The Speculum as A Symbol of Female Empowerment: Responding to Donna Haraway’s “Fetus”

After discussing Donna Haraway’s Fetus: The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order in class, I found myself questioning the notion of the gynaecological speculum as a symbol and tool…

RIP Harambe: Intra-Action and Non-Human Killability

In response to Nature’s Queer Performativity by Karen Barad

In Nature’s Queer Performativity, Karen Barad discusses the human/animal nature/culture dichotomies wherein a “tactic of dehumanization” (122) is commonly…

Cyborg Femme-ifesto

Responding to A Manifesto For Cyborgs, by Donna Haraway, and Automating Gender, by Jack Halberstam

Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto presents a post-gender, post-species approach to feminist praxis. She makes the argument that evolution has blurred the boundaries between…

Politics of Touch in a Digital Context

Responding to Engendering: Gender, Politics, Individuation, by Erin Manning

Manning describes skin as our most sensitive, largest, and perhaps most necessary, organ. We experience tactile sensitivity from our skin through touch, which…

Barbaric Cultural Practices and Homonationalism

Responding to Transborder Affective Foreclosures and State Racism, by Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler

Athanasiou and Butler outline a brief history of state sanctioned and implemented xenophobic policies that were…

A Feminist’s Speculum

Responding to Fetus, by Donna Haraway, and The Egg and the Sperm, by Emily Martin

In Fetus, Donna Haraway talks about the speculum as an instrument that represents both a symbol of U.S. feminist politics in the 1970s, as well as an apparatus for seeing. Samaa and I…

Immaterial Digital Labour

Responding to Free Labour: Producing Culture For The Digital Economy, by Tiziana Terranova

Terranova, writing in 2000, brings up a lot of interesting points that seem more relevant than ever in our contemporary digital society. She talks about unpaid digital…

Compulsory Heterosexuality

Responding to Animating Revolt and Revolting Animation, by Judith Halberstam

I really enjoyed Halberstam’s piece on “Pixarvolt”, and their argument that animated movies for children are often sites of transgression, due to undertones of queer narratives…

The Career Woman’s Disease

Responding to Lasers for Ladies, Endo Discourse and the Inscriptions for Science, by Ella Shohat

One of the most profound points brought up in this reading was just how greatly a woman’s medical diagnosis can be affected by her race. Shohat tells us that…