Submitted by Dorothy Lander

Lyn Gough’s (1988) book As Wise as Serpents has been invaluable for me in my research into the art of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). I had the pleasure of meeting Lyn in person when she participated in the Victoria Whistlestop on our March 2009 journey, and can confirm that she is more likely to trumpet other women’s accomplishments, not her own. I am so pleased to see her given the recognition she deserves for spearheading the drive to create Women’s History Month in October, so designated by the federal government in 1992, to align with the date when Canadian women officially became persons in Canadian law — October 19, 1929. Her work offers evidence of the impact of a letter-writing campaign — epistolary art as activism!! Here is the link to The Times Colonist, October 15, 2009. The accompanying picture of Lyn serving tea underscores her strong objections to the negative portrayals of the WCTU as “tea-drinking busybodies,” without acknowledging that they “laid the groundwork for modern social services amid a proliferation of pubs.”
http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/Gough+likes+trumpet+other+women+achievements/2105163/story.html

Leading differently: The Anima Leading with Integrity, Vision and Effectiveness (ALIVE) Program

(Annotated by Paula Cameron)

This past January, thanks to the SSHRC-funded research that supports this blog, I was fortunate to participate in Anima Leadership’s Leading with Integrity, Vision and Effectiveness (ALIVE) Program. Over two days, facilitator and Anima co-Founder Annahid Dashtgard led a small group of women in exercises designed to guide us toward our inner leader. Led by Annahid in movement, drama, and brainstorming exercises, we examined our leadership styles and assumptions, and learned about conflict resolution, goal development, and body image. Our diverse mix of ages, interests, and careers (from student activists to non-profit CEOs) meant we examined various strategies, styles, and assumptions in a multi-faceted way.

Together, we considered what women’s leadership looks like in a post-second-wave world. I was struck with how deeply rooted the course material was: it took us to places seldom reached in conventional learning. “It’s about inviting a new style of leadership,” Annhid pointed out. “A new form of power to take place—one that marries intellectual knowing with emotional knowing, and not sacrificing that. It takes courage.” The mission statement on the Anima website aligns this new kind of power with “building healthier, more equitable and sustainable relationships with ourselves and the world around us by connecting to a deep sense of who we are as opposed to who we believe we should be” (animaleadership.com).

I later met with Annahid in an east-end Toronto café to ask her about her path toward feminist leadership and popular education. She explained that she came to leadership training and popular education through disillusionment with political campaign work: “I got disenchanted with creating change in that way. For me, it felt very one-off, fast, superficial education, and I wanted to go to people’s core, where they would act for change in the world, but in a very rooted, wise place.” Working with a talented group of educators in Vancouver led her to a different style of raising awareness. This approach includes using artforms such as sculpture, storytelling, role playing, and bodywork to access the heart of leadership.

Though she had been aware of gender issues from an early age, Annahid’s commitment to gender equality surfaced after time spent working in the political sector. “My first job was in the political field working at the Alberta legislature for one of the political parties. I watched the absolute masculinity, the hierarchical nature of power, how invisible women were in that sphere. And, you know, working out in the gym beside the premier at the time, just the whole experience of invisibility. I felt on a gut level that the whole idea of having to be twice as intelligent in order to be considered equally competent is so true.“

She first incorporated art and popular education in her practice through organizing and leading body image workshops. “The majority of women get divorced from our own power source because we are caught up in appearance. So on some level, I believed that if I just looked right I would somehow get closer to that feeling of power that I was seeking.“ Annahid decided to develop curricula about conscious eating, to help other women heal their fractured relationship with food.

Eventually, Annahid joined with Shakil Choudhury to form Anima Leadership, and now leads workshops on the topics like anti-racism, conflict resolution, and women’s leadership. [See the Anima Leadership website (animaleadership.com) to learn more about Annahid and Shakil’s work, including their Diversity and Equity Leadership Institute, Conscious Eating Program, and workshops like Brown Book: Using Storytelling to Combat Racism.]

True to Anima aims, in the workshop I attended, Annahid created space for bodies and emotions within learning. The effect on me (and other participants, clearly) was energizing and empowering. Instead of feeling drained by a day of sitting still and absorbing facts and ideas, we moved and laughed and struggled and encouraged. Within a small council of women, we shared our (whole) selves, and learned how differently learning—and leading—can be done.

