Areas of Specialisation: Feminist/gender/queer theory, American literature, critical race theory, performance studies, film studies, aesthetics/ethics

B.A. - Individualized Study (“Feminist Imagemaking and Cultural Criticism”), New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study
M.A. - Cinema Studies, University of Toronto
M.A. - English, University of Toronto
PhD Candidate (current) - English, University of Toronto

My work as a feminist theorist is situated within several debates in the humanities. First, I take up performance theory as a challenge to the conventional belief in literary studies that the reader/scholar can objectively and authoritatively retrieve true meaning, particularly about marginalized or Othered peoples, practices, and bodies. Second, I am invested in the vexed philosophical status of the body in gender and sexuality studies, where the body has been largely taken up for analysis at the level of surface or anatomy, rather than for its active, physical capacities—in other words, the emphasis has been on what bodies mean, rather than on what they do, including what they might do to resist the meanings imposed on them. 

At the intersection of these problems then, I offer what I call bodily comportment—including gesture, posture, pose, and movement—as a means of drawing our attention to the ways in which bodies resist straightforward analysis, and argue that they might teach us something more complicated about the ways in which we come to know and relate to one another. How does an attention to bodily comportment offer us a new way of thinking about the body—not as a stable object that can be decoded and known, but as often strange, highly variable, and resistant to the facile, coercive meanings attached to it? Moreover, how is the body a powerful vehicle for relating to, living in, and creating the world?

In my SSHRC-funded dissertation Posing Alternatives: Bodily Comportment and the Feminist Imagination, I bring these inquiries to bear on a range of texts including novels and memoirs, video art, narrative film, and works of what Amelia Jones and others have called ‘body art.’ I primarily focus on American feminist cultural production of the 70s and 80s and in so doing, endeavour to rethink this era’s contributions to our understandings of gendered and racialized bodies; for instance, while 70s and 80s feminists have often been charged with reifying the body in ways that rigidly cemented a singular, universalizing image of ‘woman,’ I instead locate the ways in which the body was in fact often undone, complicated, and strategically obfuscated by other artists, writers, and thinkers of this period. My focus is consequently on an archive of creatives who, while not necessarily obscure, have not always been focalized in a specifically feminist canon, and thus might help to illuminate underrecognized alternatives to some of the problematic practices of mainstream feminists in this period, including challenges not only to gender essentialism and exclusion, but also to the mainstream movement’s collaborations with domination (the prison-industrial complex, neoliberalism, imperialism).

Posing Alternatives makes a claim for the ways in which a capacious attention to bodily comportment puts pressures on the practice of treating others/Others as transparently knowable as well as on the individualism of the Western patriarchal subject. I concentrate on the overlapping pressures of gender, race, and sexuality as they are imposed, performed, and resisted through gesture, posture, and pose, recovering vital feminist articulations of alternative ethics, politics, and sociality. In literary works by Assata Shakur, Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, as well as visual objects by Martha Rosler, Lorna Simpson, and Ana Mendieta, encounters with gesturing, labouring, posing, prostrate, and perplexing bodies instigate moments of ethical reflection and reconsideration, rather than objectification, coercion, and authoritative claims to insight, in addition to complex scenes of witnessing, care, and solidarity. Theoretical touchstones range from Peggy Phelan, Judith Butler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Saidiya Hartman, Adriana Cavarero, Sara Ahmed, Carrie Noland, Nicole Fleetwood, Hortense Spillers, Jack Halberstam, Angela Davis, Juana María Rodríguez, Diana Taylor, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Alexander Weheliye, and numerous others. 

Alongside my dissertation, I have worked on a number of essays investigating similar problems in other kinds of texts spanning 20th and 21st-century literature and film. My first publication investigated the “embodied life of feminist nonviolence” in Canadian-Mennonite writer Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking, arguing that despite the titular emphasis on speech and coming to language, the text’s vision of nonviolent feminist relation can first be located at the level of gesture and posture in the women’s physical relationships; this essay has now been cited in further scholarship on the novel and film, and has landed me roles as a peer-reviewer for other journals. In Camera Obscura, a leading film studies journal, I also published the first scholarly essay on Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, using the film’s aesthetic and ethical orientation to test and respond to shortcomings in the practice of ‘surface reading.’ I am currently engaged in a project on the queer triangulations of gesture, dance, loss, and filmmaking in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun.