Books by Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
As a concept, surface imagination refers to the powerful fantasy that a change to the exterior ca... more As a concept, surface imagination refers to the powerful fantasy that a change to the exterior can enhance or alter the interior; in other words, the outside creates and takes precedence over the interior. It is the seduction of surface imagination fantasies that create the conditions in which patients’ lives improve while their appearance remains relatively the same. Surface imaginations structure social and psychical life in the consumer-driven West as tethered to the condition and appearance of the exterior as an indicator of interior qualities and values. Connected to the biopolitical imperative to care for the individual, hermetic self, surface imagination fantasies offer inspiration to, and proof of the subject’s dramatic narrative of care and success in the project of self-creation. The concept of ‘surface imaginations’ must be separated from the kinds of popular media analyses that critique contemporary western societies as ‘superficial’ or ‘false,’ because to say that in the current moment surfaces matter is not to make a value judgement. The devaluing of a concerted and intentional interest in appearance has a long history in Western philosophy, which has privileged and separated the mind over the body. Surface imagination takes the body’s surface very seriously, as a medium that is neither interior nor exterior. Precisely because of that quality, the surface is a site of fantasy and projection. [...]
Applied to cosmetic surgery, surface imagination shores up the fantasy that changing the surface of our body will change or improve our identities and consequently promises that our bodies are infinitely transformable and controllable according to our desires. The mutable body promised and fantasized through the surface imagination of cosmetic surgery is first and foremost a controllable body. Cosmetic surgery is a cultural effect of surface imagination, and we can learn about how contemporary embodiment is understood broadly through individual experiences within the specific practice of cosmetic surgery. What is particularly significant about current understandings of embodiment in North America is the persistent belief of advanced capitalism that psychical and social suffering can be alleviated through our body’s surface, especially through self-fashioning or transforming it. Cosmetic surgery exists alongside other cultural products of surface imaginations, such as ego psychology, pornography and home renovations. These are good examples of how surface imagination logic influences the understanding of the psychological, sexual and domestic realms of contemporary life. [...]
This book is an investigation into the significance of surface to contemporary Western (and increasingly, non-Western) cultures, using cosmetic surgical culture as its example. It focuses on two salient surfaces in the experience of cosmetic surgery: the photographic surface and the surface of the skin. The photograph is cosmetic surgery’s ideal, because it can be altered in a painless and predictable manner, a quality that renders the photograph a powerful and elusive object in cosmetic surgery that reminds, evidences, and promises the patient a transformation upon the skin. Photography is deeply connected to the fantasy of a mutable body, and is a critical support of cosmetic surgery through its parallel deployment of fragmentation and transformation of the body-surface seen in cosmetic surgical practice. The skin, on the other hand, is cosmetic surgery’s de-idealized surface. Skin is important to cosmetic surgery as the material site upon which cosmetic surgery happens, and as a metaphorical site where the cultural-social meets the interiority and psychical life of the individual. However, unlike the photograph, the skin cannot be controlled easily and is contingent. It shifts, wrinkles, and heals unexpectedly.
Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis queries the intersection of cultural and psychical meanings of s... more Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis queries the intersection of cultural and psychical meanings of skin in the contemporary moment as skin responds to new (and old) pressures and articulations. A variety of topics are herein addressed including the symbolic dominance of white skin, racialization, tattooing, cosmetic surgery, fabric skins, skin eruptions, second skins, the skin in self-harm, and skin as a site of psychic repair. The authors engage an array of objects and approaches from the clinical domain, literary fiction, television, film, video art, photography, fashion design, and poetry. In doing so, they highlight the situation of skin as a socially and culturally mediated exterior simultaneously negotiated at the interior or psychical level. This collection locates skin at the centre of inquiry, rather than as a jumping-off point from which to explore 'deeper' or 'thicker' issues, which tends to happen when skin is treated synecdochically as a stand-in for the body itself. Here, skin is a cultural object, and a psychical object, in its own right.
Table of contents and sample chapter (the introduction) are linked to from Palgrave site (see below).
Papers by Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes 49, 2, 2015
Photography has been used by settlers to document and fictionalize colonial encounters in Canada ... more Photography has been used by settlers to document and fictionalize colonial encounters in Canada since the mid-19th century as an attempt to displace Indigenous peoples from the land, to contain them within settler albums. In this paper, I look at visual practices of settler photograph albums in British Columbia from the turn of the 20th century to argue that this is a key site of settler forgetting and erasure of colonial violence. Specifically, I analyse the visual practices of depicting the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of colonial encounter in two personal photograph albums of contractor Andrew Onderdonk, (ca. 1885) and photographer and civil servant Benjamin Leeson (n.d., active 1887-1900). Paulette Regan’s methodology of ‘unsettling’ (2011) guides a destabilization of the historical narratives that are supported by these personal photographic albums, and asks how they produce settler denial and guilt about Indigenous-settler relations, as well as what we can learn about colonial injustice and violence through an unsettling encounter with these same images.
This paper is a part of a larger decolonizing project that aims to destabilize the objectivity of photographic documentation to show how this archive is used to structure a fantasized ‘before’ and ‘after’ of settler contact that erases the violence of Indigenous-settler relations to depict North American colonization as a benevolent intervention.
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 11, 2, Jun 2015
This paper argues that silicone supports contemporary fantasies of a body that is intact and seal... more This paper argues that silicone supports contemporary fantasies of a body that is intact and sealed, and does so through an analysis of Amber Hawk Swanson’s performance art involving a silicone sex doll replica of the artist (2007) and silicone breast implants that ‘ordinary’ women receive, situated within the context of the previous doll art of Hans Bellmer (1935-1949). I argue that while the sex doll is structurally a perverse fetish object (psychoanalytically speaking), Swanson’s project sheds light on the neurotic structure of desiring and obtaining a breast augmentation. My analysis is that silicone facilitates new phallic forms of embodiment that are particularly attractive in a consumerist society.
