Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 4-21-2017 12:00 AM Crossing the Line: Censorship, Borders, and the Queer Poetics of Disclosure in English-Canadian Writing, 1967-2000 Kevin T. Shaw The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. Manina Jones The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Kevin T. Shaw 2017 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Shaw, Kevin T., "Crossing the Line: Censorship, Borders, and the Queer Poetics of Disclosure in English- Canadian Writing, 1967-2000" (2017). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 4526. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4526 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract Since Confederation enshrined Canada Customs’ mandate to seize “indecent and immoral” material, the nation’s borders have served as discursive sites of sexual censorship for the LGBTTQ lives and literatures that cross the line. While the Supreme Court’s decision in Little Sisters v. Canada (2000) upheld the agency’s power to exclude obscenity, the Court found Customs discriminatory in their preemptive seizures of LGBTTQ material. Extrapolating from this case of the state’s failure to sufficiently ‘read’ queer sex at the border, this dissertation moves beyond studies of how obscenity law regulates literary content to posit that LGBTTQ authors innovate aesthetics in response to a complex network of explicit and implicit forms of censorship. The numerous inter- and intra-national border crossings represented by queer writing in Canada correspond with sexual expressions that challenge the Charter’s “reasonable limits,” remaking the discursive boundaries of free speech in Canada. Informed by a range of literary critics, queer theorists, sociologists, and legal scholars, the dissertation examines compositional strategies that appropriate and exceed the practice of censorship in order to theorize what I call a “queer poetics of disclosure.” Chapter One revisits Scott Symons’ pre-liberation novel Place d’Armes (1967) alongside the era’s divergent nationalisms and the imminent decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969. Symons re-maps Montreal in text and illustration and produces metafictional boundaries that challenge subjective definitions of obscenity. Chapter Two considers Contract with the World (1980) by the American-Canadian novelist Jane Rule. Rule’s developing style of multivalent narration, coinciding with her anti-censorship advocacy, articulates an ambivalent, or borderline, model of sexual citizenship. Chapter i Three concerns Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s long-poem Double Negative (1988), an experimental narrative of their Australian travels. Marlatt and Warland’s erotic, language-mediated poetics evade both censure and the individualism of free speech discourse by questioning the limits of lyric expression. Chapter Four examines Gregory Scofield’s lyric silences in poetry that asserts a gay Métis subjectivity. Focusing on Native Canadiana (1996), this chapter revisits anxieties of blood and border crossings during the HIV/AIDS crisis in order to draw out the implications of settler-colonial sexual censorship just before the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2000. Keywords Law and Literature, Censorship, Obscenity, Canadian Literature, Citizenship, Queer Theory, Poetics, Scott Symons, Jane Rule, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Gregory Scofield ii Acknowledgements I first became interested in studying Canadian Literature in an undergraduate survey taught by Prof. Manina Jones, so I feel especially fortunate to have had her supervise my dissertation. Thank you for the many years of sound advice, insightful responses to my work, and encouragement. I am also grateful to Prof. Steven Bruhm as the dissertation’s second reader. Thank you for sharing your expertise, motivation, and good humour. I would also like to thank my examiners, Prof. Mario Longtin, Prof. Donna Pennee, Prof. Pauline Wakeham, and the external examiner, Prof. Jennifer Andrews, for their enthusiastic and productive response to the thesis. I want to thank Prof. D.M.R. Bentley who first pointed me to Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes. Thank you to Prof. Madeline Bassnett for encouragement and advice on work both academic and poetic. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the English Department staff, and to Leanne Trask in particular, for answering countless questions every year. I would also like to acknowledge the donors of the Sara Marie Jones Memorial Scholarship and the Carl F. and Margaret E. Klinck Prize, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for supporting my research. I am fortunate to have been part of a dynamic and stimulating cohort. Special thanks to those who shared their feedback on early drafts, insights on the project, or who helped me untangle the knots (often over a pint): Donnie Calabrese, Dave Huebert, Emily Kring, Riley McDonald, Meghan O’Hara, and Andy Verboom. I want to thank Jordan Murray for his encouragement to undertake this path and for his continuing friendship over the years. Thank you to my family for all the ways, big iii and small, you helped. Finally, with love and appreciation to Ben. Here’s to (finally!) further travels together. iv Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….i Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………….iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………….v Introduction: Arrivals & Departures…………………………………………………1 Chapter One: “A Centennial Fugitive”: Bordering Obscenity in Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes……………………………………………………………………..36 Chapter Two: “The Only Lesbian in Canada”: Borderline Citizenship in Jane Rule’s Contract with the World…………………………………………………….96 Chapter Three: “words my only boundary”: Borderland Utopia and the Limits of Expression in Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s Double Negative.......150 Chapter Four: “Not Too Polite Poetics”: Lyric Silence in Gregory Scofield’s Native Canadiana: Songs from the Urban Rez……………………………………205 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………260 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………..273 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………292 v 1 Introduction Arrivals and Departures “You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline.” —Madonna, “Borderline” 1. Introduction Madonna makes an intriguing cameo in the history of sexual censorship in Canada. As revealed in her 1991 docu-drama, Madonna: Truth or Dare, Toronto police were prepared to arrest the singer during her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour if she performed an act of simulated masturbation at the end of her “Like a Virgin” performance. According to the film, Madonna performed the song as planned, preparing to be arrested, but the police took no action. Two years later, Canada Customs did not detain Madonna’s book Sex, a collection of erotic photography and writing that includes explicit depictions of both heterosexual and queer sex acts, often combined with representations of simulated violence. The book’s uncontested importation was cited throughout the Little Sister’s trials—a legal case regarding the detainment of LGBTTQ cultural material at the Canadian border—as an example of Customs’ discriminatory selection practices (Fuller & Blackley 31-32). In his concurring reason in the judgment following the Little Sisters’ BC Court of Appeal trial, Justice Hall wrote, We were referred to various pictorial representations from a publication termed the “Madonna Book”. It was apparently found to fall into the non-obscene category but it must have been a close call. The relationship between the depictions in that publication and what is 2 sometimes termed “the markeplace of ideas” in discourses on free speech is not readily apparent. (qtd. in Fuller & Blackley 49) When considering expressions of sex or gender at the Canada-US border, coming in appears more fraught than ‘coming out.’ Customs, and now Border Services1, has had the legal authority to censor material at the border since 1847 (Fuller & Blackley 7). Twenty years later, under Confederation, Customs’ mandate included the ability to seize “indecent and immoral” material, suggesting that censorship has been, as legal scholar Brenda Cossman contends, “a defining characteristic of Canadian national identity” from the founding of the state (Censorship 12). Closer to the present day, increasing migrations of LGBTTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Two-Spirit, and Queer) visitors, refugees, tourists, and citizens further emphasize the role of the nation’s boundaries as discursive sites of censorship and/or disclosure for queer subjects within—and without—Canada. As Marshall McLuhan notes in “Canada: The Borderline Case,” first delivered as the Marfleet lecture at the University of Toronto in 1967, the nation is “a land of multiple borderlines, psychic, spatial and geographic” (244). Although the primary literature in this dissertation may be categorized as “English-Canadian,” many of these texts transgress national, canonical, and generic limits. Less a study of transnational influence than transnational and intra-national circulation (in the many 1 With the passage of the Canada Border Services Agency Act in 2005, Canada Customs