Tonight is the last night that we have to write for our blogging assignment. I’m so excited. I thought it might be fun to get paralytic drunk before writing and then hope to be all witty and stuff… but I have to work tomorrow morning, and that just wouldn’t be pretty. While my blog readers will never really know if I imbibed tonight, I am going to take advantage of my temporary positionality to become “a subject who consciously fictionalizes stability in order to write…” The ability “to resist, and to act” will come later when I sober up enough. My first act of my new existence of resistence will be to simply end this assignment, and my interpolation into its discourse, with a hearty cheers and a return to my poker game.

Rhodes, Jacqueline. "Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action: Women Online."

In 2004, the UK announced the Gender Recognition Act, an act through which transsexual people may apply “for legal recognition of the gender in which they now live.” The policy reform in the UK is quite revolutionary in that it deems that transsexuality is not a mental illness. The policy also calls for government intervention in industries and agencies in order to educate them about their possible dealings with transsexual people. According to Leslie Feinberg, a known transgender activist, the UK government may have taken important first steps in the liberation of many oppressed groups.

Feinberg argues that there is strength in unity, and that the unity of oppressed people can be achieved through an understanding of why oppression exists and persists. Placing liberation of the oppressed as a fight between classes, Feinberg sees the working class as capable of a revolution that will unite many despite, and indeed because of, their differences. Has the UK government become an ally in this struggle? According to Althusser, a main apparatus in disseminating and reinforcing dominant ideology is the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). Since ISA’s include schools, churches, the legal system, etc., it would seem that the UK government is merely doing their part to subsume a minority of resistors in the dominant ideology. If that is the case, the UK government is more of an enforcer than an ally. Is this policy part of reform or is it a warning…?

Learn more about the Gender Recognition Act.

The campaign for gender-neutral bathrooms on campus gets attention in the Edmonton Sun.
"A gender-bending issue"...hmmmm...

Check it out.

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Bound and Determined

In discussing the development of women’s body image, Carla Rice argues that women resist dominant beauty ideals, and as such the regulation of their bodies, through rebellious practices on the body such as hair cutting, tattoos, and piercings (326-327). Rice also suggests that resistance must include many provisional strategies, for by rebelling against one ideal resistant women are creating another ideal (328-329). Indeed, women can reappropriate their bodies and redefine their body image through a process similar to Kipnis’ refunctioning.

With Rice in mind, how can we negotiate resisting both dominant body image and gender identity ideals? It is clear that reappropriating regulation of our bodies can (though does not necessarily) include resisting dominant gender identity ideals, but I wonder if gender identity must be positively defined before it can be part of a struggle against the regulation of body and body image? If gender identity is only defined negatively (by what it is not), then does body image remain negative? How does that impact resistance to any dominant ideal? To bring the issue back to Kipnis, is refunctioning possible without first establishing which soapbox we will stand on?


(Rice, Carla. “Between Body and Culture: Beauty, Ability and Growing Up Female.” Open Boundaries: A Canadian Women’s Studies Reader 2nd ed. Eds. Barbara Crow, Lise Gotell. Toronto: Pearson, 2005. 320-332.)

Before the midterm on Thursday I attended the talk by David Harrison, “Anything You Ever Wanted to Ask a Transsexual”. David started with his youngest recollection of feeling like he was in the wrong body, and told his life story about being an actor, a transsexual, a psychic, and a professional dom. David’s talk left me with a lot of questions, which I unfortunately couldn’t work up the nerve to ask him. However, there is one question I can’t get over because it seems like it might open a floodgate of other questions. David’s story seems to resonate with a lot of feminist theory I’ve read in the last year, but at the same time, his life challenges important aspects of that theory.

One example I remember is David feeling more ‘flow’ with who he was, and yet feeling more stable as male. From a theoretical perspective, David’s life is full of contradictions and tensions that could be critically analyzed for ‘cracks and fissures’. Yet, from a material perspective, David is a walking ‘refunctioning’ of theory into practice; he IS being, not simply part of a class of beings. Sitting in that room, listening to his life story, I couldn’t help but think how absurd it is to think of the man in front of me as an application of a theoretical concept. The challenges of transitioning must be so incredible, and yet students and academics take liberty to theorize about (trans)identity. Don’t get me wrong, theory is important, as are considerations of its application. I just never want to forget that no matter how constructed our identities are/can be, there are challenges in life that can not be overcome with rationally applying theory to the lived world.

View David Harrison's web page