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 13, 4, 2014
Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video is an assignment I designed for my undergraduate femi... more Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video is an assignment I designed for my undergraduate feminist theory course, where students created a short digital video on a concept in feminist theory. I outline the assignment and the pedagogical and epistemological frameworks that structured the assignment (digital storytelling, participatory video and feminist approaches to service learning), before presenting an analysis of its learning outcomes gleaned through interviews with students. I argue that incorporating creative and service learning components into a feminist theory course deepens student learning about praxis and subjectivity because it engages their ‘soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body’ (Frueh 2006: 13), leading to a sustained engagement with feminist theory and an ability to imagine feminist theory outside of the university classroom. My objective for this paper is to share what I have learned as an educator from this project, and that it will be useful to others interested in adapting this kind of assignment to their own pedagogical contexts.
ADA: A Journal of Gender, Media, and New Technology 5 (special issue: Queer, Feminist Digital Media Praxis), 2014
In this paper, I describe and analyse a creative service learning assignment that I developed for... more In this paper, I describe and analyse a creative service learning assignment that I developed for my third year feminist theory class, titled ‘Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video’ (DFT-DV). I argue that the assignment’s integration of creative approaches to learning (digital video) and service learning (placements with organizations) fosters deep, embodied learning through praxis. After describing the assignment and the literatures that guided the creation of this assignment in more detail, I analyse two student videos alongside anonymous interviews conducted with the first cohort to complete this assignment. Reading these videos with the interviews highlights how digital video production enabled students to engage in deeper learning through praxis through a more sustained reflection on their own subjectivity in relation to their service learning placements, which had the effect of demystifying knowledge production in the feminist theory classroom.
Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis, 2013
In chapter six, ‘The Skin-Textile in Cosmetic Surgery,’ Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst explores how ... more In chapter six, ‘The Skin-Textile in Cosmetic Surgery,’ Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst explores how skin is conceptualized as a textile in cosmetic surgery through three examples that highlight the gendered, racialized and sexualized dimensions of this phenomenon. She argues that there is a Western cultural preoccupation with thinking about skin as analogous to fabric which increasingly repudiates the violence implicit in this conceptualization of the skin in cosmetic surgery. This understanding contributes to the fantasy of the mutable body and the normalization of cosmetic surgery through association with fashion. Elsa Schiaparelli’s Tear-Illusion Dress (1937) is an evening gown and headscarf sewn from a fabric printed with a Dalí design that aestheticizes the flaying of skin, and occurs within a time of experimentation in cosmetic surgery and as a critique of bourgeois denial of impending war in Europe. ‘Face Lift’ (1961) is a poem by Sylvia Plath that offers a metonymic chain of fabrics that incompletely shroud the cuts into the facial skin-textile, and historically reflects a time of optimism for face-lifting surgeries in the 1950s and 1960s and idealization of American middle-class privacy. Rick Floyd’s promotional trailer for season six of the television series Nip/Tuck (2009) is a contemporary representation of the textility of skin in cosmetic surgery par excellence. Sexualized garment sweatshop workers garbed in cheongsams cut and sew the skin-textile for Nip/Tuck’s cosmetic surgeon protagonists, a representation that promises an endless, bloodless and painless proliferation of cosmetic surgical procedures within a hybrid global market of surgical fashion.
Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis, 2013
…[T]he main title of our introductory chapter – ‘Enfolded’ – captures the broad aim of this book:... more …[T]he main title of our introductory chapter – ‘Enfolded’ – captures the broad aim of this book: to explore how skin is made meaningful through the enfolding of culture, psychical life, and embodiment. Skin is a complex affair. It cannot be taken for granted as merely organic matter, nor as a passive surface onto which social meaning is straightforwardly inscribed. As a condition of human subjectivity and a primary site of its negotiation, skin bears multiple, complex pressures from both within and without, and generates a range of expressions particular to persons, cultures and environments. Skin also separates us from and connects us to others and to objects in the world. We feel our skins as intimately our own, and yet they are continually shared by encounter and exchange. In the process, skin is imbued with conscious and unconscious meanings, including those we attach to it through constructions of sex, gender, sexuality, age, race, religion, nationality, class, (dis)ability and so forth. Skin, in short, has a biological life, a social life, a fantasy life, a somatic life, a political life, an aesthetic life, a life in the ‘lived body,’ and a cultural life – all of which inform one another to shape what it means and how it feels to inhabit skin. Appreciating the richness and multidimensionality of skin is no minor task. At the very least, an interdisciplinary approach is required. This book is one such undertaking.
This is the introductory chapter to the book Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis.
Women's Studies International Forum 35, 6, 2012
This paper explores the contradiction between dominant discourses of individualist decision-makin... more This paper explores the contradiction between dominant discourses of individualist decision-making and patient narratives of cosmetic surgery, in addition to relational understandings of the body in cosmetic surgery. Using a psychoanalytic methodology for reading interview transcripts called poetic transcription, the paper analyzes five narrative interview transcripts that explore five women's experiences with various cosmetic surgeries. The patient narratives stress the decision as one that happens in relation to others, and in particular parental relationships and romantic/sexual relationships. This is challenging to acceptable explanations for undergoing cosmetic surgery, which emphasize that the decision is made not to please others, but independently. Patients position mothers and mother figures in their narratives as symbolic of an idealized femininity to be emulated or rejected; at the same time, patients position their surgeons as either authoritative father figures to be identified with, or as romantic or sexual partners to be idealized.
