Live Nude Girls Unite!

Today the Feminist Reading Group screened the documentary, "Live Nude Girls Unite!" about the unionizing of workers at a San Francisco peep show. The documentary led into questions of how feminists and feminism is positioned in relation to this type of work. Here are a few point form comments and questions that were posed and addressed:

• Documentary suggested that the way to fight patriarchy is by taking their money. Is this intersection of economics and social issues a viable place to situate a fight?
  
• Ultimately, is sex work empowering, or is it only empowering as a means to an end, specifically an educational end? Many of the workers were Women Studies or Philosophy graduates, does being positioned as educated or going towards education change the way this type of work is seen, as opposed to say it just being a job to pay rent or bills, without a larger goal? This is also seemingly a class issue.
  
• There are moral divide operators. The mind is being respected here but the body seemingly isn't.
  
• There are good examples of this mind body divide as seen in characters on TV today. For example Catherine Willows on CSI was an exotic dancer who did it to advance her education. Similarly Lady Heather, the dominatrix character, used her money to receive a psychology degree.
• The documentary also spoke to the intersection of sex work and social work and how those two are not mutually exclusive positions.
• There was a large amount of classification done by the peep show managers along lines of race, hair colour, and body type, yet a lot of the bodies were the same. Little discussion was given in the documentary about body types in specific. Is this comfort level, a level where discussion is not necessary, the logical conclusion to say the type of activisms that Dove commercials promote?
• Was there ever really a threat of the peep show going out of business? How does this reflect in the union/management negotiations.
  
• This documentary promotes the choice of sex work as a feminist choice and not a bad moral judgment a la McKinnon.
  
• This can also tie into Irigaray and her work on the economy of the female body.
  

The next Feminist Reading Group meeting will be sometime in mid January. Details to be announced and posted soon.
Thanks to all that came out for this lively discussion.
THE FRG

FRG Today: Sex Trade Work, "Live Nude Girls Unite!"

The Feminist Reading Group invites all interested participants to join us for our second meeting of the term on Wednesday, November 12^th, from 1:00-3:00 pm in UC 274. We will be screening Vicky Funari and Julia Query’s Live Nude Girls Unite! (2000), a documentary film about a group of San Francisco sex workers and their efforts to unionize in the late 1990s. The 75-minute film screening will be followed by an almost certainly lively discussion on sex workers, working conditions, and rights.

We hope to see you there!

Notes from FRG Meeting on Women in Politics

Our first FRG meeting of the year was a lively and insightful discussion of the various tensions and issues that surround women in both the American and Canadian elections. I list here some of the key points made during our discussion. Please feel free to continue the debate on these issues here, this website was specifically designed as a place to voice further positions. Thanks to all that showed up for the Meeting today. Our next meeting is Wednesday November 12th from 1-3pm and we will be discussing the Politics and Issues surrounding Sex Work and Sex Workers. Hope to see you there.

Women in Politics:

• Though the Palin/Clinton SNL spoof is a relatively well known Popular Culture moment, it was stated that the tensions and divides that are innate in the spoof are being lost on a younger generation that does not/chooses not to engage in socio-political positioning of women.
• It was mentioned that the tension between identifying as a feminist yet still being able to enjoy domestic duties is alive and well.
• Some call Palin being kept from the media a sexist move
• Palin structures her speak around a populous rhetoric, but do voters enjoy it?
• A question was raised, if Palin was not seen as "attractive," would she still have been picked as VP nominee? What does this say about the role of aesthetics and female politics.
• What did Palin's continuous winking in the VP debate do? What sort of message does that give?
• George Lakoff has analyzed the rhetoric around the American election, and how conservatives use rhetoric and buzz words to dominate political discourse.
• There is a real dichotomy surrounding Palin's use of her children during political events; on the one hand she is opening herself up to criticism as a bad mother for having her children up late, etc. , on the other hand it can be seen as a positive strategy to shore up her position as a family oriented.
  
• In the Canadian debate it was noted that Elizabeth May's jewellery could be seen as distracting and detracting from what she was saying and the issues at hand.
  
• May, Clinton, and Palin force one to confront definitions of feminism(s); since abortion seems to be the polarizing issue, it tends to skew the view of feminists and feminism as something squarely within a leftist frame.
• Biden seems to suggest that violence against women is an economic issue, which is frighteningly like the discourse used in relation to women and education in the 19th century. To his credit he tries to use it towards a general good, thus he is often seen as a better feminist than Palin, if there is such a thing.
• It is interesting that gender has to be front and centre in political debate and discourse now. However, it sometimes needs to be coupled with economics or given an economic spin to be legitimized.
• Hunting can be seen as a de-feminizing of Palin, it relates to her lack of cohesion as a disarming movement that detracts from her bad policies.
  
• Palin's speech is often in passive voice
  
• In all cases Palin, May, etc. representation is key
  

Performance Studies Research Group

The Performance Studies Research Group is presenting a talk by Steven Bruhm, the English Department's new Lumsden Professor. Professor Bruhm will be giving a talk entitled "Red Shoes Read: A Queer Dance of Death." The talk will be held on Thursday October 8th at 4pm in UC224a. All are welcome to attend.

Reminder!!

Tomorrow is the first Feminist Reading Group meeting of the academic year, from 1-3pm in UC274. Please come out to discuss the role of women in politics especially in relation to the Canadian and American elections.

Please see the Urls below for links to possible discussion points.

Hope to see you there!

The FRG

Women in Politics: Interesting links to articles/discussion

These are a few interesting links in regards to our women in politics FRG discussion group meeting for October 8th 2008. Please feel free to email Allison other links or comments that you feel will be useful to contextualize or spark discussion during our meeting and I will add them to this list.
Cheers,
Ann

Take our girls to vote (Equal Voice)
Take our girls to vote article in Toronto Star
Women are front and centre in U.S. politics, unlike here
Don't Mess with Elizabeth May
Womens votes Up for Grabs
When we talk about the Glass Ceiling
Palin Sexism Watch
Pakistan president calls Palin "gorgeous"
Women Against Sarah Palin
SNL Palin-Clinton skit
Paglia on Palin
Palin is Rosie the Riviter?

"Women in Politics," First FRG Meeting of 08-09

The Feminist Reading Group invites all interested participants to join us for our first meeting of the term on Wednesday, October 8^th, from 1:00-3:00 pm in UC 274: “Women in Politics.” Scheduled on the heels of Canada’s English-language Federal Election debate, as well as the U.S. Vice-Presidential debate (October 2^nd), this meeting will provide us with a forum for discussing women in politics (more broadly), but will take a special interest in the phenomenon of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin (more specifically). Discussions may be preliminarily concerned with how Palin’s candidacy has been framed in terms of identity politics, or how it has by turns engaged, re-ignited, or ignored historical and ongoing feminist debates.

No formal preparation for this meeting is required, as we will provide select material from news and media sources at the meeting itself. If anyone has material that they would like to contribute for discussion (including online sources), please feel free to send it along ahead of time. All are welcome!

For more information on the Feminist Reading Group, please visit:

http://www.uwo.ca/english/site/rgroups/fem.html

Thanks,

The FRG

Problematizing Power in Buffy:Last FRG Meeting of the Term!

For our last scheduled meeting of the term, the Feminist Reading Group will be screening select scenes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s final season. The brief screening will be followed by some discussion around how Buffy negotiates individualized and collective forms of power for women.

A Burden We Can’t Share?: Problematizing Power in Buffy
Tuesday, April 8th – 1:30-3:00 pm
UC 274

We hope to see you there!

Performance Studies Research Group Event THIS WEEK!!

The Performance Studies Research Group is hosting Dr Susan Fast, of McMaster University's Department of English and Cultural Studies, on March 19 from 3-4pm in UC 224A. Dr Fast, whose current SSHRC-funded research initiative explores the politics of representation in the work of all-girl rock tribute bands, will be delivering a talk entitled "Theorizing the Copy: Gender, Virtuosity, and Originality in Tribute Band Performances." Dr Fast will speak for approximately 20-25 minutes, and will then open the floor to a broader discussion of the issues her paper will raise. Please mark your calendars, and encourage your students to join us for what will be a stimulating paper and discussion!

Susan Fast is a musicologist, who began her academic career as a Medievalist, with a focus on the Aristotelian-influenced scholasticism of the late 13th and early 14th centuries in Northern France. Her focus shifted to popular music in the mid 1990’s, and has, since then, been focused on constructions of identity in popular music performance; theoretical perspectives from performance studies have been particularly influential in her work. She has produced two books, the first of which is a critical edition of the fourteenth-century treatise Musica speculativa, by the Parisian music theorist and mathematician Jean de Meurs (published by the Institute of Medieval Music, 1994). She is also author of In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford, 2001), a collection of essays that explores the body in performance, gender and sexuality, cultural appropriation/hybridity, and ritual/mythology in rock music. Her publications also include articles on Live Aid and cultural memory, constructions of authenticity in U2, Tina Turner’s gendered and racialized identity in the 1960’s, issues of feminism and rock criticism, and on the mass-mediated benefit concerts that appeared after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Her current project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, investigates issues related to gender, race and normative genre boundaries in all female tribute bands to hard rock and heavy metal.

The Axe Effect: Targeting Advertising Campaigns – A FRG focus group/coffeehouse

The first FRG meeting of 2008 will be held on March 4 from 1:30-2:30 in UC274. The theme for our meeting will be "The Axe Effect: Targeting Advertising Campaigns." This meeting will be an interactive discussion on the representation of women in current advertising. Some of us are coming equipped with examples from print and television advertising – feel free to bring along your own examples, or just come as you are. We have reserved a smart classroom space, so the access of internet resources or other electronic material will not be a problem.
Please see the link below for a small sample of the type of advertising we will be discussing in relation to representations of women, and issues of feminist politics.
Hope to see you all there!

Click Here to See a Sample Axe Ad

Click Here to see another "Axe Effect" Ad that Amber has suggested