Toronto Metropolitan University Open Journals
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“I Just Want to Be Normal!”: A Poststructural Autoethnographic Exploration of Queer Body Image and Gynecomastia
No full textIn this article, I explore both my personal experiences within queer men’s communities engaging with dieting practices and my journey encountering assessments for gynecomastia. Gynecomastia, a medical condition that typically describes cisgender men’s experiences with enlarged breasts and extra fat tissue on their pectorals, is an under-discussed medical condition that intersects with conversations around gender, sexuality, body image and self-esteem. Within queer men’s communities, the hegemonic emphasis on toned, ‘fit’ bodies and muscular pectoral muscles leaves individuals with gynecomastia with body image and self-esteem challenges. Accordingly, hierarchical notions of queer masculinities often position feminine embodiment, particularly that which is associated with fat and fleshiness, as lesser than. In this poststructural autoethnographic article, I engage with my personal experiences of being assessed for gynecomastia and personal histories with body image challenges. Through this, I describe the hegemonic norms within queer men’s communities that constitute feminized and fattened embodiments as inferior and place my personal experiences with body image and self-esteem challenges within a larger socio-cultural and political landscape that devalues bodies outside of hegemonic and masculinized norms. I provide implications for dietetic professional practices throughout the article and advocate for an awareness of social and cultural norms around gender and sexuality in dietetic professional practices
Experimental Embodiment: Designing Ecological Spaces and POVs in Virtual Reality
No full textWhile discussing our current work-in-progress project, Virtual Aquapolis, we will consider two lines of inquiry:
VR provides unique opportunities to explore inaccessible spaces, embody non-human forms, and offer radical new perspectives. How might we tell stories and create experiences that speak to this ecological moment using VR? This presentation explores the potential for VR to offer novel ways to connect with, or even embody, flora, fauna, environments and ecosystems.
The rules for creating VR environments are still evolving: the grammar, aesthetics, and experiential possibilities developed in this early period will inform the future of the artform. As part of the above discussion, we will consider how VR might incorporate and expand on the storytelling strategies used in experimental realms and practices such as psychogeography, site-specific art, multimedia installation, interactive documentary and experimental film.
This inquiry builds on the design document for our experimental VR work-in-progress project, Virtual Aquapolis, an interactive VR experience that invites users to explore the past, present and future of NY Harbor from beneath the surface of the water. Chronicling the harbor and its inhabitants through 500 years of radical change, users will experience how human culture and beliefs have altered NYC’s underwater ecosystems, and how the harbor has shaped the city above.
Virtual Aquapolis leverages VR’s potential to explore inaccessible places and serve as a philosophical space, used to connect, not disconnect from one’s environment. While urban waterways are often considered sacrifice zones, our project examines the diversity and resilience of harbor ecosystems, challenging cultural distinctions between “urban” and “natural” by revealing how human culture works in tandem with the biosphere.
Our proposed user-POV offers visitors the opportunity to become the water of the harbor itself: experiencing the world beneath the surface from the perspective of a collective, nebulous force. This experimental POV offers many challenges to current VR conventions.
Here we examine the possibilities of VR to create new ecological experiences that speak to this ecological moment. Through this discussion, we hope to explore and discuss VR\u27s potential to:
Connect to real-world natural environments;
Allow users to embody non-human and non-singular forms;
Create immersive worlds that depart from the UXD conventions and aesthetic of gaming;
Incorporate practices from experimental film, multimedia art installations, site-specific experiences and interactive documentary;
Build on site-specific augmented reality and psychogeography practices
The Entangled Career of Guo Xiaolu: Between China and the World
No full textBorn in the People’s Republic of China and based for roughly two decades in the United Kingdom, Guo Xiaolu straddles Asian and European cultures in a prolific career that includes fiction as well as nonfiction films, novels, memoirs, and essays. Trained at the Beijing Film Academy as well as at the UK’s National Film and Television School, she writes across media entangled with the critical debates raging in cinematic and well as literary circles. She grapples with feminist, Marxist, post-socialist, post-colonial theories as they collide with the embodied reality of being a Chinese woman in a world that makes her an outsider in her native and adopted countries. Forces of power clash with “she, a Chinese” (as She, A Chinese, the title of one of Guo’s acclaimed films indicates) as Guo rebels against, operates through, and survives by the various ways in which her gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality are defined by herself and others across borders.