Topia: Journal of Canadian Cultural Studies 25, 2011
This paper examines the visual economy of happiness in cosmetic surgery, focusing on the photogra... more This paper examines the visual economy of happiness in cosmetic surgery, focusing on the photograph as the measurement of a successful surgical outcome. I argue that in order for a cosmetic surgery procedure to engender happiness, the patient must be satisfied with the photographic outcome of the surgery. My argument is that positioning happiness as a desired outcome of cosmetic surgery is profoundly linked to gendered and racialized assimilations in the history and politics of cosmetic surgery and photography, insofar as ‘happy’ and ‘well-assimilated’ (into whiteness, health, youth and beauty) are synonymic in both practices.
Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative, edited by Marcelline Block and Angela Laflen, 2010
Cosmetic surgery is a highly gendered medical practice in which the majority of patients are wome... more Cosmetic surgery is a highly gendered medical practice in which the majority of patients are women and surgeons are men, and the manner in which surgical stories are told differs depending on one’s location at the operating table. Examining the ways that cosmetic surgeons narrate their profession in popular media such as newspapers, women’s magazines, and the internet reveals that surgeons generally conceive of their role as either what I call “surgeon-artist” or “surgeon-scientist.” However, patients’ narratives of cosmetic surgery differ dramatically from those of surgeons. Focusing on one narrative of cosmetic surgery through the words of Melinda, a woman I interviewed, I argue that the way Melinda tells her story demonstrates an acute awareness of how surgeons narrate their practice but also challenges these surgeon-narratives insofar as Melinda narrates her surgery as an emotional history of her body, rather than as a feat of art or science.
Feminist Teacher, 2009
This essay traverses back and forth across the institutionally-imposed boundary between storytell... more This essay traverses back and forth across the institutionally-imposed boundary between storytelling and critical reflection to explore how my thinking about feminist pedagogical praxis has been irrevocably altered by the experience of losing a parent as well as facilitating mutual support groups for young adults whose parents or siblings have died. [...] I begin by spinning a yarn that twists together the loss of my father, teaching first year students, and facilitating a mutual support group for the first time. I reflect upon how we carry our loss histories with us into the classroom: this loss could be death, but it is more multifarious than that. This is loss in its broadest sense. Loss amplifies the effects we feel when we are perceived in cliched and discriminatory ways, so it is fundamental to acknowledge its presence in the classroom. What do we do with this loss? How can we respond to it? Theorizing the importance of loneliness in education is a helpful starting point to begin thinking about these critical questions. Finally, I conclude by discussing the transformative impact that my facilitating and teaching have had upon each other, and upon how I live with, and invite warmly though sorrowfully, the loss and grief of myself and others whenever I am capable of doing so. Denying the existence of loss bars an opportunity that we have to recognize and work with the loneliness engendered by learning and death.
Reconstruction 9, 1, 2009
This paper critically examines the use of psychoanalytic theory for interpreting interviews, as w... more This paper critically examines the use of psychoanalytic theory for interpreting interviews, as well as the possibilities of using interviewing in cultural studies. I am particularly interested in the ethics of combining interview methodologies with psychoanalytic methodologies as a researcher, rather than as an analyst.
Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal, Volume 4, 2008
Skin is the first and enduring medium with which we encounter the world, and our experience of sk... more Skin is the first and enduring medium with which we encounter the world, and our experience of skin serves as the foundation and metaphor for the relationship between our interior and exterior lives. As a site of cultural and psychic exchange, skin seethes with conscious and unconscious meaning. Our largest organ is a permeable defence against the world, and thus paradox is embodied within skin. Our life history and the passage of time are inscribed onto the somatic fabric of our skins, sometimes with or without our control or will. The practice of cosmetic surgery occurs physically and psychically upon and underneath the skin’s surface. This paper explores the topography of skin through cultural artefacts and psychoanalysis, arguing that the skin is worrying and unruly to us because it demonstrates that in many instances, surface is all we have to hang our hopes upon. This insight into our existence confounds many of our most dearly held notions about interiority and exteriority in human life, and the latter section of this paper takes up this insight through a consideration of femininity, beauty and skin in television makeover shows that showcase cosmetic surgery.
Drafts by Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video (DFT-DV) is an assignment I designed for my undergrad... more Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video (DFT-DV) is an assignment I designed for my undergraduate feminist theory course, where students create a short, non-documentary digital video on a concept relevant to feminist theory. Their understanding of the concept is developed through course readings and a placement with a campus or community organization. The commonalities shared by the organizations involved are that they all do some form of education or facilitation activity as a part of their mandate, and they all directly or indirectly address student concerns. Located in rural, northeastern Nova Scotia, campus and community organizations in Antigonish often face a dearth of education and facilitation resources that are not directed at an urban audience; the creation of these videos attempts to address this need. The student videos are housed in an online library (available at http://www.doingfeministtheory.ca/), which is available for the organizations and others to use in their activities.
In this paper, I propose to further analyse this assignment, focusing particularly on its outcomes for campus and community organizations. In my previous experiences offering community-based praxis assignments, in spite of emphasizing critical reflection, students who did such assignments still described their involvement as distanced from the organization’s members and/or those served by the organization, and as ‘helping out’ the organization. As several feminist educators have noted (Trethewey 1999; Bickford and Reynolds 2002; Dean 2007; Endres and Gould 2009), these kinds of community-based assignments can paradoxically reinforce social hierarchies and do not necessarily have the desired effect of learning through praxis. In response, DFT-DV was designed to highlight the generosity of the organizations for agreeing to mentor students, and the organizations were selected so that students were less able to distance themselves from those served by the organizations.
