Cautiously Hopeful: Metafeminist Practices in Canada 9780228004356

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Cautiously Hopeful

Cautiously Hopeful Metafeminist Practices in Canada

Marie Carrière

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-2280-0381-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-0422-6 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-0435-6 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-0436-3 (ePUB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Cautiously hopeful : metafeminist practices in Canada / Marie Carrière. Names: Carrière, Marie J., 1971- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020028505X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200285181 | ISBN 9780228004226 (softcover) | ISBN 9780228003816 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780228004356 (PDF) | ISBN 9780228004363 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism in literature. | LCSH: Feminism. | LCSH: Feminism – Canada. | LCSH: Canadian literature – 21st century – History and criticism. | LCSH: Feminist theory. | LCSH: Feminist theory – Canada. | LCSH: Intersectionality (Sociology) Classification: LCC PS8101.F46 C37 2020 | DDC C810.9/35220971 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 11/14 Warnock.

Pour Caroline et Sophie

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Cautiously Hopeful: Metafeminist Practices in Canada Envoi (un essai) Notes

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185

Bibliography 213 Index

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Acknowledgments

Several forms of support and belonging have made this book possible – personal and communal, human and nonhuman, and institutional. The latter includes McGill-Queen’s University Press, its managing editor, Kathleen Fraser, and its acquisition editor Mark Abley, who understood this project from the start; the two peer reviewers for the manuscript who lent a keen critical eye and much appreciated enthusiasm; Carolyn Yates, who meticulously copy-edited this book into proper shape; Alexandra Peace, for the awesomely detailed index; and Winnie Truong, for the beautiful art adapted for the cover. Special thanks go to five incredible poets, Nicole Brossard, Karen Connelly, Marilyn Dumont, Larissa Lai, and Rachel Zolf, for their invaluable feedback and kind permission to quote from their poetry. I am also deeply grateful to Dionne Brand, Naomi Fontaine, Tracey Lindberg, Miriam Toews, and Ouanessa Younsi. Earlier versions of the sections on Margaret Atwood and Nicole Brossard appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature 41, no. 1 (2016). In my twelve years at the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne, I have shared in the joy and consolation of literature with the magnificent writers, scholars, students, staff, members, supporters, and advisors who have graced the centre with their inspired talent, generosity, and intelligence. Also at the University of Alberta, I developed many of my ideas thanks to institutional and financial support, especially from the Department of English and Film Studies, the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, the Faculty of Arts, and the Killam Research Fund. Work with colleagues from various walks of life was pivotal. Special thanks go to Austen Lee, Zahra Tootonsab,

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and Sajad Soleymani Yazdi, whose assistance made the manuscript for this book both accountable and readable. For the collaborations, the mentorship, and the friendship along the way, I thank Philippe Carrière, Kit Dobson, Louise Dupré, Danielle Fuller, Evelyne Gagnon, Jennifer Haslett, Dominique Hétu, Linda Hutcheon, Michele Jackson, Catherine Khordoc, Margaret Mackey, Ursula Mathis-Moser, Naomi Minja, my own brilliant friend Jason Purcell, Julie Rak, Jill Scott, and Libe García Zarranz, whose work reaffirms my faith in feminism. Deep affection goes to my mother, Marie Godbout Carrière, for always believing in me and providing the love and care that made this long trajectory possible. My smart, beautiful, metafeminist daughters Caroline Myriam Rabbie and Sophie Madeleine Rabbie shine bright in ways that make me feel cautious and especially hopeful. Deepest gratitude goes to Geoff Rabbie, my partner, my love, who has put up with academia, and me in it, for over twenty years; he has been inexplicably constant and giving throughout all of this and all the rest. Finally, I acknowledge my devoted writing companion Benji, a metadog if there ever was one, who encompasses every doggy behaviour possible and extends them to new levels.

Cautiously Hopeful Metafeminist Practices in Canada

Nous avons besoin de tous les féminismes. Louise Dupré

Reflections and Deflections When I began to think about metafeminism as a possible paradigm to consider contemporary forms of feminist literary practice, notions of growth and revitalization were not at the forefront of my mind. Instead, I saw the ambivalences, paradoxes, and conflicts within feminism, which the multidirectional nature of the prefix “meta-” seemed to denote. For some time, feminism represented for me an uncomfortable space of both the culminations and the insufficiencies of the feminisms of decades past. This is so, I think, for a lot of Western women, especially other Generation X women who came to feminism through mostly academia and faced almost from the beginning ambivalence between pessimism and optimism, indifference and engagement, and other seemingly irresolvable tensions around political and theoretical effectiveness and agency. Yet recent years have been ripe with feminist reawakenings. Among them, the #MeToo movement sheds light on the pervasiveness of sexual assault and harassment, Black Lives Matter fights racial and colonial violence, and Idle No More calls for Indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty observes in Feminism without Borders: “While feminist ideas and movements may have grown and matured, the backlashes and challenges to feminism have grown exponentially.”1 In The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit

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addresses the rapid social changes of a revitalized feminist movement in North America and around the world that is not merely altering the laws. It’s changing our understanding of consent, power, rights, gender, voice, and representation. It is a gorgeously transformative movement led in particular by the young, on campuses, on social media, in the streets, and my admiration for this fearlessly unapologetic new generation of feminists and human rights activists is vast. As is my fear of the backlash against it, a backlash that is itself evidence of the threat feminism, as part of the broader project of liberation, poses to patriarchy and the status quo.2 I believe, with Mohanty and Solnit, that ours is a time of important renewal where feminism is concerned. I believe that ours is also a very nonfeminist and indeed anti-feminist time, when hate; trolling; shaming; stalking; doxing; misogyny; and violence against women, Black people, people of colour, and Indigenous people are at an alltime high. Anti-feminist backlash exists not only among men’s rights activists, incel terrorists, ultra-Conservative commentators, and Gamergaters. It also exists within women’s movements, for instance as Canadian journalist Lauren McKeon examines in her 2017 book F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism. Just think of the Women against Feminism campaign that went viral in August 2014. Or consider what McKeon calls the “cognitive dissonance” 3 of the mostly young women who identify as non- or even anti-feminist just as they support social policies that address equal pay for equal work, affordable childcare, or the end of sexual violence. In short, anti-feminist organizations have acquired incredible momentum over the past decade in North America, sometimes in the name of women’s so-called best interests. One way to understand metafeminism might be, to borrow from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic” 4 – if not mostly as the latter. Whether feminists are willing to welcome their anti-abortionist, rape-culture-apologist, and trans-exclusionary so-called sisters into the fold may be a question that remains unresolved for some. For me, the answers are clearer. I agree with McKeon, who finds in alt-right streams more misogyny than any sort of step forward for womanhood. And I am aghast by, and will not give

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credence to, self-identified radical feminists who deny trans women’s rights and very existence. I want to say that this is not the feminism I know or define or understand. But if I am to do my “thinking in the world,” as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa encourages, I cannot “preten[d] to be outside of worlds we want to see transformed, even those we would rather not endorse.”5 Nonetheless, we can look elsewhere to more usefully frame the unfolding of various practices and especially of internal debates over sex, gender, and race within the feminist movement since the 1970s. As Misha Kavka argues: “The problem is not the death or the end of feminism but, rather, coming to terms with the fact that its political, strategic, and interpretive power has been so great as to produce innumerable modes of doing – whether activist, practical, theoretical, or just ‘quiet’ – that have moved well beyond the mother term, already fractured at its origin.” 6 This to me is a tremendously important observation. When I asked my then-sixteen-year-old daughter C. what feminism meant to her, her reply was immediate and enlightening: “I’m all about feminism, but I won’t spend my entire life thinking about it.” Seeing my worried expression, she added: “Feminism is good, though.” Kavka (and C.) drive home the need for a term like metafeminism to denote perhaps the only fundamental truth about feminism: that it has no single beginning, no single definition, no single end, and thus no single history. But metafeminism is also a forceful reminder that the internal differences defining feminist thought today need not be considered only in negative, neoconservative, fraught, and ultimately anti-feminist terms. More or less echoing Kavka, Clare Hemmings, in Why Stories Matter, recalls in regard to the construction of feminist genealogies that “it is not enough for feminists to lament what is most often perceived as the cooptation of feminism in global arenas. Feminist theorists need to pay attention to the amenability of our stories, narrative constructs, and grammatical forms to discursive uses of gender and feminism we might otherwise wish to disentangle ourselves from.”7 Another, more hopeful, progressive way I propose to think about metafeminism still holds very firmly within its grasp the work of second-wave feminist pioneers to counter interrelated systems of gender and racial oppression that cause sexual discrimination and render colonial, racial, and sexual violence normative. This way

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of thinking about metafeminism includes the necessary turns and returns that have come to define feminism today and transform it into a metaepistemology. As I will consider below, if a sort of internal messiness has always characterized feminism, then metafeminism provides a critical understanding and terminology, and transforms it into an always intersectional praxis that remains self-aware of its past, present, and possible futures. Metafeminism, understood more positively, does not have to compromise the ethics and politics of its feminist foremothers (“feminism is good, though”) in order to pay attention to areas of feminist work in sorry need of improvement. For instance, feminism still has a lot to answer for, particularly in its notoriously hostile treatment of trans women and its whitewashing of issues of race, class, and social privilege. My interest in contemporary writing by Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois women lies amid a recent surge of mainstream and critical feminist debate. In Cautiously Hopeful: Metafeminist Writing in Canada, I am interested in the doubleness as well as the multiplicity, the “amenabilities,” that characterize contemporary feminism: its allegiances to and differentiations from feminisms past, the question of its political and ethical efficacy, and its shifting objects of critique. Though it must wade through the torrent of societal and cultural backlash, feminism is still doing its work. But it is doing it often differently and sometimes more dispersedly than in decades past. Throughout my theoretical reflections, I will consider certain paradigmatic shifts in feminist theory and in women’s writing in Canada. For instance, some theorists and writers may appear less unequivocal in their politics and approaches than their feminist predecessors. But whether writing from a queer, straight, trans, cis, Indigenous, racialized, or white-settler position, they are engaged with and compelled by alternative visions of social transformation spawned by earlier forms of feminist thought. Metafeminism is a critical lens and reading practice that I believe can be extremely useful, if not necessary, for demonstrating the simple though intrinsic idea that feminism today can deflect from its former selves, and productively so. Feminism is still about patriarchy, and it is about many other things as well. Intersectionality (the analysis of race, gender, and other overlapping elements of social oppression), alliances, affect theory, the ethics

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of care, and feminism’s own internal differences are core elements of feminist thought today. The idea suggested by the prefix in metafeminism is essential for understanding the present feminist moment, for it delineates the reflections and deflections of the faces of feminism with which mainstream and academic culture have grown familiar. Feminism also fuels my continued, but cautious, hope in the possibility of social justice and transformation, and such hope directly connects to how I understand metafeminism. As Solnit points out: “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.”8 Like metafeminism, hope is a sort of in-betweenness. At this point in time, feminist practitioners need to take stock of feminism’s past, present, and unknown futures; we need to understand how these temporalities are neither mutually exclusive nor linear, but interconnected. Hemmings, for one, amply shows how the ways in which Western feminism narrates its history can determine its future. In this book, I will often return to ideas of reactivation, augmentation, and multitude, and even to the sometimes hidden or less familiar faces of feminism, that emerge in contemporary theoretical and literary writing and that the prefix “meta-” again productively denotes. Metafeminism is thus a way to signify how feminism encompasses methodologies, social concerns, aesthetic features, ethical thought, and political positions that have characterized its past and now determine, though often differently, its twenty-first-century incarnations. Four brief examples might begin to illustrate what I call metafeminism. Because metafeminism, as a transnational paradigm, is wider than the Canada-located literary works on which it sheds critical light in this essay, these examples extend beyond the Canadian literary context herein. First, with her 2015 Ascent of Women, Canadian journalist Sally Armstrong reports on women’s social and political gains in war and conflict zones in Africa and Asia. Armstrong perceives a revolution for women, all over the globe, that is the unstoppable apex of women’s movements of the first, second, and third waves. Second, 20th Century Women, a 2016 comedy-drama film by American director Mike Mills, contains within its plot and characters different phases of the feminist movement. It stars Annette Bening

