Space and Gender
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canadiana oenipontana 10 Doris G. Eibl, Caroline Rosenthal (Hrsg.) Space and Gender Spaces of Difference in Canadian Women‘s Writing Espaces de différence dans l‘écriture canadienne au féminin innsbruck university press SERIES canadiana oenipontana 10 Series Editor: Ursula Mathis-Moser iup • innsbruck university press Supported by Zentrum für Kanadastudien der Universität Innsbruck, Hypo Tirol Bank, Philologisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät der Universität Innsbruck. © innsbruck university press, 2009 Universität Innsbruck, Vice-Rectorate for Research 1st edition. All rights reserved. Coverdesign: Gregor Sailer Coverphoto: © Robert Saucier (Montréal, Québec), A Face in the Glass (2009) Layout: Carmen Drolshagen Printed by: Fred Steiner, Rinn www.uibk.ac.at/iup ISBN 978-3-902719-19-5 Doris G. Eibl, Caroline Rosenthal (Eds.) Space and Gender Spaces of Difference in Canadian Women‘s Writing Espaces de différence dans l‘écriture canadienne au féminin Table of Contents Préface .............................................................................................................. 7 Introduction of Contents Table The Difference Space Makes ............................................................................ 9 I Nature-Culture Paradigms: Pastoral and Urban Iconographies Florian Freitag Ladies in the Bush and Paternal Soils: Gender and Space in Early Canadian Farm Novels .................................................................................... 23 Andrea Oberhuber Le gynécée urbain d'Élise Turcotte ................................................................. 41 Andrea Strolz Spatial Practices, Representations of Space, and Spaces of Representation in Margaret Atwood's Novels .................................................. 53 Nora Tunkel Mapping the Glass Labyrinths of the Past – Re/Constructing Identities in Jane Urquhart's A Map of Glass ...................................................................... 73 II Space and Difference: Gender-Ethnicity-Space Marlene Goldman Spirit Possession and the Transformation of Space in the Fiction of Dionne Brand ................................................................................................... 95 Eva Gruber "Changes in Relative Space": A Reading of Body, Nation, and Relation in Tessa McWatt's Dragons Cry ............................................... 109 Markus M. Müller Coming Across: Aging Female Bodies & Liminal/Other Spaces in Suzette Mayr's The Widows and Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms ........ 125 III In-Between: Transcultural, Translational, and Counter-Spaces Table of Contents Table Doris G. Eibl Les espaces hétérotopiques dans Les enfants du sabbat d'Anne Hébert .... 145 Jessica Gevers Reconfiguring Urban Spaces: Montreal as "Lettered City" in Marilú Mallet's Journal inachevé .................................................................... 161 Elisabeth Tutschek 'Espace/Space': Gender and Translation in Nicole Brossard's Le désert mauve and Gail Scott's My Paris ................................................... 179 IV Public Women: Space, Sex, and Corporeality Isabelle Boisclair Le lieu de l'échange prostitutionnel dans trois romans québécois contemporains: Putain de Nelly Arcan, Salon de Marie Lafortune et Pute de rue de Roxane Nadeau ................................................................ 199 Julia Breitbach "A palimpsest of loss"/"The place of pain": Self and Place in Catherine Bush's Urban Novels The Rules of Engagement and Claire's Head ............. 213 Caroline Rosenthal Transgressing the 'poetics of the anglicized city': The Figure of the Flâneuse in Dionne Brand's What We All Long For ................................ 231 Julie Spergel Seamstresses, Prostitutes and Mothers: London's East End as a Jewish Chronotope in Lilian Nattel's The Singing Fire .............................................. 247 Préface Préface En novembre 2007, la section "Études de femmes et du genre" de l'Association des études canadiennes dans les pays germanophones et le Centre d'études canadiennes de l'Université d'Innsbruck ont organisé un colloque interdisciplinaire et bilingue portant sur le thème "Space and Gender. Urban and Other Spaces in Canadian Women's Fiction – Espace et genre. Espaces urbains et autres dans la fiction canadienne au féminin". L'idée de consacrer un colloque à ce thème était née quelques années auparavant lors d'une réunion des membres de la section "Études de femmes et du genre" dans le but de repenser le "spacial turn" de la fin des années 1980 en termes littéraires et en fonction de la catégorie "genre". Ce livre présente les résultats de discussions engagées et fructueuses dans un contexte a priori complexe parce que bilingue. Nous remercions