How Can We Be Different and the Same?

direct link to video at Vimeo: How Can We Be Different and the Same?

A talk on the maternal body and sexual difference that I recorded in 2004 in Vancouver, and gave at an ARM conference at York University in Toronto in 2006. Recently I found the footage, and began playing with it in Final Cut, adding a number of filters. I am still working on the video, and will add scrolling images over the next week or so.

While I received a true 'dissing' when I presented this paper - a high level feminist maternal theorist arrived about half way through with her husband and spared no words in dismissing my work - and I never finished the degree I had intended to get for this work, I still stand behind every word. This was my last academic paper.

I was criticized for being 'essentialist' - such a, to my mind, pointless North American label whenever anyone tries to openly discuss the difficult and complex issues around the maternal body and motherhood and sexual difference. All I could respond with was that I had chosen to speak of 'an Adam and Eve' because you have to say something, offer an opinion on the reality, its difficulties.

Although I received apologies from the later-comer to my talk, I felt my position really too radical for even an organization focusing on research on motherhood.

So I will embed this on my 'birthdance' page at my website, where my work on the maternal body is.

Many thanks for reading this, and perhaps even watching.