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as a single mother who, like Mills’s own, was born during the Great Depression; Greta Gerwig as a twenty-something trailblazer of punk culture and women’s rights; and Elle Fanning as a promiscuous teenager. Together, they depict three generations of white middle-class women living in 1979 California, near the supposed end of secondwave feminism and within the last of the golden age of art-house cinema, which the film beautifully reflects. Third is the Women’s March on Washington, DC, which first took place the day after Donald Trump’s 20 January 2017 presidential inauguration to protest his despicable treatment of women. Alongside the flagship march were many others throughout the United States, Canada, and all over the globe. In what was then the biggest public protest in North American history, millions of people converged in the streets, and have done so annually since, to argue that women’s rights are human rights, to support a range of social-justice issues, and to unite women in the process. Yet the marches also highlight deep and historical divisions between women of colour and white women that previously peaked in the 1980s. A number of white women have expressed feelings of alienation in light of the US organizers’ focus on the plights of minorities and undocumented immigrants, which has led to difficult discussions about race and white privilege. (I cannot help but notice a roguish tone in the reporting on these divisions, as in the catchy deck, “the sisterhood may be more divided than united.”)9 Despite the intersectional Unity Principles that guide the Women’s March, controversy surrounding its organizational racism and in 2019 its perceived anti-Semitism has not abated, making the prospect of the feminist alliances it could facilitate all the more fraught. Yet as Rebecca Traister wrote in the Cut in early 2019, all is not lost, and messiness can indicate vitality: “the fact that millions of women and men have turned out for mass protests for two years in a row, not despite tensions over racial, religious, ideological, and economic differences – but in the midst of them, some engaging them head-on – has been one of the most defining and electrifying features of this iteration of a women’s movement. The hot messiness has been one of contemporary feminism’s surest signs of life and of a willingness to work toward being better than it has been in the past.”10

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Fourth is The Wonder, a 2016 novel by Irish Canadian fiction writer Emma Donoghue. Donoghue depicts one of the several cases of “fasting girls” reported in the United Kingdom and Ireland from the Middle Ages up until the twentieth century, as well as the birth of modern nursing. Trained by the Lady with the Lamp Florence Nightingale herself during the Crimean War, the protagonist Lib Wright is hired to observe Anna O’Donnell for a fortnight and determine whether the eleven-year-old’s refusal to eat is a religious miracle or a money-making hoax devised by her parents. Almost immediately upon arrival, Lib struggles with her role as strict observer and her nursing impulses to provide care, and eventually grows emotionally attached to the child. Armstrong’s Ascent of Women (as in her 2019 CBC Massey Lectures, “Power Shift: The Longest Revolution”) directly invokes feminisms past – from their historical roots in the writing of Christine de Pizan and the Enlightenment thought of Mary Wollstonecraft to the women’s movements of the past century – in her understanding of the new global ascendancy of women’s rights all over the world. Meanwhile, through a twenty-first-century and arguably metafeminist lens, Mills in 20th-Century Women looks back, humorously though never mockingly, at the white feminist movement of the 1970s: feminism’s ambiguous awakening within Bening’s sometimes frustrating character; its apotheosis through the political canon promoted by Gerwig’s character, who references Our Bodies, Ourselves and Zoe Moss’s It Hurts to Be Alive and Obsolete: The Aging Woman; and its prompting, through the sexual liberation movement, of feminism’s contradictory legacies and affects for young women like Fanning’s character. The conflicts around the Women’s March in turn underscore an ongoing lack of and desperate need for the intersectional analysis and disruption of white privilege, that is to say, the examination of how race and gender issues imbricate one another and require good alliances. Finally, Donoghue in The Wonder foregrounds care and, more particularly, the care ethics that emerged in the early 1980s and resurged in some feminist scholarship in the late 1990s and again in the 2000s, which defy traditional and patriarchal rules and systems of medicine, society, and gender. In sum, a pastiche of feminist tropes and temporalities is at work in each of my examples:

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Armstrong’s reporting on women’s global ascent, Mill’s memories and affects, the Women’s March’s intersectional politics, and Donoghue’s care ethics. Feminism in time is a characteristic of metafeminism that I will broach again below. For the record, I am and remain a feminist. I am neither a post- nor a pop feminist. I am not of the fourth (or any) wave. Nor am I a metafeminist, despite the title of and discussion within this book. Feminism for me, and for most dictionaries, is the belief in gender and racial equality and in the importance of the lives of all women, Indigenous people, racialized individuals, and other socially marginalized groups in the present, past, and future. My feminism encapsulates writing, teaching, theory, literary analysis, artistic practice, and everyday gestures that activate that belief. It rests on the recognition that violence against women is systemic, socially and culturally ingrained, and ubiquitous. Feminism is an embodied, quotidian, situated ethos that informs my worldview as a cisgender, heterosexual, white, settler literary scholar, as well as my understanding of myself and others. In short, I adhere to Mohanty’s reminder that feminism “operates at a number of levels: at the level of daily life through the everyday acts that constitute our identities and relational communities; at the level of collective action in groups, networks, and movements constituted around feminist visions of social transformation; and at the levels of theory, pedagogy, and textual creativity in the scholarly and writing practices of feminists engaged in the production of knowledge.”11 It is in view of challenged and shifting ideas of and about feminism that I offer metafeminist readings of contemporary writing by Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois women. Some years ago, I was deeply intrigued by an argument made by critic, translator, and author Lori Saint-Martin in a 1992 article on the turn to more intimate, quiet, implicit, and indeed what she termed metafeminist forms of writing by a new generation of women writers in Quebec. Saint-Martin wrote in the wake of a perceived fizzling out of the radical feminist movement that so profoundly marked Quebec literature in the 1970s and early 1980s, its literary counterpart often referred to as écriture au féminin. She noted the existence of an oft-unavowed feminist undercurrent in more recent prose work. The “nouvelle prose féminine,” Saint-Martin argued, both contained and surpassed earlier

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aesthetic and political feminist literary practices associated with Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, Jovette Marchessault, and France Théoret.12 Feminism now seemed to be something done but not necessarily theorized or explicitly avowed. It was meta in the multidirectional and multifarious sense of the prefix. Along with several other critics, I have studied how écriture au féminin spilled over into English Canada with early writings by Di Brandt, Daphne Marlatt, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Gail Scott, and Lola Lemire Tostevin. I suggest that the meta quality of Québécois feminist writing – which reflects and deflects from earlier practices and also in its engagement with the issues of intersectionality, affect, and care – is also a particular feature of the Anglophone context and of Indigenous feminisms. Today, nearly two decades after Saint-Martin’s article and along with the global renewal of democratic and decolonial movements, feminist activism is alight across social media, on university campuses, and in city streets. The revival of feminism around the world is testing, sustaining, and expanding Saint-Martin’s metafeminist theory. In its contemporary manifestation, feminism retains the difference deciphered in those texts by a new generation of Québécois women writers following in the footsteps of their feminist foremothers, just as metafeminism accounts for their continued rapport with past practices. The inherent doubleness and expansiveness signified by metafeminism inform my treatment of the four large themes in this essay – intersectionality, alliances, affect, and care – which exist in what I will argue is a productive relationship of continuity and difference with their own intellectual feminist histories as well as with feminism’s internal tensions. I am not the only critic to toy with terminology to capture the doubleness and multiplicity within contemporary feminism. Toril Moi’s understanding of “postfeminism,” Ann Kaplan’s notion of a “fourth wave,” Shirley Jordan’s idea of “fuzzy feminism,” and Jennifer Henderson’s concept of “crypto-feminism” all grapple with feminism’s shifts and turns in its more recent manifestations. Although I take from Saint-Martin the refusal to understand metafeminism as signifying feminism’s apocalyptic end, I reject the limited and in fact inaccurate idea of distinct generational trends or conflicts. For instance, Brossard’s writing shines just as productively under a metafeminist light today as it did through its critical associations

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with radical feminism in the 1970s, as my look into her post-9/11 work will demonstrate. Finally, I will also dissociate metafeminism from the idea of a “waned feminism” as the victim of its own gains and successes. Despite my references to second- and third-wave feminism, I remain wary about understanding feminism in such terms, since clear demarcations of where certain feminist epistemologies begin or end go against what I think a metafeminist analysis can teach us. However, I recognize a certain usefulness to the waves’ delineations when it comes to historicizing feminism, especially in the European and North American contexts. For instance, the so-called first wave’s work on women’s suffrage and legal rights in the late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries differs from the so-called second wave’s focus on systemic sexism and racism in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Meanwhile, both movements were led mostly by white middle-class women. The so-called third wave is regularly associated with the advent of intersectionality, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and transnationalism; with an emphasis on gender as a social construction; and with a direct challenge to previous emphasis on sexual difference and the perceived (and often misconstrued) essentialism of “French” or continental feminism. Where the second wave ends and the third begins, especially in terms of postmodernism’s aesthetic connections to both, is unclear and moot. In turn, the so-called fourth wave has been associated with the new millennium and especially the post-9/11 era. According to Tegan Zimmerman, fourth-wave feminism is characterized by the intersectional analyses of the third wave and pursues many of the same issues, including decolonization, anti-racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, and a broader gender spectrum. As Zimmerman also recalls, the fourth wave emerged online, with social media the main vehicle for the public and mainstream circulation of ideas and debates. This is not to deny that Twitter, for instance, can be toxic for feminism, but this culture online appears to point to how the fourth wave reactivates the street activism of what came before.13 Grappling with various forms of the “trans-” and attentive to white privilege within feminism, as well as within globalization, neoliberalism, and posthumanism, the fourth wave constitutes a set of relations of both continuity with and difference from preceding

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feminist practices. Yet instead of the linearity that a sequence of waves implies, I prefer to designate feminism’s contemporary reactivation as metafeminist. While the back and forth nature and temporality might emphasize the waves’ undertow, the meta allows us to swim back to shore and recognize, on solid ground, how feminism both encapsulates and surpasses its former selves. Metafeminism is very much still feminism, but its prefix foregrounds its internal epistemological, aesthetic, and political foci, shifts, turns, and returns. If practicing feminism today can sometimes look very different than it used to, it still builds on its own rich and multifarious histories and, most importantly, retains its transformative potential. As for the objects of its critiques and transformations, these have only grown exponentially. Areas of concern historically associated with feminist theory are plural. They include gender and race, subjectivity, alterity or otherness, ethical recognition and relationality, material conditions and embodiment, and the deconstruction of metaphysical binaries such as reason and emotion. All of these topics have undergone new or renewed – indeed, metafeminist – configurations in the past few decades. For instance, the feminist ethics of care, pioneered by the psychological research of Carol Gilligan in the early 1980s, have recently been reworked by a number of feminist scholars from various disciplines, with a profound impact on Francophone feminism and a growing presence in English-language feminist criticism. Meanwhile, the new material feminisms that hail from fields as widely different as English and theoretical physics validate a metafeminist reading of renewed and reworked feminist epistemologies about materiality and embodiment. In addition, the current popularity of affect theory in humanities research and particularly in feminist studies testifies to a metafeminist and verily multifocal outlook on ideas about the sensorial and sociological dimensions of emotion and being. These broad though interrelated theoretical streaks require the individual attention I will give them in the pages that follow, which delve into an assemblage of feminism’s past, present, and future. Intersectionality, alliances, affect, and care – all of which extend to material and posthumanist thought on human, nonhuman, and more-than-human selves, relations, and modes of being – consist of the incredible scope of feminism today. Together these core streams