The introductory section of this paper will introduce DFT-DV, drawing on my previous research about student responses to this assignment (Hurst 2014a; Hurst 2014b). In this work, I argue that DFT-DV enables students to engage in deeper learning through praxis because it engages students’ “soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body” (Frueh 2006). Next, I will outline the components of the assignment’s design that attempt to lessen the potential to reinforce social hierarchies and ‘other’ those involved with the organizations. It is my contention that the vulnerability students experience from producing creative work is a strength of this assignment, one which can partially address the shortcomings of conventional service learning assignments. The latter half of the paper will consist of an analysis of interviews with members of the participating organizations who supervised students working on DFT-DV in 2012, 2013, and 2014 (to be conducted in September, 2014). Based on informal conversations, it is my observation that while students frequently benefit from the community-based component of the assignment, the benefits for the organizations are less even. These interviews will enable me to evaluate this observation; specifically, I will ask why organizations participate, what organizations get out of participating, how useful they find the student placements and videos, and how they understand the concept of praxis operating in this assignment.
References
Bickford, Donna M. and Nedra Reynolds. 'Activism and Service-Learning: Reframing Volunteerism as Dissent.' Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 2, no. 1 (2002): 229-252.
Dean, Amber. “Teaching Feminist Activism: Reflections on an Activism Assignment in Introductory Women's Studies.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29, 4 (2007): 351-362.
Endres, Danielle and Mary Gould. '"I Am Also In A Position To Use My Whiteness to Help Them Out": The Communication of Whiteness in Service Learning.' Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 4 (2009): 418-436.
Frueh, Joanna. Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 2006.
Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston. “A ‘journey in feminist theory together’: The Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video project.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 0, no. 0 (2014a): 1-15. Published via OnlineFirst on 5 August 2014; to be published in print in 2015.
Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston. “How to ‘Do’ Feminist Theory Through Digital Video: Embodying Praxis in the Undergraduate Feminist Theory Classroom.” Ada: Gender, New Media, and Technology 5 (2014b). Available at: http://adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-hurst/.
Trethewey, Anna. “Critical Organizational Communication, Feminist Research Methods, and Service-Learning: Practice as Pedagogy.” In Voices of Strong Democracy: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Communication Studies, edited by David Droge and Bren Ortega Murphy, 177-190. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing and the American Association for Higher Education, 1999.
The Pandrogeny project was a collaboration between the artists Lady Jaye Breyer and Genesis P-Orr... more The Pandrogeny project was a collaboration between the artists Lady Jaye Breyer and Genesis P-Orridge and involved applying the ‘cut-up’, a technique of the early 20th century Surrealists and re-popularized by William Burroughs, to their own bodies. The artists utilized cosmetic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behaviour in an effort to merge their two separate identities into a third, singular ‘pandrogyneous’ character called ‘Breyer P-Orridge’. This article critically explores the Pandrogeny project, arguing that their elaboration of the ‘cut-up’ through cosmetic surgery practices, is a useful conceptual framework for understanding the limits and contradictions of contemporary self-transformation practices.
Lorene Squire was a wildlife photographer commissioned by The Beaver magazine in 1937 to document... more Lorene Squire was a wildlife photographer commissioned by The Beaver magazine in 1937 to document the activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the landscapes and people of the Canadian North. While Squire is most known for her photographs of waterfowl, published in The Beaver and in her book Wildfowling With a Camera (1938), I am interested in her photographs taken during the annual supply run of the ship Nascopie to HBC posts in the Eastern Arctic in 1938. I analyse Squire’s photographs of Indigenous women of the North in relation to portraits of Squire contained within the Nascopie collection in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (HBCA). Squire’s photographs of Indigenous women exist at a complicated nexus of compassion and indifference that reifies what María Lugones calls the “light side” of the colonial/modern gender system, which is white, bourgeois femininity (Lugones 2007). Lugones has introduced an understanding of gender that places what Anibal Quijano calls the “coloniality of power” – a modern racial classification axis imposed on the colonized and founded on the hierarchy of human/non-human in service of Western man – into a critique that makes the coloniality of power central to understanding our present gender system as an inherently colonial system that does violence in order to build Western civilization. The Squire collection contains several portraits of Lorene Squire – taken by others and by Squire – that are in an interesting contrast to her portraits of Indigenous women. While Squire does something that is quite radical in its time in depicting Indigenous women as individuals and as mothers – rather than as racist stereotypes – they exist in a curious juxtaposition to the portraits of Squire herself in the collection.
Reference
Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, 1 (2007): 186-209.
1882-1883 marked the First International Polar Year, which was a significant moment in the histor... more 1882-1883 marked the First International Polar Year, which was a significant moment in the history of colonial scientific exploration and research. Frustrated with the piecemeal nature of previous polar research, Lieutenant Karl Weyprecht of the Austro-Hungarian Navy proposed to the International Meteorological Congress in the spring of 1879 that a coordinated international effort be made to gather scientific data about the Arctic and Antarctic. Lt. Weyprecht’s proposal highlighted three major areas of scientific exploration: meteorology, geomagnetism, and auroral observation. Each of the fourteen stations collected mandatory and optional data about these areas. The United States embarked on two expeditions, coordinated by the Army: one led by Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely at Lady Franklin Bay, and one led by Lieutenant P. Henry Ray at Point Barrow, Alaska (which was established in 1881).
While cartographical exploration was not among the major emphases of the 1882-1883 International Polar Year expeditions, many of them made significant contributions to mapping; for example, the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition made the first attempts to map the Meade River and the Brooks mountain range. The Point Barrow, Alaska expedition is significant in the overall programme of the First International Polar Year, as it was one of only two expeditions to include an ethnographer (John Murdoch) amongst the team of scientists (the other was the French expedition to Bahia Orange, Hoste Island, Tierra del Fuego). Murdoch collected an enormous number of ethnological specimens, and produced many photographs and drawings of the Indigenous people and their everyday objects from the nearby villages of Nuwuk and Uglaamie. Through a metonymy of images, the records of the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition produce a slippage that links Indigenous bodies with land and sea.
