Michelle Walks
(pronouns: she/her/they/them)
I am a queer feminist medical anthropologist passionate about reproductive justice. My research has focused on queer reproduction, including queer birthing experiences, queer experiences of infertility, and queer/masculine (butch lesbian, trans men, and genderqueer) experiences of pregnancy, birth, infant feeding, and parenting.
I completed my PhD at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) in Spring 2013. My PhD, "Gender Identity and In/Fertility" (see below for a link to the dissertation), was completed with the assistance of a four year scholarship from SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada). I then completed a one year postdoctoral fellowship with the the University of Ottawa, in which I was part of an interdisciplinary (and community-based research) team researching: "Transmasculine Individuals' Experiences with Pregnancy, Birthing, and Feeding Their Newborns: A Qualitative Study". This project was funded through a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research - Institute of Gender and Health (CIHR-IGH).
I have worked as a Sessional Instructor teaching Anthropology, Sociology, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus), Simon Fraser University (Burnaby/Surrey), Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops), Douglas College (New Westminster/Coquitlam), Yukon College (Whitehorse), University of Fraser Valley (Abbotsford), Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Surrey/Langley), and Alexander College (Burnaby). I use a mindful queer anti-oppression and de-colonial pedagogy.
I am a queer feminist medical anthropologist passionate about reproductive justice. My research has focused on queer reproduction, including queer birthing experiences, queer experiences of infertility, and queer/masculine (butch lesbian, trans men, and genderqueer) experiences of pregnancy, birth, infant feeding, and parenting.
I completed my PhD at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) in Spring 2013. My PhD, "Gender Identity and In/Fertility" (see below for a link to the dissertation), was completed with the assistance of a four year scholarship from SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada). I then completed a one year postdoctoral fellowship with the the University of Ottawa, in which I was part of an interdisciplinary (and community-based research) team researching: "Transmasculine Individuals' Experiences with Pregnancy, Birthing, and Feeding Their Newborns: A Qualitative Study". This project was funded through a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research - Institute of Gender and Health (CIHR-IGH).
I have worked as a Sessional Instructor teaching Anthropology, Sociology, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus), Simon Fraser University (Burnaby/Surrey), Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops), Douglas College (New Westminster/Coquitlam), Yukon College (Whitehorse), University of Fraser Valley (Abbotsford), Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Surrey/Langley), and Alexander College (Burnaby). I use a mindful queer anti-oppression and de-colonial pedagogy.
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Books by Michelle Walks
Mothers, Sex, and Sexuality presents a rigorous academic analysis of the myriad ways in which the sexual/maternal divide affects women, birthing people, and those of us who assume or are ascribed the title “mother”. We examine the way we as mothers talk to our daughters about sex, the way we talk about sex in a cultural context, and the deafening silence around sex in a medical system that overlooks maternal sexuality. We return repeatedly to the impact of both Christianity and Hinduism on the mother as someone to be revered but tightly controlled. We embrace the lost eroticism of mothering and hail breastfeeding as a sexual maternal practice, arguing for a new, broader, feminist understanding of sexuality. We discuss the way fat mothers destabalise the heteronormative maternal model, the way kinky queers are reconfiguring the sexual/maternal divide through erotic role-play, and we explore the strange, intense, and romantic domestic relationship that springs up between mothers and nannies—two heterosexual women trapped together in a homoerotic triangulation of need and desire. In a titillating climax we revel in the sexual maternal as embodied through performance art, poetry, installations, and comedy, disrupting queer readings of bodies as we are invited to both fuck, and fuck with, the maternal. This book boldly provides both a challenge to the patriarchal constraints of motherhood and a racy road-map escape route out of the sexual-maternal dichotomy.
Papers & Chapters by Michelle Walks
Aims: Our study aimed to explore the experiences of transmasculine individuals with pregnancy and birth.
Methods: We conducted 22 qualitative interviews and four follow-up interviews with transmasculine individuals who had experienced one or more pregnancies. Our analysis was guided by an intersectional approach, and was led by a transgender community member.
Results: The interviews focused on stories about how the study participants built their families and navigated health care systems in the context of being pregnant transgender persons. As part of a larger study that considered the pregnancy, birth and infant feeding experiences of transmasculine individuals, this paper examines three themes that emerged from the narratives: experiences of gender dysphoria, addressing the gender binary, and intersectionality.
Discussion:
Experiences of gender dysphoria among transmasculine individuals during pregnany and birth vary widely. Some trans individuals experience pregnancy as congruent with their masculine gender identity. However, participants reported that some health care providers’ strong belief in the gender binary led to inappropriate and oppressive reproductive and perinatal health care.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in British Columbia, Canada, this chapter focuses on butch lesbian and genderqueer experiences of breastfeeding. Engaging with theories of "performativity" and "the queer art of failure," it challenges the cultural assumptions linking femininity with breastfeeding and exemplifies how butch and genderqueer individuals negotiate their masculine gender with the act of chestfeeding.
What I found during my (SSHRC-funded) PhD research on “Gender Identity and In/Fertility”, however, was that queer parents (by contrast) often do have ‘an agenda’, and that this agenda is one that explicitly challenges patriarchal hetero- (and homo-) normative ideals. Butch lesbians, transmen, and genderqueer parents often talked about their frustrations and challenges, to parent ‘against the grain’ – or to refer to Halberstams new theory, to participate in “the queer art of failure” (Halberstam 2011). “Success,” Halberstam argues, “in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (2). She later continues by noting that, “failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wonderous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers” (3). In other words, while “failure” is not easy, it does free us to be creative and challenge the status quo.