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of thought form a theoretical framework that is itself metafeminist in its rapport to previous feminist theory. I am convinced that not taking into account such a wide-ranging and also transnational body of theory and criticism would entail a very incomplete picture of contemporary feminist writing by English Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois writers. Like this theoretical context, feminist literatures in Canada, at least of the past five decades, have consistently been and remain transnational, from their problematization of the white, masculinist, Anglo- and heteronormative assumptions of the nation-state, to the theoretical influences that underlie this writing. Écriture au féminin also practiced a language poetics that was engaged with continental theory, French modernité, and American radical feminism. Meanwhile, feminist migrant writing in Quebec and diasporic writing in English Canada have drawn from postcolonial and transnational thought harking from South Asia, Australia, and the United States. In their avowed and unavowed engagement today with intersectionality, affect, and care, as well as the ensuing issues of racialization, colonialism, sex, and gender, feminist writings by Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois writers are thus not only meta in so far as these modes of thought both recall and differentiate from past practices, but also transnational. In other words, and recalling Hemmings’s consideration of feminism’s necessary reckoning with its own internal, overlapping differences, the transnational quality of feminist production in Canada and of the critical frame that I will use to read these texts contributes to rendering these texts metafeminist and, in the process, sounds the vibrancy rather than the death knell of feminism today. As its prefix denotes and in keeping with Saint-Martin’s original use of the term, metafeminism highlights those cultural  – and more specifically in my study here, literary – practices that contain some less familiar or more expansive tropes, as if to say, voilà, c’est moi! in new and sometimes unexpected ways. Intersectional analysis, feminist allyship, affect poetics, and care ethics reveal the play between encompassing and surpassing feminist practices that are both familiar and less so to Western readers. Metafeminism is very much about feminism: its multifarious expressions, its reach and elasticity, and the work that it both does and still needs to do. And so, at the time of writing, I am a feminist setting out to

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decipher and depict the internal and external plurality of feminism, as well as the sometimes messy, paradoxic metadimension and metaconsciousness of feminism today and its fundamental intervention in our neoliberal, late capitalist, unevenly globalized, patriarchal, colonial, and androcentric times. If disorder has always been an underlying tension of feminism, metafeminism creates critical space and terminology to transform it into an always intersectional praxis that remains self-aware of its past, present, and future incarnations. There is therefore an undercurrent of historiographical intention to my metafeminist reflection, which looks beyond linear, generational, or teleological conceptions of feminist thought in evolution. As in my four examples above, I contend with the idea of various temporalities. As I examine writings by women of colour and Indigenous, Québécois, and white-settler women in Canada today, I am especially interested in how feminist poetics, positionings, legacies – avowed and unavowed – inform their work in one way or another. My aim is not to make metafeminism a totalizing signifier to designate all contemporary women’s cultural production. Instead, I use it as a critical term with which to read the reflected and deflected relationship of theoretical and literary texts to feminism’s past and present.

This Book Has No Chapters There are no chapters in this book. I seek to adopt the more flowing structure of the French and here feminist essai, which I will discuss further in the envoi, to emphasize the continuum among the topics that follow. The streams of feminist thought in question are connected not only by their metafeminist attributes, but also to one another. Affect, care, and any form of feminist alliance, as I understand them, must be intersectional, just as affect, care, and allyship are the marrow of intersectional experience and analysis. Hopefully these claims will become clear along the way. I will begin by examining the recent surge of feminism in the mainstream, spawned by digital platforms, grassroots activism, trade and small presses, and various brands of neoliberal and market feminism. What is particularly noticeable about these sometimes ambivalent

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and, to say with Carrie Smith and Maria Stehle, “awkward” manifestations are the legacies of second-wave feminist politics that they both embrace and reject. My initial foray into the mainstream opens onto a theory of metafeminism as a double, autocritical reading practice and productive tool to address contemporary feminist thought and literature. I understand feminism’s relationship to its past and its reinvestments in the present and future in terms of consequences, reverberation, assemblage, expansion, timelessness, and, later on, rapprochement, metaphors that point to the fluid and mobile essence of a metafeminist criticism. In short, I theorize metafeminism in order to draw a multifarious reading practice, a thinking about feminism itself which, like subjectivity, identity, and language, can and must be constantly unmade and remade. I then tackle intersectionality as an analytical practice with a long and significant history. Metafeminism highlights how feminism today is only coherent as long as it foregrounds the intersectionality of factors such as race, colonialism, class, language, ethnicity, sexuality, body shape and size, age, and ability in the ordering, erasure, and abuse of gendered bodies. Intersectionality is not a single rubric of feminist thought, but a critical approach that is pivotal to all feminist research today and the discussions in my study. Intersectionality induces here the need to probe into the theory – especially in its millennial, inherently metafeminist manifestations – and to explore the strides and failures, as well as continued necessity, of intersectional analysis itself. In response to recent critics’ insistence on the centrality of and return to race in intersectional analysis, I turn to Dionne Brand’s extraordinary nonfiction meditation in A Map to the Door of No Return. No other writer in English Canada seems to epitomize as comprehensive an intersectional understanding of history, subjectivity, and contemporaneity as does Brand, particularly in this personal, poetic, autobiographical, and critical exploration of the haunting history of the transatlantic slave trade and the persistence of intersectional experience in the Black diaspora. Brand’s cross-border gestures of recognition and care toward other displaced individuals segue into a consideration of Indigenous feminisms. An assemblage of intersectional criticism and poetics would remain incomplete without considering the most rousing writing and scholarship occurring in both Canada and Quebec at

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this time: those that ensue from Indigenous feminisms, forcibly within and across the Canada-US border that much Indigenous thought considers a colonial invention. Indigenous feminisms have, I suggest, a very plural and meta trajectory, as does the intersectional analysis at work in their regenerations and directions forward. My look into intersectional theory thus opens onto a consideration, from my limited settler point of view, of Indigenous feminisms. The latter bring yet another layer of complexity to intersectionality and demonstrate that anti-racist discourse can still require decolonizing. Indigenous feminist scholars, as well as writers Marilyn Dumont (Cree/Métis) and Naomi Fontaine (Innu), directly and indirectly unveil some of the major blind spots and exclusions within intersectional and anti-racist work. If the self-constituting debates and internal sites of tension within Indigenous feminisms are salient examples of metafeminism, they are also an exemplary call for an intersectional methodology that is specific to Indigenous politics, ontologies, and knowledges. There are potential cross-border or transfeminist alliances within the multiple manifestations and varying degrees of struggle that women, be they women of colour, Indigenous women, or white settler women, lead in the face of overlapping elements of social oppression. I will therefore stay with the trouble,14 to borrow Donna Haraway’s expression, and turn to the vexed and risky idea of feminist allyship, particularly Indigenous-settler allyship, through a reading of collections by white settler poets Rachel Zolf and Karen Connelly on missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirited people. Such alliances require the intersectional approach I will have attempted to map from various angles if they are to even be imagined, let alone put into critical and political practice. What my readings of these settler attempts at feminist alliances also bring to light is the question of vulnerability as a shared, though differently inflicted and experienced, condition as well as familiar feminist thematics. Affect, in particular feminist studies of affect, is my next focus, as I undo the binary opposition between thought and emotion long held by Euro-Western and mainstream thinking. Affect and emotion have always been central to feminist writing and remain so today. As I focus my metafeminist lens on affect theory and its longstanding relationship to feminism and especially

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material feminisms (theories of embodiment), I will contest the idea of an affective and ontological turn in humanities research. I will then broach literary works by Québécoise writer Nicole Brossard, Chinese Canadian author Larissa Lai, and Cree Métis novelist Tracey Lindberg. All three insist on the significance of affect – or, as I will argue, feeling – to writing, and propose forms of subjectivity and material life outside metaphysical, heteronormative, colonial, and humanist norms. I will build on a discussion of posthumanism as I turn to care, not only as ubiquitous to all forms of life, but also as an affective poetics and intersectional ethics. The renewed feminist interest in the ethics of care in many ways stems from second-wave feminist theories of difference and subjectivity, as well as their radical subversion of patriarchal and heteronormative structures. Recalling Saint-Martin’s initial reflection on metafeminist narratives in Quebec, feminist care ethics today encompass and expand the feminist epistemologies that preceded them: namely Gilligan’s feminist moral theory of the early 1980s and Joan Tronto’s and other successors’ elaboration of feminist ethics and politics of care in the 1990s. At the heart of Tronto’s philosophy is also a metatheory: her care ethics constitute both an incorporating and a displacing of past feminist theories and debates and, perhaps even more so, a distending of feminist theory as a moral political care practice. Moreover, care’s recent correlations with posthuman theory and material feminisms amount to another form of metafeminist intersection. The reactivation and transformation of the feminist ethics of care in twenty-first-century thought find literary models by English Canadian authors Margaret Atwood and Miriam Toews and a nonfiction model by Québécoise writer and psychiatrist Ouanessa Younsi. I conduct a side-by-side reading of these authors’ works and consider the complexities, breakdown, and generative aspects of care when understood as a feminist ethics of recognition and alternative possibility in the face of normative, and often destructive, biogenetic, medical, and biocapital power structures. Ending with writing, with literature, as a model of care for a more habitable world would perhaps have been as good a place as any to stop. Yet in closing I will consider my own metafeminist writing practice in this book. I will conclude with a short, personal, meta reflection on the French genre of the essai, and the tentative (trial) that

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is inherent to it and that goes into an attempt to write differently, more accessibly, about the complex theories and practices that constitute feminism today. To write an academic, subjectivized, flowing essai is an underlying, experimental objective of this book; an essay in which I say “I” without hesitation, and situate my status, structural privileges, limitations, and positions, and is itself a metafeminist endeavour.

Metareactions in the Mainstream About ten years into the new millennium, feminism experienced a sort of renaissance through the growing sphere of social media commentators, journalists, writers, and critics – with ugly backlash and internal feminist disagreements never far behind. By early 2011, the Arab Spring uprisings had swept the Middle East, even though new constitutions in Egypt and Tunisia, guaranteeing greater rights for women, had not yet enforced new laws to significantly advance women’s rights and public safety. Meanwhile, protests against rampant sexual violence in India and the One Billion Rising global movement mounted important campaigns against the endemic and publicly sanctioned abuse of women. Anti-Putin protest concerts by the punk rock band Pussy Riot resulted in the 2012 imprisonment of participating members, and more recently feminist activist group Femen has staged protests throughout Europe. Closer to home, in 2011 the first SlutWalks of women and people of other genders reclaiming public spaces with their bodies were held in response to a Toronto police officer’s slut-shaming comments. In 2012, four women from Saskatchewan – Indigenous activists Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon, and non-Indigenous ally Sheela McLean – founded the now-global Idle No More movement. Indigenous activism has been notable among women elders as well. Northern Ontario Attawapiskat then-Chief Theresa Spence began a hunger strike in 2012, propelling the Idle No More movement and calling attention to Indigenous rights and struggles. From 2003 to 2017, the Mother Earth Water Walk, founded by two Anishinaabe grandmothers, organized nearly annual walks of different Great Lakes’ perimeters to raise ecological and social awareness around water issues. A few years after the Women’s March on Washington in early 2017, more

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resounding calls for long-term activism are being heard in Canada and elsewhere,15 just as #MeToo, founded by African American civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral and global in 2017 and in 2020 continues to raise awareness and break silences about sexual harassment, abuse, and assault in every sphere of society. Feminist irreverence toward men’s patriarchal authority has also gained in popularity. British columnist and broadcaster Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman reflects on the many gendered absurdities of Western women’s modern lives, and ultimately posits itself as a proclaimed reclamation of feminism. The term “mansplaining” (pénisplication in French) is now a popular way to denote the commonplace deprecation of women’s intellectual credibility. Although incorrectly credited to Solnit, the term did emerge in the wake of her 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” in which she describes the phenomenon without using the word. In a 2014 collection of essays bearing the same title, Solnit revisits the vast debate that burst onto social media around #YesAllWomen, which denounced rape culture. The phrase “yes all women” appeared in the aftermath of the 2014 Isla Vista killings, where a sorority at the University of California, Santa Barbara was one of the targets. Solnit points out that though not all men are rapists and murderers, all women live in fear of those who are. Closer to home, the University of British Columbia’s 2015 and 2016 investigation of writer Steven Galloway, accused of sexual assault and harassment during his time as creative writing program chair, bitterly divided the Canadian literary community and prompted debates around rape culture, privilege, and inequity.16 Twitter and Facebook were the main platform for critiques of the tactics of some of Galloway’s staunchest defenders. The latter’s discourse of victim blaming, dismissal, and erasure recalls that around former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi, who in 2016 was acquitted of four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking. Online feminist publications have certainly fed mainstream feminist discourse, among them Jezebel (2007–present), Bitch (1998– present), the Ms. magazine blog (2010–present), Bust (2007–present), the Hairpin (2010–2018), Geek Feminism Blog (2008–2018), the Feminist eZine collection and archive (2000–2019, combined with the Lilith eZine in 2007), the Toast (2013–2016), the Establishment