This paper is an analysis of the photographic evidence of Indigenous peoples collected by the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition. The photograph can be theorized as “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in North America, and this paper argues that we can read the vast archive of colonial photography as an ‘autobiography’ of settler fantasies and cultural imaginations. As a medium of objectivity and deathly stillness, photography was a particularly useful medium for non-Indigenous people to document the so-called benefits of the ‘civilizing’ project through representations of Indigenous bodies. The photographs collected during the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition are uniquely positioned within the larger 19th century North American colonial photographic archive, I argue, for two interrelated reasons. First, the photographs represent the Indigenous population as undifferentiated in terms of gender yet use ironic (or perhaps derisive) captions such as “Prince/Princess of Nuwuk,” projecting settler fantasies and anxieties about race and sexuality onto Indigenous bodies. And second, because these photographs exist in the context of expedition rather than permanent settlement, they do not (yet) attempt to represent the Indigenous peoples of Nuwuk and Uglaamie as capable of being civilized. This is connected to the scientists’ perception of Point Barrow, Alaska as a barren landscape that held no promises of resource extraction.
This paper is a part of a larger project that explores the multifarious ways photographs of Indigenous North Americans were constructed and used by settlers, and queries what impact these images have on how we learn about colonialism in the present. This is a decolonizing project that aims to destabilize the objectivity of photographic documentation to show how this archive is used to structure a fantasized ‘before’ and ‘after’ of settler contact that erases the violence of Indigenous-settler relations to depict North American colonization as a benevolent intervention.
References
Barr, William. The Expeditions of the First International Polar Year, 1882-83. Calgary: The Arctic Institute of North America Technical Paper, No. 29, 1985.
Barr, William. “Geographical Aspects of the First International Polar Year, 1882-1883.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, 4 (1983), 463-484.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
This e-book is a ‘thinking through’ of what it means to teach and learn about feminist theories t... more This e-book is a ‘thinking through’ of what it means to teach and learn about feminist theories through decolonial thought and with decolonizing methodologies. The central question of this e-book is: How do decolonizing methodologies and decolonial thought enable a re-reading of the field of feminist theory? The secondary question this e-book asks is: What changes need to occur within one’s pedagogical approach towards feminist theory in order to model a decolonizing pedagogy for students? I consider these questions through a discussion of the failures of feminist theory (including my own practices as an educator) to consider colonialism and decolonization in Women’s and Gender Studies curricula, moving into a decolonizing review of commonly studied theorists and texts in feminist theory curricula. I suggest two pedagogical methods to decolonize feminist theory. First, I advocate for a contrapuntal approach to reading in the feminist theory class that teaches the “classics” through making considerations of the complicity of feminisms in colonialism. And second, I emphasize methods of evaluation that move away from privileging the written word (in the format of research essay or exam) and instead privilege other methods of representing theory that are oral and visual (multivocal presentations and digital storytelling).
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Books by Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Applied to cosmetic surgery, surface imagination shores up the fantasy that changing the surface of our body will change or improve our identities and consequently promises that our bodies are infinitely transformable and controllable according to our desires. The mutable body promised and fantasized through the surface imagination of cosmetic surgery is first and foremost a controllable body. Cosmetic surgery is a cultural effect of surface imagination, and we can learn about how contemporary embodiment is understood broadly through individual experiences within the specific practice of cosmetic surgery. What is particularly significant about current understandings of embodiment in North America is the persistent belief of advanced capitalism that psychical and social suffering can be alleviated through our body’s surface, especially through self-fashioning or transforming it. Cosmetic surgery exists alongside other cultural products of surface imaginations, such as ego psychology, pornography and home renovations. These are good examples of how surface imagination logic influences the understanding of the psychological, sexual and domestic realms of contemporary life. [...]
This book is an investigation into the significance of surface to contemporary Western (and increasingly, non-Western) cultures, using cosmetic surgical culture as its example. It focuses on two salient surfaces in the experience of cosmetic surgery: the photographic surface and the surface of the skin. The photograph is cosmetic surgery’s ideal, because it can be altered in a painless and predictable manner, a quality that renders the photograph a powerful and elusive object in cosmetic surgery that reminds, evidences, and promises the patient a transformation upon the skin. Photography is deeply connected to the fantasy of a mutable body, and is a critical support of cosmetic surgery through its parallel deployment of fragmentation and transformation of the body-surface seen in cosmetic surgical practice. The skin, on the other hand, is cosmetic surgery’s de-idealized surface. Skin is important to cosmetic surgery as the material site upon which cosmetic surgery happens, and as a metaphorical site where the cultural-social meets the interiority and psychical life of the individual. However, unlike the photograph, the skin cannot be controlled easily and is contingent. It shifts, wrinkles, and heals unexpectedly.
Table of contents and sample chapter (the introduction) are linked to from Palgrave site (see below).
Papers by Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
This paper is a part of a larger decolonizing project that aims to destabilize the objectivity of photographic documentation to show how this archive is used to structure a fantasized ‘before’ and ‘after’ of settler contact that erases the violence of Indigenous-settler relations to depict North American colonization as a benevolent intervention.
