An afternoon of excellent talks draws to a close. The end of the first day of Talking Bodies 2013 was marked with a particularly taxing, and pleasantly competitive (!) feminist pub quiz. Alas, we weren't to be part of the winning team, but luckily the quality of the talks this afternoon far outweighed our quizzical dismay!
Again, we can't comment on all of the sessions, but amongst the most memorable for us were:
Miriam Walsh (Mary Immaculate College, Ireland) Tale as Old as Time: The Importance of Beauty to the Construction of Female Identity in Traditional and Modern Fairy Tales
In this session, Miriam explored the classic Disney characters of Cinderella and her wicked stepmother, as a paradigm for the equivalent binary oppositions that also operate in modern interpretations of the text. She explored how 'a girl learns that stories happen to "beautiful" women', whether they are interesting or not - and do not happen to interesting women who are not "beautiful." She concluded that despite the exaltation of beauty in both fairy tales and society, it ultimately positions the female in a patriarchal carousel and the entrapment of the "beauty myth" ensures that there are no winners.
Cassandra A. Ogden (University of Chester, UK) The Fluidity of the Body: Leaking, Seeping and Social Disgust
This really engaging talk looked at how bodies that find controlling bodily fluids difficult or impossible are often met with repulsion and exclusion - and yet paradoxically only do in public what every body does in private. Cassandra claimed that when the media attempt to grapple with issues of leakiness (e.g. when trying to sell sanitary products or contraceptives) a lack of direct, frank discussion is apparent and euphemisms are rife. She suggested that this silencing of corporeality can lead to suppression of those whose bodies are difficult to control; and also discussed how 'othered' realities can challenge normalising, ableist discourses and remind the rest of society of their corporeal existence.
Zahra Stardust (University of Sydney, Australia) Defying Objectification: Beauty, Parody, Activism and the Body Within the Sex Industry
Making use of interviews she conducted with sex workers, strippers, pole dancers, burlesque artists, and queer performers in Sydney, Zahra highlighted how perceptions of sex workers as objectified, degraded, passive and fake do not fit with workers' own understandings and material practices. "Sex industry workers have our own experiential, sentient understandings of sexism and stigma, and have individual diverse relationships with beauty, femininity, performativity and stereotype. We negotiate these through parody, reclamation and re-signification and use the body as a site for activism - sharing queer and feminist paradigms between each other, audiences and the public."
Something to chat about: Can we understand sex work as, in itself, queer?
(And here, perhaps we can understand 'queer' in the broader sense of defying norms, ideals and boundaries - rather than strictly in terms of LGBT politics)
Again, we can't comment on all of the sessions, but amongst the most memorable for us were:
Miriam Walsh (Mary Immaculate College, Ireland) Tale as Old as Time: The Importance of Beauty to the Construction of Female Identity in Traditional and Modern Fairy Tales
In this session, Miriam explored the classic Disney characters of Cinderella and her wicked stepmother, as a paradigm for the equivalent binary oppositions that also operate in modern interpretations of the text. She explored how 'a girl learns that stories happen to "beautiful" women', whether they are interesting or not - and do not happen to interesting women who are not "beautiful." She concluded that despite the exaltation of beauty in both fairy tales and society, it ultimately positions the female in a patriarchal carousel and the entrapment of the "beauty myth" ensures that there are no winners.
Cassandra A. Ogden (University of Chester, UK) The Fluidity of the Body: Leaking, Seeping and Social Disgust
This really engaging talk looked at how bodies that find controlling bodily fluids difficult or impossible are often met with repulsion and exclusion - and yet paradoxically only do in public what every body does in private. Cassandra claimed that when the media attempt to grapple with issues of leakiness (e.g. when trying to sell sanitary products or contraceptives) a lack of direct, frank discussion is apparent and euphemisms are rife. She suggested that this silencing of corporeality can lead to suppression of those whose bodies are difficult to control; and also discussed how 'othered' realities can challenge normalising, ableist discourses and remind the rest of society of their corporeal existence.
Zahra Stardust (University of Sydney, Australia) Defying Objectification: Beauty, Parody, Activism and the Body Within the Sex Industry
Making use of interviews she conducted with sex workers, strippers, pole dancers, burlesque artists, and queer performers in Sydney, Zahra highlighted how perceptions of sex workers as objectified, degraded, passive and fake do not fit with workers' own understandings and material practices. "Sex industry workers have our own experiential, sentient understandings of sexism and stigma, and have individual diverse relationships with beauty, femininity, performativity and stereotype. We negotiate these through parody, reclamation and re-signification and use the body as a site for activism - sharing queer and feminist paradigms between each other, audiences and the public."
Something to chat about: Can we understand sex work as, in itself, queer?
(And here, perhaps we can understand 'queer' in the broader sense of defying norms, ideals and boundaries - rather than strictly in terms of LGBT politics)
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