Inspired by the theoretical writings on transnational documentary entanglements by Patricia R. Zimmermann and three of her collaborators (Helen De Michiel, Dale Hudson, and John Hess), this investigation of Guo’s oeuvre focuses on her nonfiction films. While it is difficult to disentangle her films from her literary endeavors and her fiction from her nonfiction output, this presentation focuses on Guo as a transnational documentary filmmaker who brings cross-border communities into cinematic conversations that transcend national, ethnic, class, and gender boundaries. With a distinctive first-person voice that places people and places within an orbit that takes the perspective of a diasporic Chinese woman as its center, these films range from encounters with working-class Chinese laborers to celebrities such as Laurie Anderson. Scholar Kiki Tianqi Yu writes eloquently about a growing body of documentaries made in the first-person by diasporic Chinese women directors to which Yu herself has contributed as a filmmaker, and Guo’s nonfiction output shares many of the same characteristics. Her films take a critical perspective on gender, ethnicity, and class with a keen understanding of the particular position occupied by Chinese women inside and outside of the People’s Republic. Guo’s work stands out because of her eclectic choice of subject matter from workers building the Olympic Stadium in Beijing to chance encounters with people she meets as she attends international film festivals and other cultural events around the world. She moves from the countryside to the city, from the realms of manual to intellectual labor, and across racial, ethnic, and class divides that bring contradictions to the surface and take viewers beyond the autobiographical to a place of profound social commentary.
Films considered for analysis include many of Guo’s short subjects as well as feature documentaries. By exploring how these transnational entanglements expand conversations around the role of the Chinese woman as a creative and intellectual presence on the world stage, this presentation highlights Guo’s critical voice on capitalism, sexism, racism, and the ways in which various institutions enable and limit the creative imagination of the critic with a camera.
Girl-Bossing Too Close to the Sun: Exploring the Pitfalls of Navigating Capitalism and Neoliberalism in Parallel with OnlyFans
No full textThe erotic camming industry has been around for almost three decades, exponentially growing as technology continues to push the bounds of how sex work is constituted online. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in unexpected technological and cultural revolutions, with increased innovations, humans becoming more dependent on technology more than ever, and disrupted online and offline operations (Anikin, 2021). The sex industry has irrevocably changed as well, especially online sex workers and adult performers as they experience an economic boom in the midst of the pandemic. This gave grounds to increased online sex work engagement, ranging from the creation of new online sex service sites and digital creators to camming veterans who had been active pre-COVID (Rubattu et al., 2023). Sites like OnlyFans can offer as a curious case study of ushering in exponential economic growth and social change and is worth exploring through critical lenses to complicate and challenge the hegemonic structures that is positioned in and must navigate through.
In this piece, I will explore OnlyFans through the lens of neoliberalism, complicating the empowering language of self-made and empowered sex workers while they navigate capitalistic structures and at their expense, exploited for capital gain. Different case studies will be explored showing sex workers being affected by the “Girl Boss” neoliberal and choice feminist rhetoric, critiquing the language that presumably was in place to uplift and empower sex workers to destigmatize sex work (but inversely feed into capitalistic structures). I attempt to pull back the rose-colored glasses that so many sex workers on OnlyFans went in with (the promise of quick, easy, earn-while-you-sleep money along with being your own boss) and critically think about why this language has been prominent in the first place.
The language of empowerment within neoliberal feminism, as reflected in this piece, is a quite potent tool for capitalism to be perpetuated, especially within the world of online sex work. No matter how much one is aware of the tendrils of capitalism reaching out in almost every aspect of their lives, they must play the game if they want to operate within the world of online sex work. Capitalism has shown to push workers, especially in marginalized communities, to different lengths to garner income: whether that may be enduring racism and discrimination to retain subscribers, to going through almost harmful lengths in order to stay above the competition, to almost losing oneself because of feeling personal responsibility to respond to the inequalities manifested by capitalism. Neoliberalism thrives hand in hand with capitalism and is part of a symbiotic relationship at the expense of our sex workers. Perhaps our gaslighting, gatekeeping, and girlbossing isn’t as productive as we thought
From the South: Contemporary Documentary Filmmaking in Pakistan and Colombia
No full textWhen it comes to visual representation in documentary film, the seemingly distant societies and nations of Pakistan and Colombia become siblings, sharing the features that have been assigned to them in the realm of the imaginaries created by hegemonic media and film. Both Colombia and Pakistan have been depicted as forbidden territories, societies in conflict and dysfunctional nations, as well as places of indigenous magical wisdom, exotic primitive music and a poor but noble population. The west, in the form of foreign filmmakers, has embraced these reductive representations as a lingua franca, the same language with a vocabulary of euphemisms such as Third Worlds or Developing Nations, used frequently in order to portray what does not align with principles affiliated with eurocentrism, capitalism and Christianity. As a result, there is a wide arrangement of documentary films about the two countries made by foreigners speaking a unified language of otherisms. We, the Pakistani and the Colombian authors of this text, know it, just as any other Colombian or Pakistani also would. We also know it as Colombian and Pakistani documentary filmmakers and film researchers.
