Papers by Corinne L. Mason
Women's Studies International Forum, 2024
n light of public scandals and legislative pressure, Canadian universities have instituted sexual... more n light of public scandals and legislative pressure, Canadian universities have instituted sexualized violence policies in an attempt to curb harm on campus. As the first step, policy-making committees and task forces were established to spearhead institutional change. Using data from 49 qualitative interviews with feminist faculty across Canada, we examine how these policy-making committees utilized feminist expertise, particularly whether feminists with intersectional positionalities and expertise were invited to the table and if their expertise was used to inform the resulting institutional policies. As our findings illustrate, even though policies profess to seek or incorporate intersectionality, experts in intersectionality– particularly those with intersectional positionalities– are rarely invited or heard. As we argue in this article, post-secondary institutions actively work against intersectionality by narrowing the mandates of committees and siloing task forces from other Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) concerns. Additionally, invitations to serve as experts on sexualized violence committees are often reserved for feminists deemed by administrators to be palatable, and those invited who embody diversity are used to rubber stamp the process of creating sexualized violence responses instead of informing the policies. This article illustrates the various ways in which PSI committees' constitutions and their mandates tend to make intersectionality a performative rather than informative guiding principle.
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Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning
Exceptionalisms are reductive, short-sighted, and often convoluted rationalizations for refusing ... more Exceptionalisms are reductive, short-sighted, and often convoluted rationalizations for refusing relational accountabilities. They systematically deliver narrowly conceived benefits to some at great expense to others who are habitually held from public view and voice. In neoliberal times, excuses for ignoring damage and justifying harms are legion. Our planet is choking on the standard business practice of externalizing costs while permitting pollution, social ills, and health consequences to pile up in the lives of marginalized peoples, species, and places, with complicit nation states increasingly ill-equipped to address the fallout. Some exceptionalisms, like the “doctrine of discovery,” are perpetrated for centuries with virtual impunity, masquerading as sacred edict until the mass graves of children surfacing from residential school grounds reveal assimilative evils that are more difficult to ignore for those who have benefitted most.
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Comfort Women Activism, 2020
ANA LAU is a professor of History at the Universidad Autónoma Met-ropolitana in Mexico. She speci... more ANA LAU is a professor of History at the Universidad Autónoma Met-ropolitana in Mexico. She specializes on Mexican History, women and feminism; her publications include a book authored, La nueva ola del feminismo en México (1987), the co-edited volume Mujeres y revolución 1900-1917 (1993), etc.
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Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, 2019
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Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies, 2018
Around the world lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer individuals are subjected to v... more Around the world lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer individuals are subjected to violence and intimidation based on their real or perceived sexuality, gender identity or expression. With those most at risk of human rights violations often living in areas of low economic development, questions of sexuality, gender identity, and expression have become a significant area of research within the field of development studies. The Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies is the first full length study of queer development studies, collecting the very best in research from around the world. Topics for discussion include: Queering policy and planning in development Queer development critique and queer critiques of development Global LGBTIQ rights Queer social movements and mobilizations At a time when development and human rights organizations such as the World Bank, Office of the UN Secretary General and Human Rights Watch are placing increasing importance on global LGBT rights, the Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies is an essential guide for scholars, upper level students, practitioners and anyone with an interest in global sexualities, gender identities, and expressions.
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Canadian Journal of Communication, 2014
This article employs anti-racist feminist theory to respond to a document published by the Depart... more This article employs anti-racist feminist theory to respond to a document published by the Department of Homeland Security United States in 2008. This document communicated the threatening possibility that women would use burqas or pregnancy prosthetics to hide bombs. Focusing on this report, the authors explore how the bodies of Muslim women have become spectacular in the post-9/11 period. Working at the intersections of gender, modernity, and visibility, they demonstrate that representations of Muslim women as threats is a new Orientalist discourse that justifies aggressive interventions against Muslim women, including new technologies such as backscatter X-rays.Cet article s’appuie sur la théorie féministe antiraciste pour répondre à un document publié par le département de la sécurité intérieure des États-Unis en 2008. Le document avait comme but d’avertir le public de la possibilité que certaines femmes utiliseraient les burqas ou les prothèses de grossesse pour cacher des bomb...
