(FEM1a) Feminist Sociology I: Gender-Based Violence, Sexual Autonomy, and Empowerment

This session brings together papers which examine the limitations of social and institutional responses to gender-based violence, while also considering how women’s sexual autonomy is both constructed and contested. Tags: Equality and Inequality, Feminism

Organizers: Sonia D'Angelo, York University, Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, Saint Mary’s University, Ronnie Joy Leah, Athabasca University; Chairs: Katharine Dunbar Winsor, Mount Allison University, Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, Saint Mary’s University

Presentations

Lisa Boucher, Trent University

Success on the Front-Lines?: Defining "Success" in Feminist Anti-Violence Work

What counts as “success” in feminist anti-violence work? How do those working in the sector characterize this “success”? And what kinds of supports and resources are needed to ensure individual and organizational success in the future? With goals to meaningfully address gender-based violence and to support victims/survivors of this violence, many feminist anti-violence organizations offer services in their communities while also working towards more long-term visions of social, political and cultural change. Fulfilling multifaceted and complex roles, organizations - and individual feminist anti-violence service providers working in those organizations - navigate challenges at the micro, meso and macro levels. They engage in demanding gendered labour which requires specialized skills and knowledge, but which is also routinely undervalued, under-resourced, and overlooked. Despite constraints and challenges in their daily work and in their social and political environments, feminist anti-violence service providers persist and continue to provide vital services and advocacy. Informed by social movement theory and a feminist political economy lens, this paper offers reflections on the continuation of feminist anti-violence work in Canada. Drawing on a qualitative study with two feminist sexual assault centers, I explore how feminist anti-violence service providers conceptualize “success” in their work. Additionally, this paper identifies factors which contribute to, or impede and undermine, organizational success and social justice goals. The study discussed here included in-depth interviews, a content analysis of organizational documents and the use of photovoice to examine how individuals and organizations make sense of and articulate challenges and successes on the front-lines of struggles to respond to gender-based violence. While feminist anti-violence workers spoke of a range of factors which facilitated both individual and organizational success, they also identified structural barriers to success, as well as the resources needed to ensure their work is sustainable in the face funding challenges and growing and complex community need. Due to the timing of the project, the photovoice and interview data include an emphasis on experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The content analysis of the organizational documents offers insights into both shifts and continuity in the ways successes and challenges are framed and understood over a 10-year time period. Ultimately, this paper focuses on front-line and organizational experiences, and highlights creative resistance to - and persistence in spite of – the many challenges facing feminist anti-violence work.

Natalie Snow, Humber College; Brook Madigan, Independent

#JusticeforCindy: A content analysis of legacy and social media

The current case study explores how Cindy Gladue was portrayed both in social media and news reports to better understand the public framing of violence against Indigenous women and the impacts of colonialism. The study sought to characterize the themes found in tweets and legacy news media about the Supreme Court of Canada case R v Barton. Cindy Gladue, a Cree, and Métis woman was murdered by Bradley Barton in 2011 and bled to death in a bathtub at the Yellowhead Inn in Edmonton (Amato, 2023). At trial, racist stereotypes plagued the courtroom with prosecutors and justice officials referring to her as a “native prostitute”, with narratives of victim blaming that ultimately tainted the jury’s verdict and allowed biases to consume the courtroom. Gladue’s preserved vaginal tissue was also presented in court during the trial which caused outrage as this dehumanized her further. Barton testified that the act was consensual (Amato, 2023). However, Barton was still found not guilty of first-degree murder. This verdict sparked outrage and calls for justice for Indigenous women across Canada. This case is just one of many examples of how Indigenous women in Canada continue to experience high rates of violence and yet, receive no proper justice due to systemic discrimination that still exists within the justice system. This is perpetrated by continued gendered and genocidal systems that are still deeply embedded within government structures.Media analysis was the methodology used in this article and was divided into two stages. Stage one incorporated a comprehensive search of the ProQuest Newstream database to find relevant press coverage. The second stage involved importing Tweets using 4 hashtags (#MMIW, #JusticeforCindy) referencing Cindy Gladue. The purpose of collecting two sources of data was to examine different types of news-generating forums and how this case was presented resulting in the public’s comprehension of the social issues encompassing Indigenous women and sex workers. Four primary themes emerged from the data set- newspaper articles and Tweets. The themes were sexual violence, seeking justice, system failures, and the positive characteristics of Cindy Gladue. The findings reinforced the bias present in the media presenting Cindy Gladue in a negative frame. However, the findings noted the need for formal action to ensure this never happens again. The case is exceptional due to the focus of the media on the victim, Cindy Gladue, rather than the legal aspects. An intersectionality framework was used to examine the intersections of Gladue’s identity (race, gender, class) and how that shaped her lack of protection from systemic discrimination in the trial before the courts, and how the media portrayed her as a victim. Adopting an intersectional perspective was important to understanding how Indigenous women face prejudice, discrimination, and barriers that go beyond their gender, and why they continue to face higher rates of gender-based violence than others (Thurston, 2022). Concepts of ideal victims were discussed in exploring the victimology within sexual violence. An ideal victim is described by scholars as a person or group who, when experiencing a crime, is given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim (Long, 2021). The process of becoming an ideal victim concerning crimes of sexual violence is biased, challenging, and at times, not accepted by criminal justice actors based on the perceived worthiness of the victim - most of the time for racialized women. This paper argues that the Canadian criminal justice system continues to fail to protect Indigenous women from violence, and systemic discrimination, and dehumanizes Indigenous victims. This treatment within the justice system extends into the media’s representation of Indigenous women as undeserving victims. Content and discourse analysis were employed to examine media sources in a two-stage process.

