http://hdl.handle.net/1974/6641 Sun, 19 May 2013 14:51:26 GMT 2013-05-19T14:51:26Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7575 Title: Wounded Subjects: White Settler Nationals in Toronto G20 Resistance Narratives Authors: Neuman, Auden Abstract: This project engages theories of settler colonialism, biopower, and the state of exception to analyze the operations of rights-based narratives of citizenship in relation to political dissent in Canada. I argue that a normalized state of exception founds the white supremacist, settler colonial state, bringing Canadian citizenship into being as a (white) racialized, (cis)gendered, and (hetero)sexualized construct. By examining “resistance narratives” about the Toronto G20 that emerged in the post-G20 climate, my work argues that, in treating the policing practices employed during the G20 as exceptional and in (re)producing the exaltation of white heterosexual cis-masculine citizens, these narratives normalize and reinforce the daily operations of the exception, which targets Indigenous, racialized, and other “Others” in Canada. Finally, my work critically engages with the space of the Eastern Detention Centre (EDC) as a temporary camp set up to detain G20 arrestees, and with the narrative of “Torontonamo” that emerged to describe and explain the EDC. Reading the EDC in the context of other spatial organizations of the exception in Canada, I argue that the “Torontonamo” narrative reasserts race thinking in relation to the normalized operations of the exception. In so doing, it (re)produces white citizen-subjects as the proper recipients of national and international human rights, while abandoning racialized populations to the space of the camp. Ultimately, my work writes against the hegemonic view of the Toronto G20 as an exceptional event in Canadian history. I contend that G20 policing practices were only a hyper-visible example of the normalized operations of the exception within settler colonialism. Description: Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-29 21:16:51.694 Thu, 04 Oct 2012 04:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7575 2012-10-04T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7460 Title: Coming Home: Sovereign Bodies and Sovereign Land in Indigenous Poetry, 1990-2012 Authors: Thau-eleff, MAYA Abstract: This thesis probes the ways in which land-based and bodily violence inform contemporary North American Indigenous poetry. Since the “Oka Crisis” of 1990, English-speaking North American Indigenous writers have produced a substantial body of poetry that has significant implications in forwarding national sovereignty struggles. Gender violence enabled settler colonial land appropriation; resource exploitation also harmed Indigenous bodies. This project considers the ways in which Indigenous authors with diverse geographic, cultural and embodied experiences employ common strategies toward using poetry as an emancipatory tool. A poem is both whole, and a fragment of a larger body of work; engaging with the works of individual poets, and multi-authored anthologies allows for varied readings of the same poems and their engagements with the project’s key themes of homeland and embodiment. This paper is informed by the reading of many Indigenous theorists and poets, and aligns with an Indigenous-feminist critique that suggests that nationalist sovereignty struggles are meaningless as long as bodily violence against Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people is still prevalent. As such, contemporary struggles for reclaiming Indigenous lands must also be struggles toward a sovereign erotic, sovereignty over one’s sexuality and gender identity. Description: Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-12 03:07:52.957 Wed, 12 Sep 2012 04:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7460 2012-09-12T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7373 Title: Unsettling the White Noise: Deconstructing the Nation-Building Project of CBC Radio One’s Canada Reads Authors: Burns, EMILY Abstract: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Canada Reads program, based on the popular television show Survivor, welcomes five Canadian personalities to defend one Canadian book, per year, that they believe all Canadians should read. The program signifies a common discourse in Canada as a nation-state regarding its own lack of coherent and fixed identity, and can be understood as a nationalist project. I am working with Canada Reads as an existing archive, utilizing materials as both individual and interconnected entities in a larger and ongoing process of cultural production – and it is important to note that it is impossible to separate cultural production from cultural consumption. Each year offers a different set of insights that can be consumed in their own right, which is why this project is written in the present tense. Focusing on the first ten years of the Canada Reads competition, I argue that Canada Reads plays a specific and calculated role in the CBC’s goal of nation-building: one that obfuscates repressive national histories and legacies and instead promotes the transformative powers of literacy as that which can conquer historical and contemporary inequalities of all types. This research lays bare the imagined and idealized ‘communities’ of Canada Reads audiences that the CBC wishes to reflect in its programming, and complicates this construction as one that abdicates contemporary responsibilities of settlers. Description: Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-14 21:44:50.087 Wed, 15 Aug 2012 04:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7373 2012-08-15T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7336 Title: Referential Lives: Literary, Legal, and Colonial Discourses in Audrey Andrews’ Account of the Life and Trials of Dorothy Joudrie Authors: ALKENBRACK, KALEIGH ELIZABETH Abstract: In Be Good, Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie (1999), Audrey Andrews recounts the life and trial of Dorothy Joudrie, a so-called wealthy socialite who was arrested in Calgary in 1995 for attempting to murder her estranged husband after decades of domestic abuse. Andrews tells Joudrie’s story in the form of a semi-auto/biographical text that quotes other scholarly and creative literary works in an intertextual dialogue about violence against women, post-World War II gender socialization, and the “battered women syndrome” defence. This thesis takes this highly referential dialogue as its starting point, and then extends Andrews’ cultural work by tracing a genealogy of colonialism in Canadian domestic violence laws with the help of selected intertexts – including Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), the trial of Angelique Lavallee, and Lorena Bobbitt’s infamous case. First, I source the epigraphs that Andrews strategically places at the start of each chapter and discern the layer of meaning that these external texts bring to Joudrie’s story in order to raise questions about how Andrews rearticulates the work of others and the politics of such a rearticulation. Second, I similarly frame Joudrie’s 1995 trial as a referential and intertextual discourse based in precedent established by the Supreme Court in 1990 when it ruled that expert testimony on the “battered woman syndrome” was admissible in the R. v. Lavallee case (Shaffer 1). This allows me to consider a consequence of the ruling often overlooked in feminist literature: due to the fact that the original defendant, Angelique Lavallee, was a Métis woman whose identity was erased in the courtroom and in case law, subsequent trials employing the “battered woman syndrome” defence repeat settler relations entrenched in colonial violence. Third, I expose how representations can fail by thinking through what Stephen Couser calls the auto/bio/ethics of life writing, which reveals the limits of Canadian laws and literatures. Ultimately, this discussion generates questions about who is considered human under the law and how life writing might re-imagine the “reasonable” human in more just and compassionate ways. Description: Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-07-28 10:28:24.988 Tue, 31 Jul 2012 04:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7336 2012-07-31T04:00:00Z