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International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2014
Abstract Using a mathematical measurement called “disability-adjusted life years” (DALYs), the Wo... more Abstract Using a mathematical measurement called “disability-adjusted life years” (DALYs), the World Bank claims that violence against women is costly. In order to wrestle with representative grammars associated with this technocratic measurement, this article uses crip theory to investigate how the World Bank conceptualizes violence against women as requiring individual adjustments, resiliency and flexibility rather than structural and systemic change. It suggests the DALY measurement fits squarely within World Bank neoliberal economic schemas, especially the promotion of women's labor engagements as empowerment.
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Feminist Formations, 2013
This article analyzes the way that global violence against women is presented as a national secur... more This article analyzes the way that global violence against women is presented as a national security emergency in the United States. In the post-9/11 era, women's issues, including violence against women, have become central in American foreign aid and policy objectives. In particular, American national security, including the threat of terrorism, is now casually connected to gender inequalities abroad. This article investigates the implications of state-based strategies to end violence against women as a means to eradicate national security threats. Using the concept of a "development and in/security nexus," the article explores what has been branded "The Hillary Doctrine" to denote Hillary Clinton's promotion of women's rights during her tenure as Secretary of State alongside the proposed US International Violence Against Women Act in order to assess the impact of "doing" security and "doing" development within anti-violence strategies. The current US foreign policy focus on global violence against women functions to "genderwash" American foreign interests and facilitates the securitization and militarization of programs designed to end violence at the expense of women's well-being.
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International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2015
Abstract In 2012, the NGO Save the Children launched its No Child Born to Die campaign with the t... more Abstract In 2012, the NGO Save the Children launched its No Child Born to Die campaign with the tagline, “Breastfeeding Saves Lives.” The press release explains that in the first hours and days after a baby is born, their mother produces colostrum, a substance known to improve immunity, which must be delivered to infants in the first sixty minutes of life; this is referred to as “the power of the first hour.” Invoking a sense of urgency and a crisis of infant mortality, which breastfeeding is positioned to resolve, the campaign cites staggering medical statistics of infant deaths in the campaign targets of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and also Northern Indigenous and Inuit reserves in Canada. More than misrepresenting racialized women in the developed world as uneducated on infant health, childcare and child rearing and as lacking agency and empowerment, the campaign mobilizes the erroneous conflation of medical science, morality, capitalism and public health – a linkage typically mobilized by the development industry to the detriment of globally marginalized women. In order to understand how this conflation is mobilized to manufacture crisis at the expense of examining the root causes of infant mortality globally, we collect theories of crisis temporalities to develop a “feminist politics of crisis.”
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In this article, I examine print media coverage of the 2009 “Kingston Mills Murder” case and how ... more In this article, I examine print media coverage of the 2009 “Kingston Mills Murder” case and how this enactment of patriarchal violence was interpreted though a cultural lens as “honour killings.” I also focus on how feminist and gender “experts,” in statements to the news media, interpreted the murders as the consequence of a “clash of civilizations.” Drawing on the work of Chandra T. Mohanty (2003), I argue that it essential that Western feminisms decolonize discursive constructions of the “Other” in order to create and sustain “communities of resistance” to patriarchal violence. By investigating this case, I also seek to provide a road map for imagining an alternative feminist response to “honour killings” based on Sherene Razack’s (1998) interlocking analysis. Resume Dans cet article, j’examine la couverture dans la presse ecrite du cas des meurtres de « Kingston Mills » en 2009, et la facon dont cet acte de violence patriarcale a ete interprete d’un point de vue culturel comme ...
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In 2017, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) released the Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP)... more In 2017, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) released the Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), the first policy in Canada to include sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) as key concerns. Shortly thereafter, GAC publicized a $650 million commitment to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). However, attention to diversity of women and girls’ sexual orientations and gender identities was absent from GAC’s 2017 SRHR commitments. In this chapter, the author investigates the impact of inclusion rhetoric in FIAP using a mixed method: discursive analysis of FIAP and interviews with GAC and civil society. The author argues that the term “inclusive” appears in FIAP without fixed meaning and is not harnessed to particular aid commitments. Thus, despite a discursive leap toward inclusion of LGBTIQ issues, FIAP continues to operate in a heteronormative and cisnormative frame, which is an epidemic in development policy and programming and has immense impact on LGBTIQ indiv...
