Excerpt from May 2020 paper: Identification with the Political Transgressor: Psycho-analytic Perspectives on Donald Trump and Rob Ford 

Content Warning: Sex Abuse, Racism

Both leaders have visibly aligned themselves with sex. Long before his run for president, photographs of Trump that circulated in the media seldom showed him without a supermodel on his arm, surrounded by a bevvy of young, scantily-clad women or in his element judging Miss America pageants. Sex is an integral part of the miasma of sleaze that is Trump’s public image, so much so that he was the clear choice to star in at least three films produced by Playboy.[1] His personal life also revolved around it. Rumors of affairs with adult film stars such as Stormy Daniels have plagued him since he first entered the public eye and he is widely acknowledged to have placed a 1990 New York Post headline that claimed his model wife Marla Maples declared him the “best sex I’ve ever had.” [2] Whether he means it to or not, sex seems to seep into all aspects of Trump’s persona. Unlike any president before him, he uses lazily veiled sexual rhetoric in his campaign speeches. Ta Nehisi Coates points out in The First White President the often implied sexual tone that underpins white supremacy, noting that this type of racism “has always had a perverse sexual tint.”[3] The conflation of racism with sex was a huge part of Trump’s campaign as one of his most notable soundbites was his labeling of Mexican immigrants as “rapists.”[5] Sandwiched between promises to build a wall, the absurd insinuation of this statement was clear. Despite the countless accusations of sexual misconduct against Trump himself, his conjuring of fantastical violence “inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists” says Coates.[6]

To a lesser degree, and one that seems less contrived and more organic, Toronto’s late mayor Rob Ford had allowed sex to intertwine itself with his public personality. A video of him speaking crudely and drunkenly about women went instantly viral and catapulted Ford to “legend”[13] status among some Canadians while totally humiliating others. This public reaction reminds of the dichotomy in America in regards to president Trump. His influence is so catalyzing that while he appears a God-like figure in the minds of some, he causes others to curse their citizenship to the world’s largest superpower. What is it about these two men that divides public opinion so drastically?

Excerpt from May 2020 paper: Regulating Body and Behavior Through Apps in the 21st Century 

Introduction:

 May 25th 2020, Memorial Day in the United States. The front page of The New York Times is awash with names, ages, and a small factoid about each person who constitutes a grim tally: 100,000 American lives lost. One can imagine that there are countless more that exist in the category of “probable deaths, ” who succumbed to a disease – or the complications of it – that they were never tested for and thus not recorded. One can also imagine that this tally also did not extend to those who never had enough of a tangible bureaucratic footprint to be counted in this number: undocumented immigrants who died at home, homeless Americans who died on the streets. And then, one can also imagine – if they are willing and able to stretch their mind around the impossibility of this level of grief – that this is only in one country. As of Memorial Day 2020, Johns Hopkins University reports around 345, 886 confirmed deaths worldwide from Covid-19, the virus caused by the novel Coronavirus.[1] The disease, discovered in China in early November, has ravaged the globe and its economy. What the virus is also doing however, is having a considerable effect on human behavior and psychology. We are increasingly using mobile apps to map and track human bodies in space for protection against the virus, and other societal ‘ills’. I will use two specific apps: virus-tracing apps and the crime-reporting app Citizen to explore the nuanced ways in which both are examples of Foucault’s biopower. Foucault explains that biopower “focuses on the body as the site of subjugation, and…highlights how individuals are implicated in their own oppression.”[2] It works to “discipline the body, optimize its capabilities, extort its forces, increase its usefulness and docility, integrate it into systems of efficient and economic controls."[3] The apps almost replicate – and provide information for – the state and its “controlling gaze.”[4] I will explore the ways in which they encourage citizens to regulate their own activities and whereabouts for the “good of society”[5] and what this ultimately leads to. In doing so, I will also highlight another Foucaultian notion that concerns the political nature of certain physical spaces. As he states “territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it's first of all a Juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power.”[6]

Conclusion: 

The apps invite conformity to our current norms and behavior by suggesting that disobedience could have severe consequences for both health and safety. Individuals govern themselves by staying away from the people or scenes they see on the apps and by reporting crime or illness. Virus-tracing apps present maps of human disease the same way that the Citizen presents a map of human disobedience. They lay out virtual cities and tell one what is considered ‘safe’ at any given moment. The naming of safe zones proves to be very problematic socially and actually functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the ‘un-safe’ zones become more dangerous and stigmatized. These types of mapping are either inherently discriminatory or could easily lead there. They might create the illusion of control in the mind of the user but Foucault would argue that they are simply a new form of “biopower” that disciplines bodies in space. Tailored to our modern age, it is one that falls in line with our technology-dependent, social-media obsessed world.

Excerpt from June 2020 paper: The Myriad Effects of Colonialism on Indigenous Female Art Production in Canada

The use of television – reality television in particular – in Pootoogook’s work is one of the most notable tropes. Its overuse in her oeuvre is so at odds with the Southern idea of Northern life it becomes almost ironic. Not only does Annie throw the viewer into a cultural confusion mimicking her own, she also depicts the changing nature of the modern North. The screens nod to a cyclical idea that through Pootoogook’s drawings, the South is watching the North, who is in turn watching the South on TV.

The televisions also seem to be a comment on the negative and transformative influences of colonisation. They function as a synecdoche for colonialism and its corrupting effects on the Inuit way of life. Most often, the television screen seems to be the central focus of the domestic scene, and alienate the family members from one another. Tropes of the outdoors are often seen in Pootoogook’s drawings in the form of baseball gloves, bats, and balls lying around. Yet the figures remain perpetually inside. This suggests that television has become a replacement for the more tradition activities that children once enjoyed. More than anything, the television speaks to the mundane and its presence in any image totally demystifies the idea most Southerners had of the North. While her mother and grandmother potentially saw themselves as Northern narrators preserving cultural identity through their art, Pootoogook took it upon herself to update the perception of Inuit people and showcase unromantic realities. While Carpenter might approve of the realism in Annie Pootoogoook’s work, Ingo Hessel critiqued it as “exhibitionist and reality tv.” Indeed, the domestic scenes are so grittily realistic that they almost evoke the sensation in the viewer that one is watching reality television inside reality television. Yet, this comparison to reality television perfectly encapsulates Pootoogook’s intentions. Her artworks are documentary in style, and highlight fundamental problems in Indigenous communities.