FemTechNet Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Pedagogy Workbook

Maria Belén Ordóñez

Through unofficial channels of public pleasure, desire, affect and corporeal politics, Maria Belén Ordóñez' research broadly explores alternative sexual citizenships, the destabilization of (hetero)normativity and the formation of publics in mediascapes. Her ethnographic research has been based in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver where she has engaged with the affective impacts of events in disparate locations such as media headlines; queer identified spaces of pleasure and activism, and the contested zones of censorship and regulation. Her research has included the investigation and tracking of affect in Canadian legislative challenges dealing with sex, sexuality and morality. Specifically, the cases of R v. Sharpe (child pornography), R v. Bedford (bawdy house laws), the police raid of the Taboo gay strip club (homophobic targeting of young gay strippers) in Montreal and Canadian legislation that raised the age of consent from 14 to 16 years of age. Ordóñez uses feminist methodologies and multi-sited ethnography to think and write about the emergence and undoing of public events. Her most recent research is forthcoming in an edited volume, Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (2015). Belén Ordóñez' chapter is on media circuits of power, desire and labour as a rhizomatic event in a global context, vis-a-vis the political undoing of the former director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Khan. She is also a collaborator in developing and teaching curriculum for the FemTechNet initiative (internationally distributed collective of feminist artists, scholars, and activists teaching and doing research in feminist science, media and technology) : the Distributed Online Collaborative Course (DOCC). The DOCC was launched in 2013-14 as a nodal course, "Dialogues in Feminism and Technology" with 16 participating institutions including OCADU. Belén Ordóñez teaches courses in feminist theory, multi-sited and experimental ethnography and body politics.

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