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(2015–2019), Feministing (2004–2019), and the Canada-based GUTS Magazine (2013–2020), Shameless (2004–present), Canthius (2015– present), and Room (2011–present).17 Some have signed off or ended along with the heyday of feminist blogging, and others still exist in the digital sphere, but all have been vexed sites of agency for both social activism and anti-feminist attacks. In 2012 and occupying a middle ground between academic and mainstream feminist activism, the national organization Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA)/Femmes canadiennes dans les arts littéraires (FCAL) came into being. Inspired by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts in the United States, CWILA fostered further gender equity with online interviews and guest essays; when it ran its annual CWILA Count between 2012 and 2015, it broached with hard data the issue of gender parity (or lack thereof ) in Canada’s and Quebec’s book review cultures. A stream of print and online content has also steadily focused on professional and mostly white North American women’s climb up the corporate ladder as well as their regular encounter of the glass ceiling. In 2012 in the Atlantic, former Hillary Clinton aide AnneMarie Slaughter proclaimed how “Women Still Can’t Have It All,” sparking mainstream debate about women’s struggle with work-life balance. Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in her bestselling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013) and Hannah Rosin in The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (2012) meditate on how working- and middle-class women can advance professionally within information-driven technologies, leaving men, according to Rosin, to fall behind in a postmanufacturing economy. In the music world, Inuit punk throat singer Tanya Tagaq composed her album Retribution (2016) as a feminist battle cry against the horrific violence that befalls Indigenous women, while her novel Split Tooth (2018) takes up similar themes. Meanwhile, American R&B and pop star Beyoncé’s conceptual video album Lemonade (2016) presents a cleverly conceived feminist perspective on Black history and racial violence, Black women’s sexuality, and self-knowledge; the album was touted by outraged critics and commentators as “too Black”18 to win album of the year after it lost in an upset at the 2017 Grammy Awards. According to Mohanty and bell hooks, such perspectives as those offered by Sandberg or Rosin or even Beyoncé are symptomatic of the problematic directions within US-based “protocapitalist”

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feminism.19 In Feminism Is for Everybody, hooks is quick to argue that the feminist neoliberal utopias for which some yearn are not the meaningful work of feminism at all.20 Bitch cofounder Andi Zeisler finds that popular feminist productions represent what she calls and problematizes as marketplace feminism.21 Rebranded, especially through digital advertising, into commodified objects, feminism and the women who represent it are made to appear sexy, fun, or trendy by consumer capitalism (e.g., Dove, Verizon, Barbie, Thinx, Girlboss, or Taylor Swift), which dulls the challenging stances and critiques that feminist activism must often take in its fight for social change. Though she does not deny the impact of popular feminism, especially where increased public awareness is concerned, Zeisler argues that “feminism’s recently skyrocketing profile is a reminder that the best way to constrain the power of a movement is to commodify it.”22 She writes: “The problem is – the problem has always been – that feminism is not fun. It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s complex and hard and it pisses people off. It’s serious because it is about people demanding that their humanity be recognized as valuable. The root issues that feminism confronts – wage inequality, gendered divisions of labor, institutional racism and sexism, structural violence and, of course, bodily autonomy – are deeply unsexy.”23 Zeisler’s critique is that the current popularization and sellability of “‘pop feminism,’ ‘feel-good feminism,’ and most often ‘white feminism’ in mainstream consumer culture” is “decontextualized” and ultimately “depoliticized.”24 As market feminism is “probably feminism’s most popular iteration ever,” Zeisler demonstrates, “the fight for gender equality has transmogrified from a collective goal to a consumer brand.”25 In short, what may be feminism’s initially appealing aspects – liberation, self-affirmation, and empowerment – are often simplified and co-opted by market exploitation and consumer desire. The feminist movement has significantly expanded in directions as vexed and awkward as mainstream, pop, or market feminism, and so have the backlash, abuse, hate, trolling, and stalking that its members face. Contributors to all of the above outlets and organizations attest to such negative experiences. In her essay collection Shrill (2016), feminist writer, producer, and fat acceptance activist Lindy West writes viscerally about her traumatic experiences with trolls on Twitter. In January 2017, West left the platform in what she called an

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act of protest against a social medium that she considered a “grandscale normalization project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as ‘racism is bad’ and ‘sexual assault is bad’ and ‘lying is bad’ and ‘authoritarianism is bad,’ and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency.”26 In addition to the extreme anti-feminist backlash, violence, and hatred across social media, “men’s rights” activism,27 or anti-feminist rants by conservative women like writer Danielle Crittenden, the post-9/11 era was ripe for similar attacks. In The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi brilliantly examines the retaliation against and erasure of feminism in post-9/11 North America and writes, “The seismic jolt of September 11 elevated to new legitimacy the ventings of longtime conservative antifeminists.”28 Women’s rights, abortionists, gay and lesbian lifestyles, and questioning the US government’s “muscle-flexing mantras” in the wake of the September 2001 attacks (such as Susan Sontag’s in a brief New Yorker editorial) were all cast as causing the “softening” and “martial emasculation” of a suddenly vulnerable America under siege.29 What might all of this media noise, awkward production, and backlash indicate about the state of feminism today, in the not so early twenty-first century? “Meta-reactions”30 have swarmed renewed discourse around women’s equality, sexualities, bodies, motherhood, professional lives, and social oppression, highlighting the latent and rampant sexism and racism that prevail around these issues. Such metareactions have ranged from renewed combativeness to disappointment in the face of anti-feminist attacks and conservative dismissal. Social media platforms have proven Janus-faced as sites of both violent backlash and also cultural empowerment and renewed feminist publishing – even recalling the latter’s ultimate high during the 1970s.31 What feminists’ assorted relationships to social media and the state of feminism overall point to is the significance of the prefix meta-. What underlies the debates above are second-wave feminism’s legacies and the ways in which they are departed from and continued. It is often feminism itself that is put into question, into doubt, and back into vogue all at once: its focus on the politics and ethics of sexual equality, difference, and non-normative desire and standpoints. But also, if not predominantly, interrogated is the intertwined relationship

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of the private and public, of internal and external obstacles that women still face today – for instance, the debate between Slaughter and Sandberg about whether obstacles to women in industry and politics are institutional or internal. Recall, as Armstrong does, that for “most Western women” second-wave feminism meant that equality was on the way: they “thought that our time had come with the second wave of the women’s movement during the 1960s and ’70s … Although much was accomplished, the finish line when it came to equality still eluded many women in the West; in the rest of the world it remained a seemingly unattainable dream.”32 As it turns out, private, social, and normative structures of power, class, and particularly race and colonialism remain in need of further analysis, recognition, and veritable transformation. hooks argues that by the mid-1980s, some women were abandoning the feminist movement altogether. Referring to the right-wing political environment of the 1990s, but certainly relevant to the United States today, she notes that “no feminist activist in the late ’60s and early ’70s imagined that we would have to wage a battle for women’s reproductive rights in the ’90s” 33 – let alone today. “It is time for us to face the fact that our revolution has stalled,”34 Sandberg famously declares in reference to women’s place in the economy. “The promise of equality is not the same as true equality,” and it is not enough to believe “that the feminists of the sixties and seventies” completed the work to achieve it.35 Meanwhile, hooks devotes a significant portion of Feminism Is for Everybody to the profound blind spots around class and race perpetuated by a whitewashed Western feminism. Such theoretical deficiency has failed to address fundamental social problems like women in poverty, not to mention the depths of the socially transformative potential of feminism itself. In fact, the intersectional feminism for which hooks ultimately argues, and which she develops throughout her scholarship, draws precisely on the principle of doubleness – of past and present, reflection and deflection, return and release – that is at the core of a metafeminist critique: “We desperately need a massbased radical feminist movement that can build on the strength of the past, including the positive gains generated by reforms, while offering meaningful interrogation of existing feminist theory that was simply wrong-minded while offering us new strategies.”36 Similarly to hooks,

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Solnit offers measured, prudent, qualified enthusiasm about feminism in the twenty-first century: “Back then [in the 1960s], arguing that women should be equal was a marginal position; now arguing that we should not be is marginal in this part of the world and the law is mostly on our side. The struggle has been and will be long and harsh and sometimes ugly, and the backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning.”37 I find it telling that feminism – as a moniker, a politics, or an effective strategy open to debate and various modes of doing – underscores the mainstream works cited above, whatever we might think of the neoliberal underside of some of them. Sandberg and Moran argue for reclaiming feminism, which has become for many younger women almost a second F-word, as McKeon references in the title of her book. What I find also telling is the fact that feminism in the mainstream today seems to consist simultaneously both of the culminations and insufficiencies of the feminism of decades past, and also of the ensuing oscillation between pessimism and optimism of the early millennium. But most importantly, the unresolved issues of political effectiveness and agency, and the gendered divisions of the private and public show these critics working with, rather than against or outside of, the paradoxes and ambivalences of feminism today. Finally, the above examples show that metafeminism can be understood as incorporating Lauren Berlant’s notion of productive impasse: “a singular place that’s a cluster of noncoherent but proximate attachments that can only be approached awkwardly, described around, shifted.”38 Indeed, metafeminism is a set of shifting consequences.

Feminist Consequences As feminism in the mainstream demonstrates, feminist scholarship and activism have had to contend with a considerable amount of hairpulling. In her introduction to Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, Kavka observes: “It is as though the more that ‘feminism’ has become a publicly visible term, the less sense both its practitioners and its detractors have of what it is ‘about.’” 39 Though published in 2001, this essay collection edited by Bronfen and Kavka is still germane to an understanding of the multifarious state of twenty-

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first-century feminism. Kavka illustrates the idea of metafeminism, a term she does not use, as containing the ways in which feminism is about its own history as much as its present and future. The keywords “feminist consequences” essentially designate metafeminism’s expression of “a set of consequences at the crossroads of the past and the future to mark certain trajectories of feminist thinking.”40 Kavka frames contemporary feminism as incohesive from its start.41 She refuses to ring its death knell over its internal, and sometimes seemingly irreconcilable but in fact often equivocal, fractures and differences: heterosexuals versus lesbians, cis lesbians versus trans women, female identity versus queer identity, white women versus women of colour, praxis versus theory, “French” sexual difference versus “American” gender theory, materialism versus postmodernism, sexuality versus gender, gender versus transness or cisness, and so on. In her contribution to the same volume, Judith Butler urges for an understanding of sexual difference and gender constructionism not as entirely different or foundational paradigms but as unsettled modes of theoretical inquiry. Similarly, and already at the beginning of the 1990s, Tronto found the need to look, “on a metatheoretical level,” at feminist debates over the ontological (to some, essentialist) and social categories of “woman” and to move beyond them; for Tronto, these irresolvable debates have been highly divisive and, as Butler admits in her contribution, inconclusive, as they have unproductively posited feminist theory as “impossible.”42 Care theory, although not the one solution to the theoretical conundrum of sexual difference, can according to Tronto mediate some major rifts, especially those between women of different races, ethnicities, religions, social classes, and sexual orientations, that have caused “bad faith” feminism and “siderailed” feminist work.43 By understanding the institutionalized inequalities that create these problems, and by establishing “trust between feminists,”44 care as an approach requires that one meet the other morally and ethically adopt but not co-opt the other’s perspective and worldview. Feminist care, Tronto suggests, can remind us that “women” denotes not just privileged (white, cis, heterosexual, professional, upper middle-class) women, but also women of colour and other marginalized positions pertaining to gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, ability, and religion.