Reflections on the Guelph Sexuality Conference – Part 3 of 3

(Annotated by Sarah Lawrance)

[Courtesy of the SSHRC-funded research project that is responsible for this blog, I had the pleasure of spending a day at the 31^st Annual Guelph Sexuality Conference in June. This year’s theme was “Positive approaches to sexuality and sexual health.” I am particularly interested in sex-positive and queer-inclusive approaches to this topic, so I was delighted to attend the plenary panel of sex workers discussing their work, a session of 3 research briefs on erotic photography and pole dancing, and a workshop on a variety of themes tied to sex-positivity. I briefly describe my thoughts on each of these sessions in three separate entries.]

Workshop – “Ask Me About Sex”: Positive sexual health discussions with young women, by Sonja Prakash and Melanie Stafford

This workshop had a lot of potential. It had originally been planned as a whole day of separate sessions, but the presenters were only given a 1.5-hour session to present a full day’s worth of content. In that time, they were able to cram together some brainstorming over what makes a safe, sex-positive space for having discussions about sex; a few examples of activities educators can use when trying to facilitate such discussions with their students; a very brief workshop on making one’s own sex toys; and more.

I was particularly intrigued by the DIY sex toy workshop. I really appreciated the presenters’ fun and silly approach to sex, which was clearly reflected in the workshop’s activities. Participants were able to construct edible floggers out of long, stringy licorice candy; ticklers from chopsticks and feathers; pasties using a bit of stiff felt, paper, or foam and a glue-gun, and more. This sort of crafting, an interesting variation on what has traditionally been understood as “women’s work” or “women’s art,” is another fun way for people to reclaim sex as a potentially very fun and empowering activity and to express their sexuality in creative new ways. For youth who are probably in the earlier stages of their sexual lives, such workshops can provide a non-threatening and inclusive environment to ask questions or express concerns they might otherwise be too intimidated or terrified to address. This activity could certainly have benefited from an entire 1.5-hour (or longer) session to itself!

Sexual Overtones

(Annotated by Sarah Lawrance)

Part of an ever-growing movement of sex-positive, female-positive, body-positive, and queer-friendly alternative sex projects, Ottawa’s Sexual Overtones is a not-for-profit burlesque troupe that gets naked and silly to raise funds for local community organizations.

Mixing comedy with sexual satire, this refreshing representation of sexuality reminds us of how fun and funny sex is and should be. The troupe’s reclamation, appreciation, and re-valuation of real people with real bodies are wonderfully inclusive and affirming in light of a mainstream context that is constantly relegating us to invisibility.

This project is interesting to me because it presents a way of performing sexuality that is very different from traditional forms of public sex and sexual representation—like mainstream strip clubs or porn, for example. Aside from the transgressive content of its performances, the troupe’s organization is worth noting. To begin, the troupe operates as a collective so all decisions are made by the participants together rather than by an unconcerned team of managers or owners. Also, in comparison with many exotic dance clubs, for example, which prioritize meeting the clients’ needs in order to maximize the clubs’ income, this troupe instead puts its performers’ best interests at the forefront and prioritizes their safety and enjoyment. The performers participate voluntarily and design their own acts and costumes according to their own tastes, desires, boundaries, and degrees of comfort. The audience members, of course, are expected to be respectful of performers and of one another—a standard that appeals to common sense but that often goes unenforced in traditional clubs.

Again in comparison with many exotic dance clubs, which place far more emphasis on for-profit commercial activity, Sexual Overtones channels the profits from its performances back into the local community, in particular toward other sex-positive projects. This, for me, poses an interesting challenge to what has heretofore been understood as the sex “industry,” because this group performs and represents sexual entertainment without the explicit focus on economic production. Taking the emphasis off money also means that a given performance is not limited or dictated by the performer’s preoccupation with generating income. This freedom allows more room for creative experimentation and political and personal expression in the performances. Finally, de-emphasizing income also means a low degree of competition between performers and thus a strong potential for friendship and solidarity—features sorely lacking from many traditional club environments.