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Non-presenting author: Arsala Khan, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Emily Chisholm, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus

Representations of Sexual Violence in Sexual Health Education Materials in British Columbia: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis

The prevalence of sexual violence is an epidemic among young people in Canada. Sexual health education classrooms and learning materials are important sites of organized socialization where social practices and beliefs about sexual violence are represented as knowledge. From an epistemological orientation of feminist sociology, my research investigates how dominant perceptions of sexual violence are reproduced or resisted in public school educational materials through an assessment of their discussions of societal, community, interpersonal, and individual factors that contribute to sexual violence as a gendered social problem. This presentation discusses an original research project I conducted through the Undergraduate Research Award (URA) program at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, in 2023. Applying a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), I analyzed how sexual violence is discussed in a sample of 26 lesson plans, curriculum guides, and instructional samples created for sexual health educators in British Columbia. The sample is composed of publicly accessible online materials that contain teaching information pertaining to sexual violence and were selected from online sources where educators in British Columbia retrieve and share teaching materials. To guide my analysis of each text, I developed a set of questions to reflect principles of FCDA scholarship (Lazar, 2018) and recommendations from the guidelines for sexual health education curricula provided by the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN, 2019). Examples of such questions include: How does the text reflect the ideological character of gender? Does the text define and situate sexual violence in terms of the complex network of disciplinary systems that intersect with each other such as heteronormativity, colonialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism? Are dominant social practices surrounding sexual violence maintained or resisted/transformed? Finally, does the text uphold or privilege certain ideological frameworks or knowledge systems? This praxis enables my project to assess representations of information on sexual violence while locating the meaning(s) of such representations within the broader sociopolitical context, thus serving as analytical activism (Lazar, 2018). My presentation traces three dominant patterns from the learning materials’ discussions of sexual violence: (1) “Prevention strategies discourse”, where the conduct of a potential victim is suggested as a reliable way to prevent sexual violence; (2) “disclosure-centered discourse”, which centers the perceived benefits of disclosing incidents of sexual violence and attributes moral superiority to victims who disclose their experience(s); and (3) “abstinence-oriented discourse”, where violence is represented as a risk inherently associated with sex and a reason to avoid sex altogether. I illustrate key themes of these discourse patterns by drawing on contributions from feminist literature that conceptualize implications of sexual health education and neoliberal ideology in relation to intersecting forms of oppression (Bay-Cheng, 2015, 2016; Dengue et al, 2012; Lamb, 2013). These themes include the (de)moralization of responses from victims and the responsibilizing of individuals to either prevent being victimized by sexual violence, or to mitigate their own victimization. I argue that this sample of learning materials reflects inadequate integration of education that critically examines the sociocultural problem of sexual violence and embodies a hyper-individualistic lens of sexual violence that is upheld by neoliberal ideology. Such a lens obscures the ways that sexual violence is a product of broader systems of oppression which impose social positions that mediate individual experiences with sexual violence. My findings contribute to the body of Canadian literature, which has previously focused exclusively on education curricula in Ontario (Albert, 2022; Bialystok and Wright, 2019; Vanner, 2022). Addressing calls from Bay-Cheng (2016) and Vanner (2022), I discuss a sample lesson plan on sexual violence that incorporates feminist critical pedagogy and reframes the focus away from the individual in educational discussions of sexual violence. Reiterating the central focus of my research questions, my sample lesson plan exemplifies a contextualized delivery of information pertaining to societal, community, interpersonal, and individual factors that influence the social problem of sexual violence. I conclude by discussing the future directions that this research might take to address the limitations of the project at present. By advocating for school curricula that adequately address and resist power relations, this research offers contributions to broader feminist sociological efforts to understand the relationship between the communication of knowledge and social inequalities.

Oluwatobi Alabi, University of Johannesburg

Focusing on women's empowerment and agency in kayan mata's discourse in Nigeria

This paper examines the motivations behind women's use of kayan mata in Nigeria. The term kayan mata refers to traditional aphrodisiacs used by women in Northern Nigeria. It is loosely translated as the luggage of a woman. Using a qualitative research design, in-depth interviews were conducted with women who consume kayan mata, men who have insight into women's use of kayan mata, and sellers of the aphrodisiac to gain a better understanding of its varieties, motivations, and implications for intimacy, relationships, and family dynamics. To explore how kayan mata has become an important tool in Nigerian politics of intimate relationships, arguments of nego-feminism and snail-sense feminism are made, which assert that women have used a variety of strategies to navigate limiting terrains and challenge gender norms in various cultures throughout Africa. The results of this study suggest that kayan mata has become a tool by which some women assert agency and navigate the delicate politics of intimate relationships, marriage and family-life. Besides its perceived role in stimulating sexual pleasure, it increases women's self-confidence, which enhances their negotiation power. The participants' narratives emphasize the close connection between sexual satisfaction, relationship stability, and empowerment. Despite the fact that some participants believe that kayan mata can be an effective negotiation tool for women in intimate relationships, concerns about its misuse and associations with diabolical practices also emerge, underscoring the complexity and fluidity of empowerment narratives. This study emphasizes the complexity of intimate relationships and redefines narratives about assertiveness, liberation, and empowerment in the context of traditional aphrodisiacs in Nigeria.