Such creativity was demonstrated when my partner came up with the term ‘queerling’ for our son, and other children who are raised by queers. Our son is our little ‘queer’. Our son being ‘queer’ refers nothing to his sexuality – our son is, after all, only 4-years old. Rather, it refers to the fact that we culture him in a queer way. Throughout my (anthropological) PhD research, I came to hear about and see how other queer parents raise queerlings too. During my interviews, the research participants and I often shared our stories about having boys with longer hair, our challenges in acquiring appropriate clothing for our children that isn’t necessarily or always blue for boys and pink for girls, and having our children often perceived as a different sex than what they are. While not all of the parents I spoke with shared these experiences or desires, the ones that did are the interviews that I found most interesting. It wasn’t that all of the stories involved ‘hard core’ challenging of hegemonic gender values, but simply that they found their ways to queer the raising of their kids.
This chapter focuses on the stories narrated to me by butch lesbians, transmen, and genderqueer parents – most of whom experienced pregnancy (against the gendered grain) to become parents. The queerlings whom these experiences focus on were three to twelve years of age. Moreover, while most of the examples given in this chapter are about the children’s/queerlings’ gender expressions, it also becomes obvious that their childhood is also queered in other ways (ie: making sense out of having parents who are non-normatively gendered).
Mothers, Sex, and Sexuality presents a rigorous academic analysis of the myriad ways in which the sexual/maternal divide affects women, birthing people, and those of us who assume or are ascribed the title “mother”. We examine the way we as mothers talk to our daughters about sex, the way we talk about sex in a cultural context, and the deafening silence around sex in a medical system that overlooks maternal sexuality. We return repeatedly to the impact of both Christianity and Hinduism on the mother as someone to be revered but tightly controlled. We embrace the lost eroticism of mothering and hail breastfeeding as a sexual maternal practice, arguing for a new, broader, feminist understanding of sexuality. We discuss the way fat mothers destabalise the heteronormative maternal model, the way kinky queers are reconfiguring the sexual/maternal divide through erotic role-play, and we explore the strange, intense, and romantic domestic relationship that springs up between mothers and nannies—two heterosexual women trapped together in a homoerotic triangulation of need and desire. In a titillating climax we revel in the sexual maternal as embodied through performance art, poetry, installations, and comedy, disrupting queer readings of bodies as we are invited to both fuck, and fuck with, the maternal. This book boldly provides both a challenge to the patriarchal constraints of motherhood and a racy road-map escape route out of the sexual-maternal dichotomy.
Aims: Our study aimed to explore the experiences of transmasculine individuals with pregnancy and birth.
Methods: We conducted 22 qualitative interviews and four follow-up interviews with transmasculine individuals who had experienced one or more pregnancies. Our analysis was guided by an intersectional approach, and was led by a transgender community member.
Results: The interviews focused on stories about how the study participants built their families and navigated health care systems in the context of being pregnant transgender persons. As part of a larger study that considered the pregnancy, birth and infant feeding experiences of transmasculine individuals, this paper examines three themes that emerged from the narratives: experiences of gender dysphoria, addressing the gender binary, and intersectionality.
Discussion:
Experiences of gender dysphoria among transmasculine individuals during pregnany and birth vary widely. Some trans individuals experience pregnancy as congruent with their masculine gender identity. However, participants reported that some health care providers’ strong belief in the gender binary led to inappropriate and oppressive reproductive and perinatal health care.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in British Columbia, Canada, this chapter focuses on butch lesbian and genderqueer experiences of breastfeeding. Engaging with theories of "performativity" and "the queer art of failure," it challenges the cultural assumptions linking femininity with breastfeeding and exemplifies how butch and genderqueer individuals negotiate their masculine gender with the act of chestfeeding.
What I found during my (SSHRC-funded) PhD research on “Gender Identity and In/Fertility”, however, was that queer parents (by contrast) often do have ‘an agenda’, and that this agenda is one that explicitly challenges patriarchal hetero- (and homo-) normative ideals. Butch lesbians, transmen, and genderqueer parents often talked about their frustrations and challenges, to parent ‘against the grain’ – or to refer to Halberstams new theory, to participate in “the queer art of failure” (Halberstam 2011). “Success,” Halberstam argues, “in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (2). She later continues by noting that, “failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wonderous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers” (3). In other words, while “failure” is not easy, it does free us to be creative and challenge the status quo.
Such creativity was demonstrated when my partner came up with the term ‘queerling’ for our son, and other children who are raised by queers. Our son is our little ‘queer’. Our son being ‘queer’ refers nothing to his sexuality – our son is, after all, only 4-years old. Rather, it refers to the fact that we culture him in a queer way. Throughout my (anthropological) PhD research, I came to hear about and see how other queer parents raise queerlings too. During my interviews, the research participants and I often shared our stories about having boys with longer hair, our challenges in acquiring appropriate clothing for our children that isn’t necessarily or always blue for boys and pink for girls, and having our children often perceived as a different sex than what they are. While not all of the parents I spoke with shared these experiences or desires, the ones that did are the interviews that I found most interesting. It wasn’t that all of the stories involved ‘hard core’ challenging of hegemonic gender values, but simply that they found their ways to queer the raising of their kids.
This chapter focuses on the stories narrated to me by butch lesbians, transmen, and genderqueer parents – most of whom experienced pregnancy (against the gendered grain) to become parents. The queerlings whom these experiences focus on were three to twelve years of age. Moreover, while most of the examples given in this chapter are about the children’s/queerlings’ gender expressions, it also becomes obvious that their childhood is also queered in other ways (ie: making sense out of having parents who are non-normatively gendered).