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Ultimately, Kavka’s introduction underlines the continued legacy and transformation of those internal debates, propelled by the rhetorical question, “How can feminism be dead, if the term continues to enable work built out of previous work?”45 Similarly, despite her necessary and scathing critique of the white privilege and supremacy that lie beneath so much feminist theory, hooks observes: “The fact that participants in the feminist movement could face critique and challenge while still remaining wholeheartedly committed to a vision of justice, of liberation, is a testament to the movement’s strength and power.”46 As Kavka argues, it is always important “to consider … the work of today as the consequences of the histories accruing in the last thirty years in the name of feminism.”47 Today more than ever, these accruing histories include the anti-racist interventions and decolonial impulses that feminism must continue to centre in its theories and practices. On the movement of feminism itself, which is what metafeminism reflects on, Ahmed posits that “it is when feminism is no longer directed towards a critique of patriarchy, or secured by the categories of ‘women’ or ‘gender,’ that it is doing the most ‘moving’ work. The loss of such an object is not the failure of feminist activism, but is indicative of its capacity to move, or to become a movement.”48 This dynamic extension of feminism echoes Kavka’s equally important reminder that “feminist thinking may now stretch beyond ‘women’ or even gender as categories and as delimiting objects of investigation [but] it does not, however, mean leaving these categories behind.”49 Finally, just as “terms such as postmodernism and postcolonialism have been updated or even replaced by terms such as globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora, and more recently neoliberalism,”50 metafeminism is an attempt to update our historical sense of feminism’s shifting and widening epistemologies and practices: its reverberation.

Feminist Reverberation As a critical term, metafeminism is not new. In the 1990s it made temporary headway in Québécois literary criticism with SaintMartin’s work on it, which in turn was a response to the popular

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perception of an apolitical, disengaged trend in the literature in general and contemporary women’s writing in particular. Prompting Saint-Martin’s study was a much less overt literary alignment with the avowed feminist practices of writers of the two decades past, and a more noticeable turn to intimisme or the personal. Was feminism waning? Was it wavering? The sense of disengagement from the political within such metafeminist texts may not have been unlike the “political depression” experienced by feminist as well as queer intellectuals and activists south of the border in the 1990s. Discussed by Berlant in Cruel Optimism, among others, feelings of exhaustion and disappointment on the one hand, and of the assimilationist impact of radical politics (particularly queer advocacy for same-sex marriage) on the other hand, led to what Ann Cvetkovich explains as “the sense that customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, [were] no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better.”51 Race theorists and activists were also weary, and “in the wake of the [same] incomplete projects of civil rights and decolonization”52 the international activist movement Black Lives Matter, founded by three Black women organizers in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, emerged in 2013. In the critical context centred around French women’s writing, Jordan writes about “fuzzy” forms of feminism, or the “heightened consciousness of gender politics, but often with a diluted sense of purpose”; a “taken-for-granted starting point which seems conceptually nebulous and interestingly incoherent.”53 Rejecting the idiom “postfeminist,” Saint-Martin in turn argues that “meta-” manages acutely to designate what “post-” does not: both what “exceeds and encompasses the object in question.”54 Again, for Saint-Martin, metafeminism highlights a “double movement” in contemporary women’s writing, whereby some of “the strategies and trends of feminist precursors” were moved aside while others still underlay their work.55 In more or less the same vein, but in a wider theoretical context, Henderson proposes the term “cryptofeminism” in a 2007 Atlantis article titled “Can the Third Wave Speak?”56 Cryptofeminism refers to “a kind of work that is feminist in a subterranean way,” in keeping with the scientific sense of crypto as “a life form with a concealed part that is below the observable surface – as in cryptobranch: ‘an animal

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with concealed or covered branchiae or gills.’”57 The “more colloquial sense of the prefix ‘crypto’” also comes into play, as this “prefix almost always serves as an accusation of concealed adherence,” for instance as in the term “crypto-communist.”58 Yet unlike Saint-Martin, Henderson is at ease with connecting her notion of cryptofeminism to postfeminism. Although the latter, Henderson admits, can mean “historically subsequent” and carry “the sense of a phenomenon that is predicated on the cancellation or rejection of what came before,” it can also signify “an uncertain, unpredictable continuation of something prior, perhaps on a different level or in different domains or in different terms.”59 These ideas of sameness and difference are precisely what I find “meta-” to signify all the more accurately. In this vein, also theoretically analogous to metafeminism is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s metaphor of agencement at work in Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure as well as Mille plateaux.60 Translated into English as “assemblage,” theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz have taken up the idea, and as Anna Bogic explains: “For Deleuze and Guattari, an agencement is an open multiplicity, with points of deterritorialization and lines of escape (or flight) (1975, 153; 1986, 86). It is a combination of heterogeneous elements adjusted one to another (Callon 2006, 13).”61 If agencement characterizes feminism’s “innumerable modes of doing,”62 to recall Kavka, so does Scott’s turn to the idea of feminist reverberation as a signifier of plural, shifting, conflicting, and multidirectional movement and positioning. Like the various waves of feminism, periodization can be useful. But ultimately, a metafeminist reading leaves aside an emphasis on succession and even progress. Thought in terms of agencement or reverberation, feminism can embrace its own “seismic shock waves moving out from dispersed epicenters, leaving shifted geological formations in their wake.”63 In 1990, Teresa de Lauretis anticipated such meta-, post-, fuzzy, and crypto- gestures of “self-displacement”64 as germane to the very historical consciousness of feminist theory. According to de Lauretis, “the feminist critique of feminism,” particularly by queer women and women of colour, is what constitutes feminist theory and transforms feminism into “a community whose boundaries shift and whose differences can be expressed and renegotiated through connections

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both interpersonal and political … a process of continuing renegotiation of external pressures and internal resistances.”65 De Lauretis describes this metafeminist process as a form of “dis-placement and a self-displacement: leaving or giving up a place that is safe, that is ‘home’ – physically, emotionally, linguistically, epistemologically – for another place that is unknown and risky, that is not emotionally but conceptually other; a place of discourse from which speaking and thinking are at best tentative, uncertain, unguaranteed.”66 If considered the apocalyptic end of feminism altogether by some, an “end of innocence”67 by others, or the reflection of “the anger, grief, denial, or resignation of those mourning at a graveside”68 by others still, these shifts emphasize much more accurately, as Kaplan suggests, “that there is no monolithic feminism is a good, if at times uncomfortable, fact: positions, actions and knowledge – constantly being contested, questioned, and debated – mean that feminism is alive and well, and always changing in accord with larger social, historical and political changes in whatever nation or part of a society women live in.”69 They emphasize the amplification and expansion that metafeminism denotes in turn.

Feminist Expansion In recent years, the extension of feminist concerns into new or wider political and ethical fields – for example, the war on terror, decolonization, environmental degradation, ethical thought, affect, and care – has redefined the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, and therefore the boundaries of human subjectivity itself. In her 2001 article “Becoming-Woman,” Braidotti observes a particular shift with the end of the last millennium and the beginning of the present one, as feminism’s alliances with a postindustrial social imaginary propose something beyond normative ideas of the human. Characterized, according to Braidotti, by postmodernity’s interest in the embodied differences of the monstrous, the grotesque, the hybrid, the freakish, the queer, or the mutant, feminism is incorporating new streams of thought such as the posthuman and the anti-anthropocentric, which I will examine later. In turn, Alaimo and Susan Hekman, in the introduction to their 2008 edited collection Material Feminisms, notice an impasse

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in feminist theory caused by postmodernism’s language-focused theories. If their critique inaccurately suggests a distinguishable rift between poststructuralist and material theory, which I will return to later as well, their argument is nonetheless qualified and, well, metafeminist: it retains both social construction and material reality (ontological embodiment) as core elements for a feminist understanding of subjectivity and its human and nonhuman relations. Alaimo and Hekman clearly acknowledge postmodernism’s importance in feminist theory’s deconstruction of fixed identities, especially those founded in binary and hierarchical dualism, and also postmodern feminism’s role in the development of queer theory. Their critique rests on the argument that the “language/reality” duality in particular is not yet settled: “Even though many social constructionist theories grant the existence of material reality, that reality is often posited as a realm entirely separate from that of language, discourse, and culture.”70 Acknowledging the work of Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Haraway on the material forces of life and power as springboards for a new material feminism, Alaimo and Hekman insist on the need to reconceptualize the materiality – “lived experience, corporeal practice, and biological substance” – that bodies inhabit, as well as the social conditioning of these bodies: “ways that account for myriad ‘intra-actions’ (in Barad’s terms) between phenomena that are material, discursive, human, more-than-human, corporeal, and technological.”71 The “material turn” envisioned for feminism is once again a metafeminist epistemology: it seeks “to build on rather than abandon the lessons learned in the linguistic turn. The new settlement we are seeking is not a return to modernism. Rather it accomplishes what the postmoderns failed to do: a deconstruction of the material/discursive dichotomy that retains both elements without privileging either.”72 As I will consider below, intersectionality, affect, material feminisms, and feminist care theory have profound ramifications for feminism’s contemporary grappling with subjectivity, corporeality, cross-border alliances, relationality, and agency. I read these bodies of thought as metafeminist in so far as they point to prominent aspects of feminist analysis that come into play familiarly, newly, and differently – just as they carry forward the correction of past lacunas and failings. After all, binary divisions, racial and sexual identity categories, the category of human, and social transformation do not

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pertain to women only. Echoing Ahmed, Scott recalls that “women need not be the explicit object of debate.”73 In particular, Scott uses feminist critique to counter the essentialist categories deployed in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and, more widely, in the relentless aftermath of 9/11. Her argument also applies to the recent turn to environmental and animal studies in posthuman, material, and care theories espoused by such feminist thinkers as Braidotti, Alaimo, and Tronto. “Here is a movement,” Scott continues, “that is not narrowly restricted to things of interest to women, but that takes the domain of large-scale politics as its own,” while repeating “an old feminist claim that women’s interests are society’s interests.”74 In reference to the spring 2020 protests over the police killing of George Floyd and other Black people in the United States, and although certainly not blind to Canada’s deplorable record when it comes to the socioeconomic conditions of Black communities, my friend N. sums up well this expanded sense of feminist politics in a 31 May 2020 text message: “As a woman of colour,” she confided, “I can honestly say I have no desire to set foot in that country again … and that is only compounded by their idiot president, regression of women’s rights, and their hapless handling of this pandemic. Thankfully the world is a big place with far better travel options (one day).” If I privilege the prefix “meta-” over “post-”, it is because of the former’s self-reflexive, multidirectional, and expansive connotations. Metafeminism contains the internally critical, self- or meta-critical potential of contemporary feminism; it highlights feminism as a reverberation of thought, politics, and writing “with multiple, changing and disputed referents,” to borrow from Margaret Ferguson.75 Again, as Saint-Martin insists, “meta-” designates what follows but also what exceeds and incorporates. It designates that which reflects and deflects, or echoes and critiques, what came before and may still lie ahead, and extends this multidirectional tendency to twentyfirst-century ontological, ethical, and social concerns that are both ongoing – like racism and colonialism – and growing – like the ecological crisis and the posthuman condition. Metafeminism is feminism in time, because it is about its own time: before, now, and later.