Drafts by Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
In this paper, I propose to further analyse this assignment, focusing particularly on its outcomes for campus and community organizations. In my previous experiences offering community-based praxis assignments, in spite of emphasizing critical reflection, students who did such assignments still described their involvement as distanced from the organization’s members and/or those served by the organization, and as ‘helping out’ the organization. As several feminist educators have noted (Trethewey 1999; Bickford and Reynolds 2002; Dean 2007; Endres and Gould 2009), these kinds of community-based assignments can paradoxically reinforce social hierarchies and do not necessarily have the desired effect of learning through praxis. In response, DFT-DV was designed to highlight the generosity of the organizations for agreeing to mentor students, and the organizations were selected so that students were less able to distance themselves from those served by the organizations.
The introductory section of this paper will introduce DFT-DV, drawing on my previous research about student responses to this assignment (Hurst 2014a; Hurst 2014b). In this work, I argue that DFT-DV enables students to engage in deeper learning through praxis because it engages students’ “soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body” (Frueh 2006). Next, I will outline the components of the assignment’s design that attempt to lessen the potential to reinforce social hierarchies and ‘other’ those involved with the organizations. It is my contention that the vulnerability students experience from producing creative work is a strength of this assignment, one which can partially address the shortcomings of conventional service learning assignments. The latter half of the paper will consist of an analysis of interviews with members of the participating organizations who supervised students working on DFT-DV in 2012, 2013, and 2014 (to be conducted in September, 2014). Based on informal conversations, it is my observation that while students frequently benefit from the community-based component of the assignment, the benefits for the organizations are less even. These interviews will enable me to evaluate this observation; specifically, I will ask why organizations participate, what organizations get out of participating, how useful they find the student placements and videos, and how they understand the concept of praxis operating in this assignment.
References
Bickford, Donna M. and Nedra Reynolds. 'Activism and Service-Learning: Reframing Volunteerism as Dissent.' Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 2, no. 1 (2002): 229-252.
Dean, Amber. “Teaching Feminist Activism: Reflections on an Activism Assignment in Introductory Women's Studies.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29, 4 (2007): 351-362.
Endres, Danielle and Mary Gould. '"I Am Also In A Position To Use My Whiteness to Help Them Out": The Communication of Whiteness in Service Learning.' Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 4 (2009): 418-436.
Frueh, Joanna. Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 2006.
Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston. “A ‘journey in feminist theory together’: The Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video project.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 0, no. 0 (2014a): 1-15. Published via OnlineFirst on 5 August 2014; to be published in print in 2015.
Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston. “How to ‘Do’ Feminist Theory Through Digital Video: Embodying Praxis in the Undergraduate Feminist Theory Classroom.” Ada: Gender, New Media, and Technology 5 (2014b). Available at: http://adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-hurst/.
Trethewey, Anna. “Critical Organizational Communication, Feminist Research Methods, and Service-Learning: Practice as Pedagogy.” In Voices of Strong Democracy: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Communication Studies, edited by David Droge and Bren Ortega Murphy, 177-190. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing and the American Association for Higher Education, 1999.
Reference
Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, 1 (2007): 186-209.
While cartographical exploration was not among the major emphases of the 1882-1883 International Polar Year expeditions, many of them made significant contributions to mapping; for example, the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition made the first attempts to map the Meade River and the Brooks mountain range. The Point Barrow, Alaska expedition is significant in the overall programme of the First International Polar Year, as it was one of only two expeditions to include an ethnographer (John Murdoch) amongst the team of scientists (the other was the French expedition to Bahia Orange, Hoste Island, Tierra del Fuego). Murdoch collected an enormous number of ethnological specimens, and produced many photographs and drawings of the Indigenous people and their everyday objects from the nearby villages of Nuwuk and Uglaamie. Through a metonymy of images, the records of the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition produce a slippage that links Indigenous bodies with land and sea.
This paper is an analysis of the photographic evidence of Indigenous peoples collected by the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition. The photograph can be theorized as “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in North America, and this paper argues that we can read the vast archive of colonial photography as an ‘autobiography’ of settler fantasies and cultural imaginations. As a medium of objectivity and deathly stillness, photography was a particularly useful medium for non-Indigenous people to document the so-called benefits of the ‘civilizing’ project through representations of Indigenous bodies. The photographs collected during the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition are uniquely positioned within the larger 19th century North American colonial photographic archive, I argue, for two interrelated reasons. First, the photographs represent the Indigenous population as undifferentiated in terms of gender yet use ironic (or perhaps derisive) captions such as “Prince/Princess of Nuwuk,” projecting settler fantasies and anxieties about race and sexuality onto Indigenous bodies. And second, because these photographs exist in the context of expedition rather than permanent settlement, they do not (yet) attempt to represent the Indigenous peoples of Nuwuk and Uglaamie as capable of being civilized. This is connected to the scientists’ perception of Point Barrow, Alaska as a barren landscape that held no promises of resource extraction.
This paper is a part of a larger project that explores the multifarious ways photographs of Indigenous North Americans were constructed and used by settlers, and queries what impact these images have on how we learn about colonialism in the present. This is a decolonizing project that aims to destabilize the objectivity of photographic documentation to show how this archive is used to structure a fantasized ‘before’ and ‘after’ of settler contact that erases the violence of Indigenous-settler relations to depict North American colonization as a benevolent intervention.
References
Barr, William. The Expeditions of the First International Polar Year, 1882-83. Calgary: The Arctic Institute of North America Technical Paper, No. 29, 1985.