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Critical Policy Studies
One cannot escape the constant messages and imagery of urgency unfolding across the globe: news, ... more One cannot escape the constant messages and imagery of urgency unfolding across the globe: news, social media, and television advertisements are just some of the conduits for messages of urgency that we increasingly face on a daily basis. But how constructive are these in terms of addressing global challenges? This is a question asked by Corinne L. Mason in Manufacturing Urgency: The Development Industry and Violence Against Women. Mason examines American foreign policy, the World Bank, and the United Nations (184) in order to analyze how violence against women (VAW) has been constructed as an urgent policy issue that must be dealt with immediately by the international development community. She suggests that the VAW policy agenda has been conceptualized in a flawed manner that has resulted in significant policy failures globally. The specific initiatives analyzed are The Hillary Doctrine, The Cost of Violence campaign by the World Bank, and campaigns by the United Nations (UNiTE to End Violence Against Women and Say NO). By exploring these initiatives through a critical, gender-theoretical lens, Mason points out the flawed, normative assumptions and gendered constructs embedded in the design of these policies. Mason nicely illustrates for example how The Hillary Doctrine was a clear driver in linking VAW (particularly in non-Western contexts) to national security policies in the United States; problematic because VAW was not conceptualized as an important issue in and of itself. Of particular importance is Mason’s ability to highlight how solutions put forward by the international community are often not appropriate: for example, suggestions to have military personnel deal with women coming forward after experiencing violence within their homes show a lack of understanding of interpersonal violence. Mason’s further questioning of the World Bank’s attempt to examine VAW as a hindrance to women’s ability to work (93) again illustrates a rather grim conceptualization of women by international institutions. Mason rounds out her critical analysis by exploring how the United Nations often represents women in the developing world as needing sympathy and pity, a representation laden with negative assumptions. Scholars of gender studies will particularly appreciate the ways in which Mason meshes discourse analysis and critical theory to illustrate the urgent way in which VAW is problematically constructed and addressed by many within the international community. This is a key strength of the book; the tension between highlighting women’s issues, and addressing these issues in a constructive way is evident here. For example, Mason, necessarily, questions whether overarching policy narratives concerning women’s empowerment (which are often predicated upon women being engaged in income generating activities) are truly about empowering
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Feminist Media Studies, 2016
Abstract In March 2014, at the height of the popularity of the hook-up application Tinder, The Gu... more Abstract In March 2014, at the height of the popularity of the hook-up application Tinder, The Guardian published the “Seven Shades of Cliché” of user profiles claiming that Humanitarians of Tinder are the “creepiest ticket yet to laidsville.” Humanitarians of Tinder are Tinder users (a hook-up application) who have selected to present images of themselves in humanitarian or volunteer settings outside of the West (or Global North, developed world). With a Tumblr devoted to this subgroup of Tinder users, and mainstream media outlets including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Yahoo News, and the feminist blog Jezebel following this story, Humanitarians of Tinder evoke dialogue about the intersections of sexiness and racialized benevolence. This article takes seriously Humanitarians of Tinder to think through the connections between social media hook-ups, racial affect, feminist studies humanitarianism, and racisms in development. It asks: why do people use humanitarian photos to generate hook-ups on social media? How does holding an African baby make someone “hot”?
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Corinne L. Mason is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at Brandon... more Corinne L. Mason is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at Brandon University. She conducts transnational critical race feminist analyses of development discourses and popular news media, focusing specifically on representations of LGBTIQ rights, violence against women, reproductive justice, and foreign aid. Her work has been published in Feminist Formations, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Feminist Media, Feminist Teacher, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Surveillance & Society, and Canadian Journal of Communication. She is the author of Manufacturing Urgency: Violence Against Women and the Development Industry (May 2017) and the editor of the forthcoming collection Queer Development Studies Reader (Routledge).
