Abstracts 2023
Panel I - Gender Roles (and Status)
Harriet Foreman: “You’re not married, so they kind of count you as irrelevant”: marriage and the military in 21st century Britain
Feminist research has shown how the military is reliant on the women married to its personnel to maintain its ability to function. ‘Military wives’ are expected to undertake the domestic, emotional and discursive labour which leaves soldiers free to undertake military work and ultimately war. To enable this, women are socialised to be an ‘ideal wife’ who is feminine, patriotic and stoical. The gendering of military wives allows the counter construction of masculinised militaries and states partaking in just wars. However, this research has focused on married partners. Using auto-ethnography and qualitative interviews, I explore the experiences of the unmarried partners of army personnel in the UK. Foregrounding lived experience through a critical feminist framework, I suggest that the army and its community enact a strong preference for heteronormative married relations and corresponding traditional gendered roles. Formal military policy and practice, including housing, deployments and socialisation, geographically and socially limit unmarried women’s access to the military community. In addition, social discourses and norms create marriage as a marker of insider status which ostracises unmarried women and those who do not fulfil the traditional gendered roles expected of a military wife. Hierarchical relations are thus fostered which make unmarried women feel less important than married women while their lack of access to the community and support leaves them isolated and in flux. These forces combine so that women feel they are left with no options other than marriage. Thus, the experiences of unmarried army partners show the gendered logics and practices inherent within militarism in the UK and the ways in which militarism continues to espouse and function through traditional heteronormative ideals.
Yue Liu: Renegotiating the Empowerment of Only Daughters in Urban China
From 1997 to 2002, Vanessa Fong conducted an ethnographic research in Dalian, a coastal city in northeast China, with a focus on the subjectivity, experience and desire of the only-child generation under the One-Child Policy. She found that urban only daughters born under the One-Child Policy have received unprecedentedly investment by their parents, because they do not have siblings, particularly brothers, to compete with for resources (2002). She further argues that these urban only daughters have more power/are unprecedentedly empowered to deal with detrimental gender norms (2002). However, according to my 30 interviews with young women in urban China, I found that young women’s decisions, actions and strategies to defy gender norms varied tremendously, though most of them shared similar economic and educational resources. Some young women, like Fong (2002) indicates, were able to challenge social pressure and gender norms exerted on them; some, on the contrary, had to succumb to mainstream social norms by sacrificing their own demands and interests. With these observations, I had to query Fong’s argument: can we readily conclude that urban only daughters are categorically empowered, with no room for analysis of the gendered dynamics in their engagements with power, privilege and agency? I argue that Fong is too quick to conclude that women are “empowered” without carefully analysing the process, ways and methods of women's empowerment and what role women themselves play in this empowerment process, which she has analysed as largely economic in terms of the resources and capital that One-Child-generation women have possessed.
Panel II - Lived Experiences as Feminist Knowledge
Lizzie Merrill: “Existing in a way that I feel I don’t exist”: Afterlife and ghostly embodiment in Anne Boyer’s The Undying
“The Remission Society”, as Arthur W. Frank puts forth, is a middle ground between Susan Sontag’s “kingdom of the well” and “kingdom of the sick” (Sontag 1978). It is the place where people are “effectively well” but never necessarily “cured” (Frank 1995) and it is precisely here where American poet and essayist, Anne Boyer, found herself while writing The Undying, a creative memoir of her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. I will argue that Boyer reimagines “The Remission Society” as a kind of afterlife, inhabited by the ghosts of people once well and now ever-changed by their illnesses. By drawing on my own experience of Leukaemia diagnosis and treatment, I will express how the unreality of cancer patienthood bleeds into our impression of existence and thus leads to a cultural crossover with death.