Barr, William. “Geographical Aspects of the First International Polar Year, 1882-1883.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, 4 (1983), 463-484.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Applied to cosmetic surgery, surface imagination shores up the fantasy that changing the surface of our body will change or improve our identities and consequently promises that our bodies are infinitely transformable and controllable according to our desires. The mutable body promised and fantasized through the surface imagination of cosmetic surgery is first and foremost a controllable body. Cosmetic surgery is a cultural effect of surface imagination, and we can learn about how contemporary embodiment is understood broadly through individual experiences within the specific practice of cosmetic surgery. What is particularly significant about current understandings of embodiment in North America is the persistent belief of advanced capitalism that psychical and social suffering can be alleviated through our body’s surface, especially through self-fashioning or transforming it. Cosmetic surgery exists alongside other cultural products of surface imaginations, such as ego psychology, pornography and home renovations. These are good examples of how surface imagination logic influences the understanding of the psychological, sexual and domestic realms of contemporary life. [...]
This book is an investigation into the significance of surface to contemporary Western (and increasingly, non-Western) cultures, using cosmetic surgical culture as its example. It focuses on two salient surfaces in the experience of cosmetic surgery: the photographic surface and the surface of the skin. The photograph is cosmetic surgery’s ideal, because it can be altered in a painless and predictable manner, a quality that renders the photograph a powerful and elusive object in cosmetic surgery that reminds, evidences, and promises the patient a transformation upon the skin. Photography is deeply connected to the fantasy of a mutable body, and is a critical support of cosmetic surgery through its parallel deployment of fragmentation and transformation of the body-surface seen in cosmetic surgical practice. The skin, on the other hand, is cosmetic surgery’s de-idealized surface. Skin is important to cosmetic surgery as the material site upon which cosmetic surgery happens, and as a metaphorical site where the cultural-social meets the interiority and psychical life of the individual. However, unlike the photograph, the skin cannot be controlled easily and is contingent. It shifts, wrinkles, and heals unexpectedly.
Table of contents and sample chapter (the introduction) are linked to from Palgrave site (see below).
This paper is a part of a larger decolonizing project that aims to destabilize the objectivity of photographic documentation to show how this archive is used to structure a fantasized ‘before’ and ‘after’ of settler contact that erases the violence of Indigenous-settler relations to depict North American colonization as a benevolent intervention.
In this paper, I propose to further analyse this assignment, focusing particularly on its outcomes for campus and community organizations. In my previous experiences offering community-based praxis assignments, in spite of emphasizing critical reflection, students who did such assignments still described their involvement as distanced from the organization’s members and/or those served by the organization, and as ‘helping out’ the organization. As several feminist educators have noted (Trethewey 1999; Bickford and Reynolds 2002; Dean 2007; Endres and Gould 2009), these kinds of community-based assignments can paradoxically reinforce social hierarchies and do not necessarily have the desired effect of learning through praxis. In response, DFT-DV was designed to highlight the generosity of the organizations for agreeing to mentor students, and the organizations were selected so that students were less able to distance themselves from those served by the organizations.
The introductory section of this paper will introduce DFT-DV, drawing on my previous research about student responses to this assignment (Hurst 2014a; Hurst 2014b). In this work, I argue that DFT-DV enables students to engage in deeper learning through praxis because it engages students’ “soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body” (Frueh 2006). Next, I will outline the components of the assignment’s design that attempt to lessen the potential to reinforce social hierarchies and ‘other’ those involved with the organizations. It is my contention that the vulnerability students experience from producing creative work is a strength of this assignment, one which can partially address the shortcomings of conventional service learning assignments. The latter half of the paper will consist of an analysis of interviews with members of the participating organizations who supervised students working on DFT-DV in 2012, 2013, and 2014 (to be conducted in September, 2014). Based on informal conversations, it is my observation that while students frequently benefit from the community-based component of the assignment, the benefits for the organizations are less even. These interviews will enable me to evaluate this observation; specifically, I will ask why organizations participate, what organizations get out of participating, how useful they find the student placements and videos, and how they understand the concept of praxis operating in this assignment.
References
Bickford, Donna M. and Nedra Reynolds. 'Activism and Service-Learning: Reframing Volunteerism as Dissent.' Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 2, no. 1 (2002): 229-252.
Dean, Amber. “Teaching Feminist Activism: Reflections on an Activism Assignment in Introductory Women's Studies.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29, 4 (2007): 351-362.
Endres, Danielle and Mary Gould. '"I Am Also In A Position To Use My Whiteness to Help Them Out": The Communication of Whiteness in Service Learning.' Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 4 (2009): 418-436.
Frueh, Joanna. Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 2006.
Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston. “A ‘journey in feminist theory together’: The Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video project.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 0, no. 0 (2014a): 1-15. Published via OnlineFirst on 5 August 2014; to be published in print in 2015.
Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston. “How to ‘Do’ Feminist Theory Through Digital Video: Embodying Praxis in the Undergraduate Feminist Theory Classroom.” Ada: Gender, New Media, and Technology 5 (2014b). Available at: http://adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-hurst/.
Trethewey, Anna. “Critical Organizational Communication, Feminist Research Methods, and Service-Learning: Practice as Pedagogy.” In Voices of Strong Democracy: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Communication Studies, edited by David Droge and Bren Ortega Murphy, 177-190. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing and the American Association for Higher Education, 1999.
Reference
Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, 1 (2007): 186-209.
While cartographical exploration was not among the major emphases of the 1882-1883 International Polar Year expeditions, many of them made significant contributions to mapping; for example, the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition made the first attempts to map the Meade River and the Brooks mountain range. The Point Barrow, Alaska expedition is significant in the overall programme of the First International Polar Year, as it was one of only two expeditions to include an ethnographer (John Murdoch) amongst the team of scientists (the other was the French expedition to Bahia Orange, Hoste Island, Tierra del Fuego). Murdoch collected an enormous number of ethnological specimens, and produced many photographs and drawings of the Indigenous people and their everyday objects from the nearby villages of Nuwuk and Uglaamie. Through a metonymy of images, the records of the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition produce a slippage that links Indigenous bodies with land and sea.