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Feminism in Time Metafeminism is particularly relevant in its challenging, widening, and even recasting of writing and literary histories, across, to borrow from Johanna Drucker, “theoretical temporalities.”76 Metafeminism points to the open, flexible historicity of feminism itself, as I will demonstrate, as well as the relevance of various streams of thought such as intersectionality, affect, and care to recent literary production from English Canada, Indigenous nations and communities, and Quebec. Feminism’s relation to time, in particular to its own time, is multidirectional rather than linear. An issue of Modern Language Quarterly, Feminism in Time, and a special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Feminism and Time, reflect on the much-needed historicizing of feminism, and interestingly so at the turn of the new millennium. As Kavka suggests, the history of feminism may well be “out of time” for the very reason that it embodies dispersed and often conflicting sites of past and present historical struggle determined by class, race, location, and sexual identities – just as it is presently, as well as historically, motivated by an unknowable future of social transformation: “feminism is out of time because it is always as much a manifest, or promise of justice to come, as it is a past and present historical struggle.”77 In this very temporal collapse or timelessness, and in its inherent ties to futurity, feminism is cautiously hopeful. One timeless metafeminist figure is Ahmed’s feminist killjoy. In contrast to the comfortable and pleasing object of marketplace feminism, the feminist killjoy calls out racism, sexism, violence, and brutality; kills the buzz of easy complicity or the comfort of silence in the face of injustice; ruins the party by speaking up about racism or sexism; and uses “words like ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ even if that means being heard as the cause of bad feeling (and [is] willing to cause bad feeling).”78 As in her book Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed is clear about her feminist influences, including from the 1970s and 1980s thinking of Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich, and Judith Butler. She practices what she discusses as the crucial killjoy gesture of feminist citation: “Feminist killjoys will point out when men cite men about men as a learned social habit that is diminishing.”79 It is especially from Lorde’s 1984 response to the pervasive racism directed at Black women that Ahmed draws her contemporary notion

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of killjoy anger as “visionary” and “creative” and urgent as ever for feminism. “‘Anger is loaded with information and energy,’” Ahmed writes, quoting Lorde, as well as futurity: Here, anger is constructed in different ways: as a response to the injustice of racism; as a vision of the future; as a translation of pain into knowledge; as being loaded with information and energy. Crucially, anger is not simply defined in relationship to a past, but as opening up the future. In other words, being against something does not end with “that which one is against” (it does not become “stuck” on the object of either the emotion or the critique, though that object remains sticky and compelling). Being against something is also being for something, but something that has yet to be articulated or is not yet. As Lorde shows us, anger is visionary and the fear of anger, or the transformation of anger into silence, is a turning away from the future (1984: 127). For Audre Lorde, anger involves the naming of various practices and experiences as racism, but it also involves imagining a different kind of world in its energy (Lorde 1984: 127).80 Reinvested with Lorde’s translation of anger into action and vision for a better future, Ahmed’s feminist killjoy is very much a metafeminist critical figure. She “moves feminism into a bigger critique”81 of the present world. She is of time past, present, and future. Such reinvestment of earlier feminist tropes informs other recent scholarship engaged, as is Ahmed’s, with affect studies. While the turn to emotion in feminist theory may indicate the “search of a new critical vocabulary,”82 the focus on affect, as I will explore further, is also recognizably in continuation with feminism’s longstanding engagement with ethics, ontology, and the material conditions of selfhood, identity, and subjectivity. The recent momentum of affect studies in humanities scholarship is often talked about as an “affective turn.” But such talk, as Anu Koivunen argues, erases longstanding feminist scholarship. Again, the idea of reverberation rather than a turn does better justice to feminism’s epistemological history around emotion. Koivunen urges scholars to consider “the long history of feminist engagement with psychoanalysis” as well as the “the work

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on love by Julia Kristeva (1987), Jessica Benjamin (1988), Teresa de Lauretis (1994), and Kaja Silverman (1996) – all distinguished psychoanalytical thinkers and theorists of the ‘passionate subject.’”83 She adds: “The question of affect and the reflexive link between ontology and epistemology were always already there in feminist self-consciousness.”84 Also significant is the usefulness that Braidotti finds in affect theory. Divining from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of vitalism, Braidotti conceives of a subject who is always in a middle space of inner and outer forces. According to her, this middle space undoes the unitary solipsistic self of metaphysical tradition and Enlightenment thought. This middle space will be important in my later discussion about affect and intimacy in the works of Brossard, Lai, and Lindberg. But for now, I note that Braidotti’s metafeminist outlook on subjectivity also confronts the sex and gender wars that raged in the 1980s and early 1990s by refusing both a purely foundational, ontological “inner self ” as well as a purely constructionist focus on “outside cultural codes.”85 This once again metafeminist, decentred, and, to borrow from Butler, “permanently unsettled”86 view of subjectivity allows for a redefinition of personhood as well as the articulation of new subject positions – of a “posthumanistic and anti-anthropocentric mode” in an age where humanity, Braidotti argues, is anxiously tempted to imagine our own “end”/extinction through “technological overkill and environmental collapse.”87 Braidotti wishes to “reset the agenda in the direction of affirmation and sustainable subjectivity”88 – which in turn is a question of ethics, and which has been a central, if not timeless, issue for feminism all along. Looking for an affirmative “philosophy of becoming, of active transformations in the age of posthumanist subjectivity,”89 Braidotti then invokes a feminism of the past and future, seeking a subject position for those who identify as women that will neither exacerbate nor neutralize gendered identities, but will embrace their constructive aspects through ambivalence and paradox. Ambivalence, with which I opened this book, therefore does not have to be anti-feminist or ineffectually passive. It can foster instead the cautious hopefulness that marks the various faces of feminism that I have drawn so far, whether mainstream or philosophical. One consequence of ambivalence is that multiple blind spots can

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begin to show, such as ones pertaining to race or sexual fluidity with which feminism has long struggled to contend. One salient question with which we must stay is the intersection of gender with race and other social forces of oppression stemming from colonialism, sexual orientation, class, religion, and age, and to which I turn next. What intersectional feminism does best is include rather than exclude in a way that highlights rather than erases differences and boundaries in the resistance of hegemony – including the hegemony of white, Western, and settler feminism. In other words, intersectionality is feminism at its best, and is a metafeminist reminder that anti-racist critique is as urgent today as it was over forty years ago, when the Combahee River Collective Statement, a key pioneering document for Black feminism, emerged in North America. I turn to this statement now, as well as to theories of intersectionality that preceded and have ensued from it.

Intersectionality Now Feminism cannot have a significant social impact if it fails to recognize multiple forms of structural oppression and how such barriers not only coexist distinctly but also steadily imbricate one another. But this perspective, of course, is not new. It is at the core of the Combahee River Collective Statement. Written by Black feminists in April 1977, the collective argued: “The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated.”90 The understanding of gender not as a single peculiarity, but as only truly apprehensible through its relationship to other social categories, identities, and forms of oppression or belonging – including race, nation, Indigeneity, ethnicity, language, sexuality, class, age, ability, body shape, religion, and history – is what intersectional thinkers have argued for since. Once again, Western feminism, when (as it must be) framed by its coming to terms with the inherent components of intersectionality, reveals itself to be a metafeminist critique: intersectional feminism contains, has learned from, and also attempts to move past the internal divisions of feminism’s so-called waves, camps, factions, blind spots,

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and limitations. In what is a welcome but unfortunately rare study of intersectionality in Francophone feminist scholarship, Québécois scholar Chantal Maillé evokes this very relationship of continuity and rupture underlying intersectional feminism today: “Works by postcolonial feminists as those of antiracist feminists have been at the avant-garde of the questioning of certain feminist narratives of the second wave by formulating questions into race, ethnicity and national identity to think through oppressions of women. They situate themselves in continuity with the preceding works of another generation of feminists who have reflected on the articulation of gender relations alongside race and class relations, all the while constituting a certain rupture in terms of the theorization and understanding of the power relations at work.”91 Like Maillé, Ahmed describes the persistent, urgent need for intersectional analysis in metafeminist terms. She, too, underlines the importance of previous feminist writing on gender and diversity and its relevance to the present: We can also consider how the language of critique and how that language is also assumed to be dated. I think even within some feminist writing, the idea that we should be critical of sexism has indeed been seen as rather dated and even as a habit that is blocking us, holding us down, or keeping us back: stopping us from reading or engaging most positively and affirmatively and creatively with the texts that are the objects of critique. It would be timely to re-state the arguments that sexism and racism are not incidental but structural, and thus to understand sexism and racism, requires better, closer readings of what is being gathered. Attending to the restrictions in the apparently open spaces of a social world brings us into closer proximity to an actual world. We need feminist and anti-racist critique because we need to understand how it is that the world takes shape by restricting the forms in which we gather. We need this now; the time for this is now. We need this critique now, if we are to learn how not to reproduce what we inherit.92 The rhetorical “we” in this passage is not meant to suggest a false universal sisterhood that erases differences. But it does, I think, suggest that possible alliances between feminisms – of colour, Black,

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Indigenous, white, settler, queer, trans, cis, lesbian, straight, disabled, abled, as well as past and present – could begin to appear less vexed and perhaps as necessary now as they have ever been. Is this sentiment hopelessly naïve? Perhaps. But stick with me to see how the notion of cross-border alliances might play out. My reflections on intersectionality take up ideas that feed directly into the others presented so far. Here, I look at the coming of age of intersectional analysis, first more generally and next as it informs, to varying degrees, Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois writing by women. Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989, but certainly did not invent the concept. As all definitions do, Crenshaw’s presents a statement of meaning as a tool to think more critically and self-reflexively about the kinds of analysis that constitute feminism’s most radical and necessary work. In response to white feminism’s analytical and political blind spots, Crenshaw defines intersectionality as “the complex, cumulative manner in which the different forms of discrimination combine, overlap, and intersect.”93 Given their often-singular focus, Crenshaw takes both anti-racist and feminist studies to task for failing to effectively address Black women’s experiences. As she argues: “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”94 As Rita Dhamoon expands: “An intersectional-type framework starts from the premise that distinctive systems of oppression such as racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity need each other in order to function: they are co-produced and productive of unequal material realities.”95 Crenshaw in her early work draws attention to the structural intersectional discrimination that Black women experience in the legal system and the workplace. She shows how Black women’s distinct experiences of racial discrimination remain buried by and overlooked in comparison to the lived realities of white women who are in turn privileged by feminist politics as an object of analysis. In a keynote address delivered almost thirty years after she coined intersectionality, Crenshaw points out yet more manifestations of anti-racist politics that still fail to take patriarchy and gender discrimination seriously into account. The failures of anti-racist politics reinforce

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patriarchy, she argues, just as white feminism’s continued negligence of race reinforces racism. Terming these limitations “intersectional failures,”96 Crenshaw, as much in 2016 as in 1989, stresses the importance of recognizing the intersectional operations of gender, race, and poverty in the vulnerability of Black women and women of colour to gender-based violence. In her 2016 address, she stresses the particular importance of naming the women who remain unacknowledged in Black Lives Matter, especially the latter’s insurgence against systematic police violence in the United States. As much today as when feminism began to explicitly theorize itself, intersectionality recognizes, in Mohanty’s terms, “the interwoven processes of sexism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism [as] an integral part of our social fabric, wherever in the world we happen to be”97 – that these processes “underlie and fuel social and political institutions of rule and thus often lead to hatred of women and (supposedly justified) violence against women.”98 Mohanty’s influential 1986 essay “Under Western Eyes,” reprinted in her 2003 book Feminism without Borders, was especially important in Western feminism’s paradigmatic shifts in the 1990s. Acknowledging the theoretical foundations provided by the feminist writing and scholarship of the 1970s, Mohanty, along with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, admonishes Western and academic feminism for ignoring its own dominant premises and behaviour, particularly toward racialized women. As Mohanty argues, “assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality, on the one hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of Western scholarship on the Third World in the context of a world system dominated by the West, on the other, characterize a sizable extent of Western feminist work on women in the Third World.”99 Western representations of Third-World women – as a homogenous group or stick figures of ignorance, poverty, or victimization – and “the way the ‘West’ colonizes gender, in particular, its colored, racial, and class dimensions,” are Mohanty’s main focus.100 She advocates for anti-racist, Third-World, and postcolonial modes of analyses as productive forces of change and feminist solidarity. Mohanty’s revised essay, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited,” also included in Feminism without Borders, examines such forms of resistance against the effects of globalization and also, “the absence of racialized gender and feminist politics in the antiglobalization

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movements.”101 As Mohanty argues in the collection’s introduction: “If processes of sexism, heterosexism, and misogyny are central to the social fabric of the world we live in; if indeed these processes are interwoven with racial, national, and capitalist domination and exploitation such that the lives of women and men, girls and boys, are profoundly affected, then decolonization at all the levels (as described by Fanon) becomes fundamental to a radical feminist transformative project.”102 Without actually using the term “intersectionality,” Mohanty introduces decolonial politics into intersectional analysis. I will return to her decolonial project and potentially inclusive theory of feminist solidarity in relation to Indigenous women’s writing further on, since for Mohanty, the Third World includes (not unproblematically) not only non-Western states like those of Latin America, the Caribbean, or sub-Saharan Africa, but also the Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous populations of North America, Europe, and Australia.103 In other words, she focuses on “Third World women as an analytical and political category” to eventually propose those “potential alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries” that I will explore below.104 To return to Crenshaw’s pioneering intersectional work, the date of it, 1989, is a relatively late one. This is especially so if we consider the earlier intersectional interventions that were developing within feminist production in the early 1980s, and the impact of intersectional analysis today. The recognition of intersectionality’s precursors, particularly within Black studies, cannot be stressed enough, along with its emergence as a veritable social movement rather than a strictly academic exercise. Taking stock of these early perspectives is metafeminist work: a metafeminist critical lens allows us to understand more fully how intersectional work has not only returned but also expanded into various considerations of overlapping systems of subordination. Taking stock is precisely what Crenshaw does in her 2016 talk, as she stresses the urgent relevance, failures, and potential transformations of decades-long intersectional analysis in feminist politics. Finally, this assembling of earlier approaches and their positioning in the midst of today’s social concerns can help us to recognize how intersectionality is a central focus not only for the social sciences, from which it emerged, but for various disciplines including, of course, the humanities and the arts.

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From the start, intersectional analysis focused on the insufficiencies of white, bourgeois, heterosexist feminism; it also challenged masculinist Marxism and male-oriented race theory. As Mohanty argues, Third-World women – a controversial term that she uses interchangeably with women of colour – “have consistently focused on the idea of the simultaneity of oppressions as fundamental to the experience of social and political marginality and the grounding of feminist politics in the histories of racism and imperialism.”105 In other words, intersectionality, particularly in a Black lesbian context, has “operated in the cracks between oppressions and the spaces between social movements,”106 and so has always been metafeminist. Articulated by African American writers such as Lorde in Sister Outsider, hooks in Ain’t I a Woman, Angela Davis in Women, Race, and Class, or Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis in Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives, anti-racist critiques of white liberal feminism joined those of Latin American feminists Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, with Patricia Hill Collins among the first, in 1990, to explicitly pursue and apply Crenshaw’s term to Black feminist scholarship. This cursory assemblage of intersectional feminist writing and social activism is not to present, as K.L. Broad warns against, a “single-identity politics”107 among these theorists. On the contrary, it points to the differences underlying intersectionality as a social movement of Black and women of colour feminism starting with the second wave – the differences between and within Black, Indigenous, and Chicana feminisms, for instance  – “even when engaged by similarly situated groups in similar historical moments.”108 Since Crenshaw coined it, the concept of intersectionality has expanded to include other colliding elements of oppression, marginalization, and recognition related to sexuality, gender, transness, ability, age, body, shape, religion, and language. Also important to consider is that, just as feminism does not concern only women, intersectionality and particularly questions of race do not concern only Black women and women of colour.109 Whiteness is a powerful social construct, often one of continuously confirmed social privilege and dominance, that some scholars like Elizabeth Spelman and the late Ruth Frankenberg acutely analyze in relation to gender, class, and sexuality. Postcolonial theory’s examination of how white masculinity became

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normative under colonialism joins anti-racist feminist analysis of Western feminism’s white, middle-class femininity.110 In addition to Crenshaw’s critique of the men-dominated Black Lives Matter movement, feminist scholars have raised other potential limits and even misuses of intersectional theory: namely its institutionalization as a privileged, often whitened, academic exercise and therefore its distance from race, racialization, and racism, as well as everyday experiences of subordination. As Sirma Bilge argues, intersectionality is whitened not just by white scholars who take it up as their primary mode of analysis, but by those who discount others “who have multiple minority identities and are marginalized social actors – women of color and queers of color.”111 This criticism is certainly not unfamiliar given feminism’s history of self-questioning especially as a theoretical and academic discourse often misaligned with the diversity of women’s daily experiences, identities, political activism, and anti-racism. Among other critics of intersectionality’s failings are Sumi Cho, Lesley McCall in a 2013 issue of Signs, and Collins in a 2015 critique of the contemporary depolitization of intersectionality. As Corinne Mason and Amanda Watson, in a 2017 double issue on intersectional analysis by the Canadian journal Atlantis, ask in turn, “What Is Intersectional about Intersectionality Now?” Collins even goes so far as to indicate that her earlier calls – to recognize race, class, and gender as “categories of connection” as well as “relationships and coalitions to bring about social change” – now “seem like a pipe dream.”112 Zimmerman, in a study of feminist Twitter via which she ultimately argues for the central place of intersectionality, points out how, for some critics, intersectionality fails as a tool for social redress by “reif[ing] categories of identity, oppression, and privilege.”113 How do we escape such impasses or avoid them in the first place? Along with Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall, I view intersectionality’s expansion (into areas of trans, femme, or subversive femininities, for instance) as necessary and promising. Yet I also agree with these critics that the focus on race, racialization and racism, women and queer people of colour, and Indigenous women and Two-Spirited people, as well as their distinct experiences of intertwined oppressions, must remain at the core of intersectional analysis. As Mason and Watson point out, Catharine MacKinnon recalls the importance

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of this “distinctive stance” on race in a 2013 Signs issue – “a simple prompt” that is also an essential reminder to intersectional feminists today.114 This prompt recalls one of the most fundamental objectives of intersectionality, which is to decentre the Western, middle-class, white, cis, heterosexual woman as the universal subject of feminism. Only with race and colonialism held firmly in view as significant not only for Indigenous, Black, and other racialized women but also for white and settler women can forms of feminist alliance, such as the Indigenous-settler alliance I will consider later on, avoid the erasure, whitening, and normativization of intersectionality’s anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-sexist goals.

Lost in Translation The Anglophone and Francophone contexts of feminist thought in Canada have distinct trajectories where intersectional analysis is concerned. But to a considerable extent, both contexts derive from Black American feminist theory, at slightly different times and to differing degrees. I will look briefly at some important initiatives, on an institutional and theoretical level, of intersectional feminism in Canada and Quebec, some defunct and some ongoing. These distinct histories are rarely discussed or explored, and even less frequently compared, in the numerous literary histories that are published in the two linguistic contexts. This is where the work of assemblage implied by the concept of metafeminism is useful: these literary forms of intersectional feminism cohabit similar sites of influence, particularly from American feminists of colour, when it comes to narratives of nation, origin, and identity that circulate within them. In the Quebec context, Maillé notes a turning point for feminism with the Marche mondiale des femmes (World march of women) in 2000, initiated by the Fédération des femmes du Québec, which assembled more than 600 groups from 163 countries. This event marked a veritable “passage” in Québécois feminism’s recognition of differences other than gender-based ones, and of intersectional, transnational, and postcolonial analysis.115 In Quebec scholarship, intersectional analysis named and pursued as such has only recently emerged, more if not almost exclusively in the social sciences.116 But

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as Geneviève Pagé indicates, a form of intersectionality did exist in 1970s Quebec consciousness, as feminists struggled simultaneously against patriarchy, heteronormativity, American imperialism, and Anglophone colonialism.117 The question today is how this analytical heritage can be extended to address the experiences of racialized and minority women in Quebec, who do not share in the same colonial, white, Euro-based history as their Québécois de souche sisters. Alexandre Baril is another rare Francophone critic to discuss intersectional perspectives in Québécois and French-language scholarship.118 Looking back over Québécois feminism in the past thirty-five years or so, intersectionality, Baril notes, has been scarcely analyzed by feminist scholars. He observes this lack in Francophone feminism more generally, and states that the title for his essay on Anglophone and Francophone intersectionality “could have been ‘All feminist intersectional analyses are Anglophone, all Francophone feminists are cisgender, but some of us are brave,’” in homage to the title of the 1982 collection All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, which points out the lacunas in feminist and anti-racist discourse.119 But the absences do not stop there. According to Baril, language issues, which tend to prevail in Francophone feminist critique, are too often absent in Anglophone criticism, just as trans issues, which now have a presence in Anglophone criticism, are seriously lacking in a more cisnormative Francophone criticism.120 If the absence of linguistic concerns in Anglophone intersectionality is conspicuous, recall that these critiques apply to theoretical discourse more so than to literary production. English-language works by such authors as Brand, Claire Harris, Lai, and Dumont go a long way to demonstrate how linguistic and racial identities intersect. Although the critical Anglophone context currently has a leg up when it comes to discussing queer as well as trans and genderqueer identities and artistic practices, literature in Quebec does have a long history of queer feminist poetics. Lesbian feminism is an operative modality, first enmeshed and activated in texts and poetics by Bersianik and Brossard, and then pursued by Anne-Marie Alonzo, Gloria Escomel, and others, to emerge in Québécois literature in the early 1970s and beyond. In terms of feminist criticism more so than literary practice, intersectionality took longer to reach French and Québécois scholarship

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than English scholarship. Maillé, in a 2014 article, argues that race relations analysis was ensconced in American and British cultural theory before Anglo-Canadian feminists really took it up, and points out the different rapport to such critical influences in Quebec. Without the same access to the circulation of English-language texts, Francophone feminists, Maillé suggests, did not benefit straight away from the critical race theory or postcolonial criticism of the 1980s and their particular attention to racialization and colonial oppression.121 As Baril indicates, the “Anglonormativity” of English-based intersectional analysis may have contributed to Francophone feminists’ failure to recognize its importance – a failure, as the Fédération des femmes du Québec noted in 2013, that also results from critics’ ongoing resistance.122 The failure to address language issues within intersectional analysis may well have led to the Francophone perception of intersectionality as a threat, “an institutio-anglicized, Anglo-American, colonial notion” – despite, ironically, Crenshaw’s initial denouncement “of monolingualism as a significant barrier for many non-Anglophone American women.”123 Thus more heavily informed by French, and often cisnormative, theory and its universalizing assumptions about women’s social conditions and experiences than by English perspectives on diversity, Quebec feminist scholarship, mostly in the social sciences, has only recently turned to intersectional analysis.124 There is at least one other factor contributing to this lagging scenario where intersectional work is concerned, and it relates to the idea that Quebec, despite its recent clerical-conservative past, is a secular society along the lines of France and its republic’s long history of church-state separation. Just as it is bound to the Canadian Multiculturalism Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Government of Quebec has invoked its right to constitutional exemption (the notwithstanding clause) to outlaw religious symbols in public. The Coalition Avenir Québec passed Bill 62 in 2015 to apply to municipalities, the National Assembly, and public transit, and its sister Bill 21 in June 2019. Supporters believe that the bills – which outlaw religious head and face coverings and other symbolism among public servants, teachers, and citizens seeking to access medical and government services – reaffirm and uphold the requirements of a secular Quebec society. Critics believe that the bills legalize