In The Undying, Boyer explores how medical imaging softwares, used to diagnose her breast cancer, rupture her corporeal understanding of the body. Then, in the treatment that follows, chemotherapy completely obliterates the boundaries of the recognisable body, turning it into something new. One major outcome of this bodily decimation is the reimagination of Boyer’s metaphysical identity as a ghostly embodiment: “I feel as if I am probably dead, haunting the earth’s slightly familiar territory, a postbiological traveller to an afterlife” (Boyer 2019). It is in this identification with the ghost, that Boyer reimagines Frank’s “Remission Society” as a kind of purgatory, where she exists on the same plane as the well but unable to reintegrate herself fully. I will suggest that trauma has allowed for the reconceptualization of the living body as a ghostly embodiment, leading to existence following a traumatic event being expressed as a kind of afterlife. Further to this, I will explore how the literal death of cells, follicles and nerves, brought on by chemotherapy, precipitated Boyer’s understanding of treatment as a partial physical death, thus, allowing her to express cellular regeneration as her body “undying”.
Lizzie Merrill is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Women’s Studies at York University and is supported by WRoCAH. She has an MSt in Women’s Studies from Oxford University and a BA in Fine Art from Central St Martins. Her writing has recently been published in The Polyphony and presented at the Death and Mortality Oxford Postgraduate Conference and the Women’s Studies Postgraduate Conference among others.
Francesca Lewis: Looking from within the Jar: lived experience research and writing the encounter
In my recently submitted doctoral thesis on borderline personality disorder, I developed a methodology I call autø/gnøsis. Building on lived experience disability scholar Margaret Price’s concept of counter-diagnosis, autø/gnøsis thinks from and with neurodivergent borderline selves and knowledges, while acknowledging the shifting, unsteady void at the centre of these concepts.
I write about borderline experience as a person with a diagnosis of BPD. Doing lived experience research is a challenge and a risk, especially when speaking with mad voices invites the accusation that mad knowledge is too incoherent, fragmentary, or illogical to be taken seriously. As a mad scholar who knows this epistemic injustice well, I want to share how I have managed to navigate the experience I often describe as being “in the jar”. To be in the jar is to have a sense of being on display for the eyes of the curious, a feeling that often comes with drawing on one’s own experience in academic work. During my research I learned that if I was going to challenge this politics of looking-at, I had to practice my own politics of looking-with.
For Sisterhood in Action, I would like to present a series of exploratory reflections on the process of developing my methodology and undertaking my research. I will think through my use of neuroqueer and new materialist ideas, how engagements with tarot helped guide my work, and how a practice of “thinking through/with diffractive encounters” rather than “analysing research materials” changed my perspective and opened up radical new possibilities for borderline experience.
Daisy McManaman: Complicated Empowerment: Art making as a conduit for reclaiming and subverting sexualised femininities found in Playboy
My PhD research focuses on analysing representations of women in Playboy magazine (1953-2020) and its related media through an intersectional feminist lens, and in relation to themes, such as the gaze, empowerment and western beauty standards. My research combines three different methodologies: content analysis of female photographers who have worked for Playboy, such as Bunny Yeager, as well as the 2005-2009 reality series The Girls Next Door (which garnered a large female fan following), interviews with current Playboy staff members, and art making, with a particular focus on self portraiture. This project aims to draw attention away from Hugh Hefner, who has historically been the focal point of texts on Playboy, and onto the women who consume, produce and feature in Playboy content. Whilst women of Playboy are found embedded within media that is largely tailored for the assumed male gaze, I argue that on reanalysis they often disrupt and subvert the binary distinctions between sexual objects, and sexual subjects, becoming sites for what I refer to as, complicated empowerment.
Having come from a studio art background, I find art making a powerful tool for exploring, experimenting and thinking, that can bring so much into academic research. This paper will focus on the artwork that I have been producing in response to the Playboy imagery that I consume and analyse for my research. With a particular focus on self portraiture, I transform myself through rhinestoned costumes, wigs and make up, into heightened versions of feminine sexualities, as an act of reclaiming the imagery found in Playboy, as well as a tool to explore first hand how it feels to produce and pose in nude photographs. This paper will also explore the challenges I’ve faced in producing these photographs, as well as in utilising art making as a methodology within my research.