Additionally, unlike many participants in the sex industry who prefer to distance themselves from more stigmatized occupations, Sexual Overtones proudly aligns itself with sex worker rights activist groups, namely Ottawa’s POWER (Prostitutes of Ottawa-Gatineau Work Educate & Resist). This show of solidarity is surprisingly rare within the sex industry, as legal issues and social stigma often make such alliances difficult.

What I find particularly exciting and inspiring about this project is that, for me, it is both utopian and pedagogical. By “utopian” I mean that it is building the sex projects its members want to see, as much as they are different from industry norms, and it is doing it right now, in the shell of a sex industry that places little value in its workers and that is often indifferent about who its content misrepresents or excludes. This project is also pedagogical for almost the same reasons, in that it is teaching (by example) a different way of “doing” sexual entertainment. It is also teaching about sex-positivity and other kinds of inclusiveness. The “doing” essentially IS the “teaching” because it is unashamedly showing how another world (and/or sex industry?) is possible. Click here to read more about this idea of “utopian pedagogy.”

Of course this pedagogy is contestable—not everyone will agree that there is a direct connection between sex work and education. It is also without guarantees (regarding its effectiveness, longevity, etc), and this model cannot yet be effectively translated to a context where performers rely on their performance income for subsistence. Nonetheless, this is an interesting project that is taking steps toward creating a world where sex and sex work are valued and respected.

Cross-annotation of Utopian Pedagogy and burlesque troupe Sexual Overtones

(Annotated by Sarah Lawrance)

To consult the version of this annotation that excludes the heavy theory, click here.

Last year I was struck by a piece of theory that I think applies to many projects described in this blog, but only now am I able to write coherently about it. I’m referring to the concept of utopian pedagogy as articulated by Coté, Day, and de Peuter in their edited work Utopian Pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization (2007), where utopia is understood “not as a place we might reach but as an ongoing process of becoming” (Coté, Day, & de Peuter, 2007: 13). More specifically, the utopia described “is both a critical attitude towards the present and a political commitment to experiment in transfiguring the coordinates of our historical moment” (Coté, Day, & de Peuter, 2007: 13). That is, this idea of utopia means being critical of how things are while also trying to make things better, all the while acknowledging that there is no singular “correct” vision of what this could look like because we will always be improving upon it. “Thus it might be said that utopian experiments today share a point of departure much more than a point of arrival” (Coté, Day, & de Peuter, 2007: 14, emphasis in original), since there is no actual point of arrival, singular or otherwise, in sight. This also suggests that the “ends” are inconsequential because, wherever we end up, we’ll always still be in the process of making our current situation better. Thus, these utopian experiments are necessarily prefigurative: they involve building now the world we want to see—always in the shell of the old—in order to continuously bring our reality closer to what we want it to be.

These prefigurative projects, as clumsy and imperfect as they may be (or not), are at least ways to imagine, enact, and keep discovering what is possible. “It is those practices which seek to propagate an awareness of the existence and possibilities of the radical outside that we call utopian pedagogy, a pedagogy that is itself contested and without guarantees” (Coté, Day, & de Peuter, 2007: 15). I have already written on this blog about a project that I think embodies particularly well the prefigurative politics of utopian pedagogy. I now describe another alternative sex project that I think equally exemplary.

Sexual Overtones

Part of an ever-growing movement of sex-positive, female-positive, body-positive, and queer-friendly alternative sex projects, Ottawa’s Sexual Overtones is a not-for-profit burlesque troupe that gets naked and silly to raise funds for local community organizations.

Mixing comedy with sexual satire, this refreshing representation of sexuality reminds us of how fun and funny sex is and should be. The troupe’s reclamation, appreciation, and re-valuation of real people with real bodies are wonderfully inclusive and affirming in light of a mainstream context that is constantly relegating us to invisibility.