This paper is an analysis of the photographic evidence of Indigenous peoples collected by the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition. The photograph can be theorized as “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in North America, and this paper argues that we can read the vast archive of colonial photography as an ‘autobiography’ of settler fantasies and cultural imaginations. As a medium of objectivity and deathly stillness, photography was a particularly useful medium for non-Indigenous people to document the so-called benefits of the ‘civilizing’ project through representations of Indigenous bodies. The photographs collected during the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition are uniquely positioned within the larger 19th century North American colonial photographic archive, I argue, for two interrelated reasons. First, the photographs represent the Indigenous population as undifferentiated in terms of gender yet use ironic (or perhaps derisive) captions such as “Prince/Princess of Nuwuk,” projecting settler fantasies and anxieties about race and sexuality onto Indigenous bodies. And second, because these photographs exist in the context of expedition rather than permanent settlement, they do not (yet) attempt to represent the Indigenous peoples of Nuwuk and Uglaamie as capable of being civilized. This is connected to the scientists’ perception of Point Barrow, Alaska as a barren landscape that held no promises of resource extraction.
This paper is a part of a larger project that explores the multifarious ways photographs of Indigenous North Americans were constructed and used by settlers, and queries what impact these images have on how we learn about colonialism in the present. This is a decolonizing project that aims to destabilize the objectivity of photographic documentation to show how this archive is used to structure a fantasized ‘before’ and ‘after’ of settler contact that erases the violence of Indigenous-settler relations to depict North American colonization as a benevolent intervention.
References
Barr, William. The Expeditions of the First International Polar Year, 1882-83. Calgary: The Arctic Institute of North America Technical Paper, No. 29, 1985.
Barr, William. “Geographical Aspects of the First International Polar Year, 1882-1883.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, 4 (1983), 463-484.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
In this paper, I turn my attention to a more recent and rapidly expanding sub-field of cosmetic surgery: injectables (for example, Botox), laser treatments, and chemical peels. These procedures are overlooked in all existing critical analyses of cosmetic surgery (including my own), and not examined in their own right. Using testimonial photographic narratives from surgeons’ websites and an interview with a woman who underwent multiple chemical peels and laser treatments, I argue that these non-surgical procedures collapse the difference between the surfaces of the photograph and the skin more successfully than surgical procedures. Thus, the expansion of these non-surgical procedures must be considered as the result of not only global economic circumstances, but also the surface imagination fantasies of embodiment that they support.
Reference
Essig, Laurie. American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and the Quest for Perfection. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.
While Squire is most known for her photographs of waterfowl, published in The Beaver and in her book Wildfowling With a Camera (1938), this paper focuses on her photographs taken during the annual supply run of the ship Nascopie to HBC posts in the Eastern Arctic in 1938. In particular, this paper reads Squire’s photographs of Indigenous women of the North in relation to portraits of Squire contained within the Nascopie collection in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (HBCA). These photographs simultaneously interrupt and replicate the ‘before’ and ‘after’ narratives and colonial gaze that are common to the vast archive of settler photographs of Indigenous North Americans, and they contain something in excess of “the real thing captured through the camera’s eye.” The Squire collection in the HBCA holds complex and contradictory settler fantasies of race and gender in “the true North.” I argue that employing Paulette Regan’s methodology of ‘unsettling’ (2011) to Squire’s Nascopie photographs requires the viewer to re-think of them as autobiographical documents that exist at a complicated nexus of compassion and indifference that reifies the colonial/modern gender system (Lugones 2007).
This paper is a part of a larger project on photography as a technology used to categorize colonized lands, resources, and people within government documentation, commercial photography, and the albums of settlers. Exploring the multifarious ways photographs of Indigenous North Americans were/are constructed and used by non-Indigenous settlers, this project queries what impact these images have on how we learn about colonialism in the present.
References
Geller, Peter. “The ‘True North’ in Pictures? Photographic Representations in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s The Beaver Magazine, 1920-1945.” Archivaria 36 (1993): 166-188.
Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, 1 (2007): 186-209.
Moore, Debra and Bronwen Quarry. “Cool Things in the Collection: Lorene Squire: Wildlife and Northern Photographs in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives.” Manitoba History 66 (2011): 48-49.
Regan, Paulette. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.
Squire, Lorene. Wildfowling With a Camera. New York: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1938.
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The research component of the project explores how arts-based learning approaches can be productively linked to service learning in the feminist theory classroom. “Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video” is inspired by the literatures on digital storytelling, participatory video, and creative feminist pedagogies. These literatures were used to develop the assignment itself, and then to help reflect upon the assignment through interview conversations with students who completed the assignment. You can find information about the research outcomes of the project by clicking on the “RESEARCH” link, and access a reading list related to the project.
Students of feminist theory (WMGS 303) created a short, non-documentary digital video (3-5 minutes) on a concept relevant to the study of feminist theory, such as decolonization or sexual violence. Students’ understandings of their concepts were developed through reading course materials, in addition to providing service to a community organization. After creating their videos, students wrote a reflection piece in which they analysed their video by connecting it to their learning in the course as a whole. A copy of the assignment can be located in the “RESEARCH” section. You can learn about the community organizations involved with “Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video” by clicking on the “PARTNERS” link.
All of the community organizations are involved in some type of educational or facilitation activity, and a service outcome of “Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video” is the creation of an online digital video library that can be used in these activities. The online library is organized by keywords. You can find the videos by clicking on the “VIDEOS” link.
The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and the Service Learning Program at St. Francis Xavier University generously funded the “Doing Feminist Theory Through Digital Video” project.