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Surveillance Society, Sep 4, 2012
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Canadian Journal of Foreign Policy , 2019
In 2017, the Canadian Liberal government introduced the Feminist International Assistance Policy ... more In 2017, the Canadian Liberal government introduced the Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), which offers an “intersectional” lens by taking into consideration the diversity of women and girls. This article argues that “intersectional” conceptualized inconsistently in FIAP, and outlines the dissimilar understandings of intersectionality between GAC officials and civil society members. The lack of clarity around intersectionality is predictable given that this issue fuels debates and dialogues in the field of intersectionality theory. As intersectionality has traveled from activist circles to academia and beyond, the theory of intersectionality has often been reduced to a fuzzword and buzzword. Ultimately, this article argues that the impact of this theory on Canadian aid may be quite limited if intersectionality is not clearly and consistently conceptualized.
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Our desire to think through the authority of intersectionality in contemporary praxis in the fiel... more Our desire to think through the authority of intersectionality in contemporary praxis in the field(s) of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies was inspired by a number of thoughtful presentations at the “International Intersectionality Conference” hosted by the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy (IIRP) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in 2014. IIRP was particularly interested in presentations that engaged “the uses and ‘abuses’ of intersectionality” (IIRP 2014). Our presentation focused on the challenges and possibilities of institutionalized intersectionality—on how intersectionality, as an invaluable critical lens, is an expected feature of feminist work and yet might be exploited by a privileged intellectual class to reinforce oppressive boundaries of belongingness in the academy through the wielding of intersectionality as a learned skill. As intersectionality is understood as the most important theoretical, analytical, and methodological tool in gender, women’s, and sexuality studies and as its mainstreaming marks a paradigm shift in feminist praxis (Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013; McCall 2005; Nash 2008), we wondered: what work is being done in its name and in what fields of inquiry and practice? And what are the implications of this work for those whose experiences intersectionality was designed to center, namely women of colour?
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In March 2014, at the height of the popularity of the hook-up application Tinder, The Guardian pu... more In March 2014, at the height of the popularity of the hook-up application Tinder, The Guardian published the “Seven Shades of Cliché” of user profiles claiming that Humanitarians of Tinder are the “creepiest ticket yet to laidsville.” Humanitarians of Tinder are Tinder users (a hook-up application) who have selected to present images of themselves in humanitarian or volunteer settings outside of the West (or Global North, developed world). With a Tumblr devoted to this subgroup of Tinder users, and mainstream media outlets including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Yahoo News, and the feminist blog Jezebel following this story, Humanitarians of Tinder evoke dialogue about the intersections of sexiness and racialized benevolence. This article takes seriously Humanitarians of Tinder to think through the connections between social media hook-ups, racial affect, feminist studies humanitarianism, and racisms in development. It asks: why do people use humanitarian photos to generate hook-ups on social media? How does holding an African baby make someone “hot”?
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Papers by Corinne L. Mason
Queering policy and planning in development
Queer development critique and queer critiques of development
Global LGBTIQ rights
Queer social movements and mobilizations
At a time when development and human rights organizations such as the World Bank, Office of the UN Secretary General and Human Rights Watch are placing increasing importance on global LGBT rights, the Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies is an essential guide for scholars, upper level students, practitioners and anyone with an interest in global sexualities, gender identities, and expressions.
Manufacturing Urgency investigates anti-violence policies in international development, demonstrating that strategies intended to end violence against women are constructed to serve ends other than the needs of women.
Through careful consideration of anti-violence initiatives--including "The Hillary Doctrine," the World Bank's "The Cost of Violence," and the United Nation's "UNiTE To End Violence Against Women" campaigns--Corinne Mason shows how these projects are technocratic, depoliticized, and executed in a manner that serves the interest of neoliberal economic growth and security concerns, at the expense of a more holistic, effective, and accountable approach.
"An impressive contribution....Mason's work is transdisciplinary, and theoretically sophisticated. She weaves together critical race, disability and feminist theory, literature on violence, development studies and their impact on policy with beautiful results. Undoubtedly, this book will situate her among the leading thinkers in the fields of transnational feminism and development." Elora Halim Chowdhury, author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh