University of Alberta Hauntings: Representations of Vancouver’s Disappeared Women by Amber Richelle Dean A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies ©Amber Richelle Dean Fall 2009 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Examining Committee Daphne Read, English and Film Studies Julie Rak, English and Film Studies Michael O’Driscoll, English and Film Studies Teresa Zackodnik, English and Film Studies Cressida Heyes, Philosophy Sneja Gunew, English and Women’s Studies, University of British Columbia We inherit not “what really happened” to the dead but what lives on from that happening, what is conjured from it, how past generations and events occupy the force fields of the present, how they claim us, and how they haunt, plague, and inspirit our imaginations and visions for the future. - Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History, 150 Abstract In this dissertation I examine representations of the events surrounding the disappearance and murder of women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, in the interests of animating a sense of implication in these events among a wider public. To do so, I build on theoretical concepts developed in the work of Avery Gordon, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown, namely the notions of hauntings, grievability, and inheritance. My approach to knowledge production builds upon Avery Gordon’s theorizing about the significance of hauntings in particular. Following Gordon, I argue that while the women disappeared from Vancouver are no longer physically “there” in the Downtown Eastside, they do indeed maintain what Gordon describes as a “seething presence” in Vancouver (and beyond), one that suggests matters of some urgency for contemporary social and political life, and so my research traces those presences as they have arisen through my engagement with a variety of cultural productions (including documentary film, photography, journalism, art, and poetry). Building on insights from each of the three theorists listed above, I argue that ethical encounters with the ghosts of the women who have been disappeared require rethinking conventional ways of understanding the relationships between self/other and past/present/future. Because the women disappeared from the Downtown Eastside are disproportionately Indigenous, I begin by investigating how histories of colonization, and in particular the frontier mythology so commonplace in western Canada, are implicated in these contemporary acts of violence. I argue that conventional understandings of space, temporality, and history are inadequate for understanding these events in all of their complexity. From there, I investigate how and why the women were initially cast, in a variety of representations, as living lives that many assumed could not be widely recognized through the framework of what Judith Butler has coined a “grievable life.” And finally, I ask after what kind of memorial practices might be most capable of hailing an “us” into relations of inheritance with the women who have been disappeared - such relations, I argue, are a necessary part of reckoning with our individual and collective implication in the disappearances of women from the Downtown Eastside. Note to the Reader This is not a conventional thesis. But the funny thing is, I didn’t realize this myself until I happened to sit in on a session titled “Publishing and Marketing your Scholarly Book” at a recent Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This session was geared primarily towards doctoral students who might be thinking about trying to publish their dissertations, and the speakers included two acquisitions editors from Canadian scholarly presses. One of the biggest hurdles to transforming a thesis into a book, they suggested, has to do with the question of audience, for while a dissertation is generally written in the interests of securing the approval of five particular academics (the examining committee), a book, they insisted, even an academic book, must speak to a wider audience. This revelation came as a surprise to me, for it struck me quite suddenly that I had never, ever imagined that the five academics on my examining committee would be the only, or even the primary, audience for my dissertation. From the outset, I imagined that my dissertation would, and ought to, be of interest to a broader public – and not necessarily just a broader academic public, either. Instead, I imagined it being picked up and read by members of my family, or by some of the people I have collaborated with outside of academe in activist and social justice circles. I also imagined that it might be read by some more anonymous members of the public who had read or watched much of the media reportage on the story of Vancouver’s disappeared women and developed an interest in the topic. So, although I certainly wanted to enter into various academic debates, I wanted to do so in a way that might still hold the attention and interest of those for whom these debates might be entirely foreign. This desire has had a tremendous impact on the way my dissertation has been written – more impact than even I realized until I attended that session. As a result, instead of attempting to demonstrate my mastery of a set of academic debates, which is perhaps the terrain of a more conventional thesis, I have written this dissertation in such a way as to animate my understanding of the significance of those debates for a wider public. And while I certainly engage with the ideas of a few theorists that I imagine to be some of the most important critical thinkers of our times, I have in places deliberately opted not to trace the genealogy of their ideas through the theorists that have influenced them, and those that have in turn influenced their interlocutors, and so on. I definitely value this approach to theorizing and recognize its importance, and I could certainly have written that kind of a dissertation, but it would be a very different document from the one you are about to read. My decision in this regard has to do, I believe, with a set of ethical questions that have plagued me since I began this project: namely, what does it mean to “do theory” as a response to the violence, suffering and loss of others? And what are the risks of such theorizing? I don’t have any straightforward answers to these questions, but I have come to believe, through the process of researching and writing this dissertation, that an ethical approach offers an intervention of sorts, and that the kind of intervention that interests me most attempts to interrupt ideas and various discursive framings as they are circulating among a broader public, and does so in a way that aims to engage some members of that public in the debate. Finally, I have also paid a great deal of attention to my approach to writing in this dissertation, because through the research process I began to realize that questions of writing and style were central to my approach to knowledge production, rather than peripheral. As a result, I have included a fair bit of critical reflection on some of my own experiences, both prior to and during the process of writing. This, too, is intentional, because as I was researching and writing I began to see how some of these experiences actually offered openings that allowed me to better animate the theoretical ideas that I was working with. These openings provided opportunities for me to get to the core of what it seems to me matters most within a set of academic debates – about subjectivity, temporality, and implication in particular. As a result, I have tried to write about those experiences quite carefully and deliberately in ways that animate precisely what it is that I believe to be at stake in those debates. Whether I have succeeded in doing so will depend very much on the sorts of effects that these passages, and my approach to writing in general, have on you, the reader, who has lurked in my imagination since the very beginning. Acknowledgements So many people have contributed to the writing of this dissertation that it is difficult to sort out where to begin. As with any written work, however, its shortcomings are of course all my own. First to my co-supervisors: Daphne Read encouraged me to do this work from the very beginning, and her many generous readings gave me the courage and confidence to proceed when I would have just as soon turned away. She also pushed me to consider the limitations of the concepts of grievability and witnessing as I was using them, which has made this work immensely stronger. For all of her thoughtful contributions, critical reflections, reassurances, and for her encouragement throughout the process, I am immensely grateful. Sharon Rosenberg’s keen insights pushed my thinking and writing in so many ways that it is impossible to recall who “I” was before we began working together, and for all of those important pushes I am extremely grateful.