ABSTRACT
The author was born in 1978 in the suburbs of Toronto. She don't remember her parents ever discussing the topic of "feminism" explicitly with her or each other, yet, beneath the surface, feminist ideals were fundamental to how she was raised. In my PhD work, she started to ask more critical questions about the relationships between gender, culture and race that authors such as Wolf, Bordo and Orbach set out, and the implications of their analyses as they "travelled" more widely across feminist theory. She has tried to think through how embodied practices such as veiling, anorexia, genital cutting and cosmetic surgery are constituted relationally through wider webs of transnational encounter encounters of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism and neo-liberalism and feminism. She wanted to think more carefully about the critical implications of feminist comparisons' positioning of figures such as "the anorexic" and "the veiled woman" as metaphors for their "respective" cultures.
