Carla Rice

Project Re•Vision: disability at the edges of representation

The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away. Self-representations have been a powerful part of the disability rights and culture movement, but recently scholars have analysed the ways in which these run the risk of creating a ‘single story’ that centres the experiences of white, western, physically disabled men. Here we introduce and theorize with Project Re•Vision, our arts-based research project that resists this singularity by creating and centring, without normalizing, representations that have previously been relegated to the margins. We draw from body becoming and new materialist theory to explore the dynamic ways in which positionality illuminates bodies of difference and open into a discussion about what is at stake when these stories are let loose into the world.

Becoming women : the embodied self in image culture

List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Introduction: Searching for Identity in Image Culture 1 In the Shadow of Difference 2 In a Girls Body 3 Invisible in Full View 4 The Student Body 5 Puberty as Sexual Spectacle 6 A Body That Looks, and Feels, Like a Woman 7 In the Mirror of Beauty Culture Conclusion: Out of the Shadows Appendix A: Participant Profiles Appendix B: Interview Guide and Advertising Flyer References Index

Rethinking Fat From Bio- to Body-Becoming Pedagogies

This article engages with recent critical research on the obesity epidemic to think through the bioethics of current obesity prevention and consider alternative responses to fat bodies. To develop such an approach, it offers a feminist “body becoming” theory of fat that interweaves constructivist and new materialist theories with embodied and aesthetic perspectives to imagine other possibilities for fat embodiment. Thinking beyond conventional biopedagogical interventions that send moralizing messages about what bodies should be, I theorize a “becoming” pedagogy that moves away from enforcing norms toward more creative ways of expanding possibilities for what bodies could become. Because in our boundary-setting world this kind of imagining is considered the work of the artist and not within the purview of the social scientist, I turn to the arts and to aesthetic theory for insight and inspiration in this project. I discuss representations that focus on embodying and materializing change among individuals and groups so as to transform social scripts about body, ability, and normality.

Pedagogical Possibilities for Unruly Bodies.

ABSTRACT Project Re•Vision uses disability arts to disrupt stereotypical understandings of disability and difference that create barriers to healthcare. In this paper, we examine how digital stories produced through Re•Vision disrupt biopedagogies by working as body-becoming pedagogies to create non-didactic possibilities for living in/with difference. We engage in meaning making about eight stories made by women and trans people living with disabilities and differences, with our interpretations guided by the following considerations: what these stories ‘teach’ about new ways of living with disability; how these stories resist neoliberalism through their production of new possibilities for living; how digital stories wrestle with representing disability in a culture in which disabled bodies are on display or hidden away; how vulnerability and receptivity become ‘conditions of possibility’ for the embodiments represented in digital stories; and how curatorial practice allows disability-identified artists to explore possibilities of ‘looking back’ at ableist gazes.

Girls and Sexting: The Missing Story of Sexual Subjectivity in a Sexualized and Digitally-Mediated World

For girls coming of age in a sexualized and digitally-mediated culture, sexting is not uncommon. While self-sexualizing through technology tends to be framed as risk behavior, not all girls are affected in the same way. For some, creating sexualized content using digital media provides opportunities for sexual exploration. However, among feminist scholars, debates concerning girls’ sexual empowerment persist. Many argue that despite professed empowerment, girls’ participation in creating sexually-explicit material reinforces gender/sexual scripts borne out of a male gaze. Others contend that self-sexualization may be necessary for girls’ sexuality development in a world that magnifies concerns over female sexuality and circumscribes its expression. Missing from debates is consideration of girls’ embodied sexual experiences, including theorization of sexual pleasure as a holistic force that merges body, mind and culture. Using feminist new materialist and embodiment theory, this chapter unpacks dominant narratives shaping girls’ sexualities and presents an alternate conceptualization of sexuality as an emergent force that materializes through the interactivity of biology, psyche, and society. Applying an intersectional lens that reveals how “the girl” in this discourse operates as an unmarked (white, heteronormative) category, we argue for the need to focus on diversely-located experiences of sexual pleasure, including sexting and self-sexualizing generally, as stepping stones to sexual empowerment in a digitally-mediated, sexist climate.

Unrecoverable? Prescriptions and Possibilities for Eating Disorder Recovery

Introduction: In Western psychology, post-structural feminist scholarship on eating disorders (EDs) has brought to light three key differences between critical and conventional frameworks: differences in understandings of causation and course, in conceptualizations of the normal/pathological divide, and in attendance to lived experiences as a source of scholarly and clinical knowledge and insight.

Cultivating disability arts in Ontario

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research Grant #106597; the Canadian Foundation for Innovation Project #35254; and the Canada Research Chairs Award #950-231091.

Making spaces: multimedia storytelling as reflexive, creative praxis

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore our experiences as researchers and participants in multimedia storytelling, an arts-informed method wherein we work with artists and aggrieved communities to speak back to dominant representations through film. In positioning ourselves as storytellers, we do research with rather than “on” or “for” participants, allowing us to connect in practical and affective ways as we co-create films. Drawing from dialogues about our workshop experiences, we outline four themes that make the storytelling space unique: reflexivity; structure and creativity; transitional space and reverberations; and fixing versus being/becoming with. We analyze our self-reflexive films on mind-body difference as “biomythographies,” as films that situate stories of ourselves in technological-temporal-spatial relations and that highlight how we make/experience change through creative research. Multimedia storytelling, we argue, allows us to enact reflexive creative praxis in a way that opens to difference rather than trying to fix it, forging an ethic we find all too rare in the neoliberal university.

Cripping the Ethics of Disability Arts Research

The use of multimedia story-making and narrative-based drama in disability research raises conventional ethical issues of informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality. In this chapter, we explore unique issues that arise when working with non-normatively embodied/enminded participants in a collaborative way, using arts-based mediums that transgress boundaries of anonymity and privacy, and call for difference-tailored consent processes. We identify unique ethical issues/practices arising out of our research with Re•Vision, a research-creation centre that uses the power of the arts to dismantle stereotypical understandings of mind-body difference that create barriers to healthcare. Drawing on Re•Vision’s arts research, we map ethical conditions under which participants/collaborators/artists create their stories, and how curation of multimedia stories and drama gives rise to an ethics of voice and bearing witness.

Story-Making as Methodology: Disrupting Dominant Stories through Multimedia Storytelling: Story-Making as Methodology

In this essay, we discuss multimedia story-making methodologies developed through Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice that investigates the power of the arts, especially story, to positively influence decision makers in diverse sectors. Our story-making methodology brings together majority and minoritized creators to represent previously unattended experiences (e.g., around mind-body differences, queer sexuality, urban Indigenous identity, and Inuit cultural voice) with an aim to building understanding and shifting policies/practices that create barriers to social inclusion and justice. We analyze our ongoing efforts to rework our storytelling methodology, spotlighting acts of revising carried out by facilitators and researchers as they/we redefine methodological terms for each storytelling context, by researcher-storytellers as they/we rework material from our lives, and by receivers of the stories as we revise our assumptions about particular embodied histories and how they are defined within dominant cultural narratives and institutional structures. This methodology, we argue, contributes to the existing qualitative lexicon by providing innovative new approaches not only for chronicling marginalized/misrepresented experiences and critically researching selves, but also for scaffolding intersectional alliances and for imagining more just futures.