particulièrement Nicole Brossard et Danielle Fournier qui, lors du colloque, nous ont honorés de leur présence et d'une soirée de lecture inoubliable. Leurs nombreux commen- taires et réflexions ont enrichi la discussion et nous ont permis de mieux cerner le point de vue de celles qui écrivent et qui, depuis quatre décennies, s'engagent dans la cause féministe. Si ce livre voit le jour, c'est grâce au soutien financier de la "Philologisch-Kulturwis- senschaftlichen Fakultät" de l'Université d'Innsbruck, de la HYPO TIROL BANK et last but not least du Centre d'études canadiennes de l'Université d'Innsbruck et de sa directrice Prof. Ursula Mathis-Moser qui, en outre, a consenti à le publier dans sa collection "canadiana oenipontana". Nous tenons à adresser nos remer- ciements à tous nos sponsors. Enfin, nous remercions également tous ceux qui ont contribué à la réussite du col- loque – Melanie Fessler, Margarethe Karl-Goodwin, Pascal-Anne Lavallée, Ingrid Niederwieser et Julia Stiebellehner – et à la mise au point de la publication des actes – Marcel Laqueur, Corinna Assmann et Claudia Schwarz. Marcel et Corinna ont assumé un travail rédactionnel fort exigeant, et Marcel, s'étant familiarisé avec le programme de mise en page, s'est patiemment chargé des détails et problèmes de dernière minute qui, inévitablement, se présentent au cours de la réalisation d'un manuscrit. 7 Introduction: The Difference Space Makes Caroline Rosenthal, University of Constance Doris G. Eibl, University of Innsbruck Situating or locating gender […] requires both a cultural and a geographical imagination: it requires that we attend to particular contexts, and it problematizes conceptualizations of space as well as gender. Liz Bondi/Joyce Davidson, "Troubling the Place of Gender", 325 Space has become a highly politicized concept in our time. The theoretical approaches of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, or Edward Soja have emphasized that space is not materially given, but rather is the product of social practices, of power formations, and of ideologies. Space does not precede social relations and symbolic orders but results from them and in turn shapes and sustains them. Space Makes The Difference Introduction: Spatiality has thus become a key factor in cultural studies for analyzing difference as a society's and a nation's gender, race, or class patterns manifest themselves in the organization of spaces. The essays in this collection look at how gender differences – often in correlation with differences of race, class, age, or ethnicity – manifest themselves in space and in spatial representations. The authors examine, for example, how the dichotomy of nature versus culture has served to legitimize gender and sexual difference or how the opposition of private versus public space has sustained gender patterns in society. The essays not only look at how spatial dichotomies create and maintain differences, however, but also investigate the excess of such dichotomies. Various authors in this volume investigate liminal, hybrid, third, or supernatural spaces that not only lie in-between oppositions but that call into question oppositions such as woman-man, nature-culture, or private- public. Such counter-spaces make room for the configuration of new identities and for the strategic re-inscription of space. Many articles also turn to the body as an intimate space and contested terrain of gender and sexual identity. The body, as critics like Judith Butler or Elizabeth Grosz have pointed out, does not exist as a tabula rasa onto which gender as a cultural construct is inscribed, but the body always already has a history and is immersed in discursive contexts that construct it in certain ways. Within the discursive field of the sex/gender dichotomy, Butler claims for example, the body is made to appear as a biological or given entity in 9 order to naturalize and legitimize sexual identity. To the same extent, geographical places, the feminist geographer Doreen Massey states, always already have a history, and because they are populated by subjects whose identity has also arisen on the sutures of various discourses, Massey speaks of "the double articulation of place". Differences do not simply become inscribed onto space but spaces and spatial practices play an active part in making difference. As Sherene Razack, among others, has shown, racial and spatial practices often coincide, for example when black youths are stopped in fancy shopping malls simply for being the wrong race in the wrong place. To the same extent slums or housing development projects do not simply account for and reflect differences but contribute to making and sustaining them. Gender and sexual identity is also made in spatial practices. Caroline Rosenthal, Doris G. Eibl Gender identity is the effect of repeated acts,