Panel III - Gender, Culture and Representation
Zishu Chen: Feminists, but fancy a “misogynist” culture: female dan mei fans’ identity negotiation
My PhD research explores Chinese female fans’ engagement with Chinese gender issues and feminism, especially online discursive engagements made to challenge Chinese conventional gender norms. This paper, as a section of my PhD research, focuses on how female fans from danmei community who self-identify as feminists negotiate the latent misogynist nature within danmei culture, negotiate their two identities as fans and feminists and resolve to confront feelings of ambivalence. Danmei culture, also known as yaoi in Japanese and slash in English context is a literal/artist genre depicting gay romances of pretty men. This subcultural genre is criticised for erasing the existence of women, uglifying the image of women in cultural works (mainly fiction and manga), and the reinforcement of women’s submissive role and their “otherness” in gender order (Wang & Liu, 2008: Han, 2020; Jiang, 2020). In the paper, I will explore my participants’ reflexions on the culture from their perspectives as both feminists and danmei fans. Within their reflexions, there are perplexities owing to the contradiction between misogynist content and feminist identity. However, my research demonstrates also how fans critically analyse the issue, how they practically appropriate their fan power to challenge misogyny, shape the genre, and instil and circulate feminist ideas into danmei works. I will therefore argue that while for female fans the two identities are hard to balance in perfect harmony it does not mean that the negotiation has failed. Instead, the rising power of female fans and dissemination of feminist ideologies through danmei works can be seen as a subtle resistance to the shrouded patriarchy.
Zahra Hashemi: An Investigation into the Effects of #MeToo Movement on Gender and Sexuality Representation in English Children’s Books
Despite the very specific context in which it initiated, the #MeToo movement, like many other women’s movements, has had transformational effects on how women are viewed and has brought shifts in law, social norms, how men perceive their role regarding gender violence, and a general increase in global awareness of women’s rights and gender inequality and violence. One of the impacts this revolutionary movement is a call for a deeper look at genders portrayals across different sectors, since these portrayals contribute to one’s assessment of gender roles and shape their gender identity in an early age. Stereotypes and underrepresentation have been found to contribute to gender inequality, which in turn reinforces gender violence. A qualitative literary analysis was conducted on a sample of storybooks from a selection of award-winning and popular books published in the UK from 2017 to 2022 in order to explore the visibility and centrality of female, male, and LGBTQ+ characters in these books, which were intended for both preschoolers and school-aged audiences. Through this investigation, which was guided by gender and queer theories, it was found that these books focused on promoting gender equality and diversity, as well as acceptance and understanding of all kinds of people. Furthermore, strong female characters were often featured. In conclusion, it was observed that more publishers are creating books with gender-equal characters and storylines in the age of #MeToo.
Sanna Erkison: Motherhood as middle-class women’s citizenship in the Chinese TV drama ‘A Love for Dilemma’
In China, women have been pushed away from public roles towards the domestic sphere since socio-economic reforms started in the 1980s (Sun & Chen, 2015). Currently, Xi Jinping’s family values envision women’s roles publicly as more domestic and caring-oriented (Hird, 2017). This reflects a significant change to 20th century Chinese imaginings of modernity and nation-building where women held a key role in defining the Chinese nation-state (Wesoky, 2015). Now the predominant vision of the Chinese nation-state is (hyper-) masculine (Zhang, 2014). This is reflected in popular culture such as action films showcasing aggressive masculinity (Shi & Liu, 2020). Simultaneously, women’s placement in roles affiliated with the private sphere is also visible in popular culture, e.g., in family-marriage TV drama sub-genre productions. The stories told about women and/or mothers in domestic settings nevertheless partake in informing a cultural discourse on what women’s roles are in the current nation-making project. In this paper I argue that contemporary TV melodramas focusing on women’s lives and family life are both consolidating and contesting societal roles envisioned for women as, e.g., carers, consumers, and educators. I connect nationalism/patriotism to citizenship to argue that nation- and state-making processes create specific types of subject positions for women as citizens. Thus, I enquire how gender and motherhood are constructed in popular discourse, specifically in the education-centred TV drama A Love for Dilemma (2021). I focus on women’s subject positions in urban middle-class families as wives, mothers, and daughters; political negotiations of gendered familial roles and expectations; performance of class; and collective happiness. This analysis will provide insight into how TV drama representations of women’s familial and societal roles can be understood as participating in the formation and/or consolidation of a specific middle-class women’s citizenship pivoting on caring roles, as these representations align with state policies.