This project is a great example of utopian pedagogy, for me, because it presents a way of performing sexuality that is very different from the traditional context of public sex and sexual representation. Aside from the transgressive content of its performances, the troupe’s structural organization is worth noting. To begin, the troupe operates as a collective so all decisions are made by the participants together rather than by an unconcerned team of managers or owners. Also, in comparison with many exotic dance clubs, for example, which prioritize meeting the clients’ needs in order to maximize the clubs’ income, this troupe instead puts its performers’ best interests at the forefront and prioritizes their safety and enjoyment. The performers participate voluntarily and design their own acts and costumes according to their own tastes, desires, boundaries, and degrees of comfort. The audience members, of course, are expected to be respectful of performers and of one another— a standard that appeals to common sense but that often goes unenforced in traditional clubs.

Again in comparison with many exotic dance clubs, which place far more emphasis on for-profit commercial activity, Sexual Overtones channels the profits from its performances back into the local community, in particular toward other sex-positive projects. This, for me, poses an interesting challenge to what has heretofore been understood as the sex “industry,” because this group performs and represents sexual entertainment without the explicit focus on economic production. Taking the emphasis off money also means that a given performance is not limited or dictated by the performer’s preoccupation with generating income. This freedom allows more room for creative experimentation and political and personal expression in the performances. Finally, de-emphasizing income also means a low degree of competition between performers and thus a strong potential for friendship and solidarity—features sorely lacking from many traditional clubs.

Additionally, unlike many participants in the sex industry who prefer to distance themselves from more stigmatized occupations, Sexual Overtones proudly aligns itself with sex worker rights activist groups, namely Ottawa’s POWER (Prostitutes of Ottawa-Gatineau Work Educate & Resist). This show of solidarity is surprisingly rare within the sex industry, as legal issues and social stigma often make such alliances difficult.

If it is not yet clear why I consider this to be a project of utopian pedagogy, I’ll specify the utopian and pedagogical connections separately. This project is utopian in that it is building the sex projects its members want to see, as much as they different from industry norms, and it is doing it right now, in the shell of a sex industry that places little value in its workers and that is often indifferent about who its content misrepresents or excludes. This project is also pedagogical for almost the same reasons, in that it is teaching (by example) a different way of “doing” sexual entertainment. It is also teaching about sex-positivity and other kinds of inclusiveness. The “doing” essentially IS the “teaching” because it is unashamedly showing how another world (and/or sex industry?) is possible.

Of course this pedagogy is contestable—not everyone will agree that there is a direct connection between sex work and education. It is also without guarantees (regarding its effectiveness, longevity, etc), and this model cannot yet be effectively translated to a context where performers rely on their performance income for subsistence. Nonetheless, this is an interesting project that is taking steps toward creating a world where sex and sex work are valued and respected.

Reference:

Coté, Mark, Richard J. F. Day, & Greg de Peuter (Eds). 2007. Utopian Pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.

Halifax’s Poet Laureate

*

Halifax’s 2009 Poet Laureate illustrates the possibilities for young women’s art, activism and leadership. Halifax-based Shauntay Grant is a writer, journalist, musician, and spoken-word performer with roots in North Preston, Nova Scotia. Her children’s book, Up Home, about growing up in North Preston recently won the 2009 Atlantic Book Award for Best Atlantic Published Book, and the Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration. Shauntay’s poetry and music have been featured nationally on CBC Radio, CBC TV, and Vision TV. She is a founder of the Word Iz Bond Spoken Word Artists’ Collective, and the host of CBC Radio-Two’s “All the Best,” a weekly show that airs in the Maritimes.

Shauntay educates and celebrates where she comes from. She weaves together images of feminine strength and community pride, historical struggle and present hopes. To hear samples of her poetry, including “Up Home,” visit her myspace page here.

– Posted by Paula

*

Missing stories: Voices of our Sisters in Spirit

Until recently, there has been an alarming lack of stories about the lives of missing Aboriginal women. To begin addressing this gap, Status of Women Canada has funded a multi-year research, education and policy initiative called Sisters In Spirit. Through collecting life histories and other kinds of information, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) aims to better understand racialized, sexualized violence against Aboriginal women and girls. This knowledge will help NWAC and other groups understand the root causes of this violence and identify measures to increase the safety of Aboriginal women and girls. Importantly, NWAC also honours the women and girls who have been lost to violence and remembers those still missing.

You can read the March 2009 edition of the report Voices of Our Sisters In Spirit Report here. Life histories begin on page 10.

– Posted by Paula