As a Pakistani or Colombian documentary filmmaker, how do you become a part of an international film market that would potentially require you to relate to a series of depictions that more often than not get translated into political debate? That is the agglutinating topic that we explored with documentary filmmakers from our nations in the form of conversations about their films, about what the international market expects from them, about the role of the international film development funds, the participation in international film festivals and film markets, and what they expect from themselves as filmmakers in this environment. The answers provided show that all documentary filmmakers have ruminated on these dilemmas, they have faced both episodes of combat and episodes of resignation, revealing a duality that manifests individually and collectively, confronting the documentary filmmaker as the director in a career-building path, with the documentary filmmaker as the autonomous creative critic of the hegemonic film language.
This article is conceived as a case study presenting the first results of this research, which has facilitated a communal reflection, an opportunity to unify the concerns of filmmakers from locations and societies that have had a specific representation in cinema and media, in this case Pakistan and Colombia, who end up speaking to each other from the same level and speaking to other communities in similar situations. In addition, the individual experiences of the documentary filmmakers have answered the seldom formulated question of how we - non-western documentary filmmakers - conceive the international film market, a space that mistakenly has had the tendency to regard itself as a neutral.
This research features documentary filmmakers Aseneth Suarez Ruiz, Mohammed Ali Naqvi, Mauricio Acosta, Haya Fatima Iqbal, Viviana Gómez Echeverri, Ammar Aziz, Jenni Kivistö & Jussi Rastas, Saad Khan, Clare Weiskopf & Nicolas van Hemelryck, Jamil Alvi and Federico Atehortúa
Introducing an Innovative Bio-Based Purification Medium: Processed Puffed Rice Media to Improve Indoor Air Quality
No full textIndoor environments profoundly influence human well-being, constituting over 90% of our daily engagements. The growing awareness of Indoor Air Quality\u27s (IAQ) impact on health and productivity contrasts with the paradoxical role of buildings, designed for protection yet contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Particularly concerning are classrooms, where dense populations endure prolonged exposure to indoor pollutants. Simultaneously, the UAE faces a rice waste challenge, with 40% of imports ending up as waste annually. This paper proposes repurposing discarded rice into a biobased purification material for ceilings, walls, and décor to enhance IAQ and reduce CO2 emissions. The research outlines the material\u27s formulation, optimal selection, and treatment process, emphasizing its efficacy in capturing CO2. Preliminary findings showcase the material\u27s adaptability, ease of implementation, and potential in diverse decorative designs, reinforcing its promise for reducing CO2 levels sustainably
Adsorption Mechanisms of Linear and Branched alkane liquid on solid surfaces that influences heat transfer
No full textThe contact interfaces of solid and liquid are common systems in tribology studies where the main parameter looked at are the wear rates and scar. These problems of wear rates and scar are evaluated by adsorption mechanisms. The main contributors of these problems are the character of liquid orientation on solid surfaces that required deep analysis of molecular orientations. Thus, the main purpose of this study is to look at the adsorption mechanisms of liquid on solid surfaces based on the structural quantities of density and orientation order parameters. The simulation system of solid of gold with surfaces of face-centered cubic (FCC) of (100) in contact with three types of alkanes (pentane, heptane and 3-ethyl-pentane) is modeled using molecular dynamics simulations. A uniform temperature is applied throughout the simulation system at 0.7 of the critical temperature of the liquid. It is found that, the adsorption behavior of liquid with linear molecular length is higher as compared to liquid with branches in the molecular, this in away influences the heat transfer near the contact interfaces of solid and liquid. However further investigation is needed to observe the influence of surface structure of the solid surfaces
Lewis Number’s Effect on Natural Double Diffusive Convection of Thermo-Dependent non-Newtonian Carreau-Yasuda Liquids in a Square Enclosure
No full textOur work focuses on how the Lewis number affects natural convection in the case of double thermal diffusion of non-Newtonian fluids of the Carreau-Yasuda type, confined in a square cavity. In this configuration, the enclosure\u27s horizontal walls are impermeable and adiabatic, while the vertical ones are imposed to uniform concentrations and temperatures. By applying the SIMPLER algorithm and the finite volume technique, we conducted a numerical study solving the complete governing equations. The two most important factors in this analysis are the Lewis and the Pearson number. The outcomes are compared with previously published reference results to validate the internal FORTRAN code
Dust Effect On The Thermal Performance of a Parabolic Trough Solar Concentrator
No full textSolar collectors (mirrors) are exposed to outdoor environments where they suffer from dust deposition which requires frequent cleaning to maintain their efficiency. In this study, the effect of dust accumulation on the reflector of a parabolic trough solar concentrator was investigated and analyzed. A numerical simulation was developed using the Fortran language The results showed that the increase in the dust-deposited density decreased the thermal efficiency