Martha McCaughey

The Fighting Spirit Women's Self-Defense Training and the Discourse of Sexed Embodiment

This article presents ethnographic research on womens self-defense training and suggests that womens self-defense culture prompts feminists to refigure our understanding of the body and violence. The body in feminist discourse is often construed as the object of patriarchal violence (actual or symbolic), and violence has been construed as something that is variously oppressive, diminishing, inappropriate, and masculinist. Hence, many feminists have been apathetic to womens self-defense. As a practice that rehearses, and even celebrates womens potential for violence, womens self-defense illustrates how and why feminism can frame the body as both a social construction and as politically significant for theory and activism.

Changing the hidden curriculum of campus rape prevention and education: women's self-defense as a key protective factor for a public health model of prevention

Recent activist, policy, and government efforts to engage in campus rape prevention education (RPE), culminating in the 2014 White House Task Force recommendations to combat campus sexual assault, prompt a need to examine the concept of “prevention” in the context of sexual assault on U.S. college campuses and their surrounding community service agencies. This article reviews previous research on effective resistance to sexual assault, showing that self-defense is a well-established protective factor in a public health model of sexual assault prevention. The article goes on to show, through an examination of campus rape prevention efforts framed as “primary prevention,” that self-defense is routinely excluded. This creates a hidden curriculum that preserves a gender status quo even while it strives for change. The article concludes with recommendations for how administrators, educators, facilitators, funding agencies, and others can incorporate self-defense into campus RPE for a more effective, data-driven set of sexual assault prevention efforts.

Victim Vaginas: The V-Day Campaign and the Vagina as Symbol of Female Vulnerability

In 2004 vaginas engulfed my work. As the director of a women’s studies program, I was one of the several hundred people on college campuses organizing a benefit production of Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues. While it was a great pleasure to see women on the campus and from the community participate in an all-female performance that’s about women and directed by women, and to see

Got Milk?: Breastfeeding as an 'Incurably Informed' Feminist STS Scholar

10,000 donated to our local women’s shelters, I became increasingly nervous about where the millions of dollars raised this way were being distributed—or, more precisely, not distributed. My aim here is not to quarrel with those who act in or see the show, to undercut the meaningful and transformative experience that The Vagina Monologues offers the women doing the show, or to deconstruct any of Ensler’s monologues. Instead, I want to discuss V-Day, the organizational structure governing campus and community benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues, and in so doing raise questions about the relationship between the play’s subject matter—vaginas—and the play’s activist cause—violence against women. Why is a performance about vaginas a fundraiser to stop violence against women? After all, the benefit productions of a show about vaginas could conceivably raise money to stop, say, sexually transmitted diseases, cervical cancer, teen pregnancy, or infant mortality. Eve Ensler has stated publicly that she conceived her play as a reaction to her personal experience as a victim of her father’s sexual abuse; it was her way of challenging violence against women. While it is commendable that Ensler chose to turn the popularity of her play into a way of raising money for

Windows Without Curtains - Computer Privacy and Academic Freedom

‘Got Milk?’ considers the authors own commitment to and experience of breastfeeding as a mother/intellectual, examining ways of theorizing embodiment and complex bio-social practices while also showing just how complicated living/embodying feminist STS theory can be. Many breastfeeding advocates are naïve about nature, technology, and gender issues, and many feminist STS scholars focus on the pregnant body, rather than the lactating body, to discuss gender, technology, and embodiment. Pro-breastfeeding materials often represent breastfeeding as an organic practice free from the intervention of medical experts and technologies. The authors experiences of the physical difficulties of breastfeeding, the management of breastfeeding by medical experts, the lack of social support for the practice, and the lack of a non-essentialist feminist discourse about the importance of breastfeeding left her wondering on what grounds she could and should justify her commitment to breastfeed her children. Ultimately, recognizing that breastfeeding is an embodied practice that is not free from technological intervention or other social and political contexts can counteract the romanticized, essentialized representations of breastfeeding for a stronger, if more contingent, ‘cyborg’ breastfeeding advocacy.

Perverting Evolutionary Narratives of Heterosexual Masculinity: Or, Getting Rid of the Heterosexual Bug

Focuses on the computer privacy of professors at public universities in the U.S. Details of a university police investigation using a professors computer; Assessment of the moral limitation of computer searches on ownership grounds; Application of the Constitutions Fourth Amendment to the electronic environment.

Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice

Focuses on the characters of evolutionary stories about male sexuality. Cause of male grief; Discussion on heterosexual masculinity; Information on gay men.