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discrimination. Quebec, like Canada, is in fact and in law diverse when it comes to culture, religion, and race, and as David Seljak argues, “part of the confusion arises from the fact that, since the 1970s, Canada has become both more secular as well as more religiously diverse. Canadian Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Chinese and Jews – as well as aboriginal peoples – struggle to integrate themselves into structures that had been defined first by Christianity and then by Canadian-style secularism. At the same time, new forms of religious intolerance and discrimination have emerged, challenging Canada’s efforts to become a multicultural society.”125 Defenders of Bill 21 are always quick to assert that Canada and Quebec are secular, and arguments founded upon secularism (laïcité) consistently counter cultural accommodation and inclusion. The Révolution tranquille (Quiet Revolution) of the 1960s was the decisive turning point in the separation of church and state in Quebec and jettisoned its economic and social modernity. Yet given the relatively recent history of the systematic Catholicism in every echelon of Quebec society – political, social, familial, cultural, religious, and colonial – I wonder how rooted secularism can really be. Might there not be at work here several layers of sociological self-misrecognition, as well as hypocrisy and prejudice? Regardless, it is minority and racialized communities, and women in particular, who stand most directly at the punishing end of such laws, which is an overt failure of intersectionality. This legislation skims over the needs, experiences, and protection of Quebeckers of colour and non-Western Quebeckers – Hindus, Muslims, Jews, people from former French colonies, and women who wear the hijab – as rightful residents, landed immigrants, refugees, and citizens of Quebec. Laws against religious symbolism, whether in Quebec or in France, affect first and foremost racialized women and have divided feminists for some time.126 The Fédération des femmes du Québec, once in favour of the legislation in the name of women’s secular emancipation, has since declared it to be a sexist violation of women’s rights, in line with other opponents’ outrage about the legislation’s social violence and tactics of “swatting,” a number of public servants and teachers have confided to the media, “at a problem that doesn’t exist.”127 Baril and Maillé’s “brave” intersectional scholarship is thus among some of the most important and necessary to emerge in Quebec

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since the turn of the new millennium. Their work is a promising springboard from which to begin to reassess the importance of an intersectional understanding of minority and racial issues and stakes within Quebec’s plural society. But again, the production of intersectional analysis does not exactly overflow in French Québécois studies or letters. Nor does postcolonial analysis, which for Maillé is paramount to any effective and transformational intersectional feminist theory that emphasizes contextual differences and colonial as well as neocolonial power in the lives of minority and Indigenous women.128 In fact, in a 2014 article, Maillé reproduces word for word the same sober conclusion she delivered twelve years prior in a paper about the amount of intersectional work ahead: “Today, it is necessary to recognize that the power relations involving colonial processes remain unthought at the core of Québécois feminism … the experiences of minority women who live in Quebec are often amalgamated to the peripheral and inexact position of the category of ‘immigrant women’ … whereas the Indigenous dimension is treated as a marginal element of history.”129 The under-representation of Indigenous, racialized, and minoritized authors in the Québécois literary milieu has also drawn critical attention. In a 2017 article titled “Blanches” (white women), Carole David and Martine Delvaux present a justifiably scathing critique of a symposium on women and literature held in Montreal that featured exclusively white women authors and speakers. Beyond critiques of representation in Québécois literature, a 2015 issue of the journal Recherches féministes, introduced by Dominique Bourque and Maillé, focuses on “intersectionalités” (appropriately plural), including in the arts. Yet if “sexual identity … in turn examined in relation to age, ethnic belonging, and sexual orientation”130 is said to underlie the 2013 essay collection Femmes désirantes, the editors’ call for intersectional perspectives on racialized, Indigenous, migrant, and queer women’s writing seems to end with the foreword. Finally, it is especially through the increased attention given to Indigenous writing that intersectional analysis is potentially gaining ground in Quebec literary studies. Critics such as Jeanette den Toonder, Joëlle Papillon, and Isabelle St-Amand heed Maurizio Gatti’s 2004 call for criticism of French-language Indigenous writing.131 Works particularly by Innu women authors like Joséphine Bacon,

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Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Rita Mestokosho, and Naomi Fontaine, all published by Mémoire d’encrier, as well as translations into French of Métis author Katherena Vermette’s The Break (which won Radio-Canada’s 2018 Combat des Livres), Lindberg’s Birdie, and Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg writer and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, are garnering heartening critical consideration. My reading of Fontaine below joins this small choir of critical voices concerned with the intersectional examination and critical reception of Indigenous women’s writing in Quebec. But for now, I turn to the English-language context of intersectional criticism. To begin, Canada’s profile within the context of its new national rhetoric of multiculturalism in the early 1990s is worth recalling. This cultural moment informed an important segment of Canadian literature, with critical anthologies such as Other Solitudes (1990), edited by Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, featuring debates among authors and critics about the merits and limitations of multiculturalism – not so much as a policy, but in terms of the impact of its divisive, ghettoizing practices. A number of authors and critics such as Himani Bannerji, Neil Bissoondath, and Smaro Kamboureli revile the whitewashing within Canadian multiculturalism, and several writers pursue significant reconfigurations of colonial, normative, immigrant, and exclusive national affiliations. Dumont offers a vivid depiction of multiculturalism discourse’s erasure of race in “this ‘vertical mosaic,’ this colour colony” and its “multicultural intentions”132 in a poem titled “It Crosses My Mind,” included in A Really Good Brown Girl. Required to indicate whether she is a Canadian citizen on a job application, the poet-speaker considers the following biting, and dual, reply, filled with the irreconcilable spoils of a history of colonization and the intertwined elements of her irreducible Métis identity: “‘Are you a Canadian citizen?’ I sometimes think to answer yes, by coercion, yes, but no … there’s more, but no space provided to write my historical interpretation here, that yes but no, really only means yes because there are no lines for the stories between yes and no.”133 A very vocal critic of multiculturalism’s emphasis on national identities, Brand in turn writes, in A Map to the Door of No Return, that “[t]oo much has been made of origins”; according to Brand, “[n]ation-states are configurations of origins as exclusionary power structures which have legitimacy based solely on conquest

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and acquisition. Here at home, in Canada, we are all implicated in this sense of origins.”134 Even before Crenshaw’s term entered feminist critical vocabulary, racialization and racism were part of gender analysis and feminist practices in English Canada. In the 1970s, several notable advocacy groups, among them the Congress of Black Women, the Disabled Women’s Network, the Native Women’s Association, and Paukiuutit, formed.135 Anti-racist feminism aggregated into such organizational efforts as the bilingual Women and Words/ Les femmes et les mots conference held in Vancouver in 1983; the 1994 Writing thru Race Conference; the now-defunct Sister Vision Press, cofounded by Makeda Silvera and Stephanie Martin in 1985 to publish work by Black women and women of colour; or the Women’s Press, which, as Nourbese Philip discusses in her essay collection Frontiers, fractured after extensive debates over racism and censorship. Meanwhile, in 1986, the 8 March Coalition and National Action Committee on the Status of Women became a site of struggle over racial issues. Later, important works sought to bridge the lack of racialized and Indigenous women writers being published in Canada: Himani Bannerji’s Returning the Gaze (1992) and Thinking Through (1995), Enakshi Dua and Angela Roberton’s anthology Scratching the Surface (1997), Arun Mukherjee’s work, and Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle’s collection Memory Serves and Other Essays (2015), as well as two important Atlantis issues on Indigenous feminism edited by Lawrence and Anderson (2005) and on intersectionality edited by Mason and Watson (2017). The work, of course, is incomplete, as the late Wendy Robins indicates in her 2010 blog title for the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, as part of a series to mark forty years since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women.136 As Tanana Athabascan feminist scholar Dian Million recalls, the commission was also where Indigenous “women testified on the blatantly sexist Indian Act of 1876,”137 even though “white Canadian Women’s Rights groups were slow to recognize the double indemnity of racial and sexual discrimination, much less the necessity for solidarity with sovereignty and self-determination positions.”138 But some progress has been made, and Robins notes that the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, the Legal Education Action Fund,

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and women’s and gender studies in universities across the country continue to work with intersectionality. Meanwhile, Indian Rights for Indian Women was founded in 1971 to counter sexist discrimination laws in the Indian Act – finally amended, in 2015, to provide eligibility for Indian status to women, children, and persons removed from the register based on non-Indigenous marriage or paternity.139 Race analysis became an important part of English Canadian literary scholarship in the 1990s, with critical focus increasingly on writers such as Brand, Maria Campbell (Cree-Métis), Harris, Joy Kogawa, Hiromi Goto, and Sky Lee. Today, intersectional feminism is undergoing a renewal with cutting-edge work in Indigenous studies, as I will consider later, and with Libe García Zarranz on transnational queer writing by women, Erin Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy, Karina Vernon on Black Canadian prairie writing, and Lai’s scholarship on cross-cultural alliances among diaspora and Indigenous writers. As Kit Dobson, Marlene Goldman, Tanis MacDonald, Kamboureli, and García Zarranz consider, female, queer, postcolonial, anti-racist, and multiple subject formations emerge in texts by racialized writers; these authors’ poetics inscribe themselves not so much within the nation as through and across cultures, locations, generations, lands, and histories both collective and personal. In García Zarranz’s work, transnationalism or the “transCanadian” occurs through her analysis of queer bodies and identities as well as affect; while Dobson’s transnational perspective on Canadian writing, including the fiction of Haisla writer Eden Robinson, emerges through a Marxist feminist lens and recourse to globalization studies in Transnational Canadas. To return to Baril’s observation about the Anglophone context’s intersectional attention to trans issues, one other exciting turn has been the work of racialized transgender women writers such as Vivek Shraya, Kai Cheng Thom, and Arielle Twist (George Gordon First Nation). These writers self-consciously contribute to an avowedly feminist intersectional poetics, and their work reverberates with scholarly interventions into Indigenous studies and queer theory.140 Insofar as queer theory is concerned, its expansion onto a widened field of social critique is akin to metafeminism’s amplification of its objects of critique beyond patriarchy or gender. Issues of race; Indigeneity; problems of colonialism and transnationalism, global capital and

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labour, diaspora and immigration; as well as questions of citizenship, national belonging, neoliberalism, family, and kinship all figure in the examination of various ways that white, colonial, and heteropatriarchal sexual norms have been naturalized and universalized. Yet despite the growing awareness of sexuality as intersectional with, and not extraneous to, other modes of difference,141 queer critique also manifests some intersectional shortcomings: particularly where a double exclusion from queerness occurs when it is conceived in white, imperial, colonial settler terms; or where queer settlers have attempted to  activate indigeneity and appropriate transsexual Indigenous bodies to imagine their own sexual diversity (as Two-Spirited, for example), without proper knowledge of or, worse, justified claim to Indigenous kinship or ontologies. As Quo-Li Driskill (Cherokee) et al. discuss in their introduction to Queer Indigenous Studies, the Two-Spirited identity is a difficult ethical and methodological matter among Indigenous LGBTQ2 critics, particularly when anthropological “application of pan-tribal concepts”142 ignores the plurality of cultural specificities that pertain to selfhood, sex, and gender. But for now I turn to Brand’s nonfiction work, for me exemplary of intersectional thought on Black diasporic experience today, as I also heed those reminders from Crenshaw and Collins that race, racialization, and Black feminist thought itself need to remain a major focus of intersectional analysis.

Black Living in the Black Diaspora (Dionne Brand) A Map to the Door of No Return delves into what Dorothy Smith calls “relations of ruling,”143 but it is no “simple relation of colonizer and colonized, or capitalist and worker”144 that the author traces in this nonfiction work. Brand’s interest lies in the simultaneous and “multiple intersections of structures of power,”145 which she goes to pains to situate and especially to historicize. The history in question is that of the transatlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage, and its ongoing impact on the Black, female, queer, Canadian diasporic writing subject of Brand’s text. At the centre of A Map to the Door of No Return is the idea that the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade has created a mental and

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diasporic, real and imagined, space “of irrecoverable losses”: of erasure, anti-origins, and anti-belonging that dominate the present of Black diasporic people.146 Christina Sharpe, in her beautifully written work of criticism In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, proposes the wake “in all of its meanings as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance.”147 For Brand, the Door of No Return does similar work as “a place, real, imaginary and imagined … which makes the word door impossible and dangerous, cunning and disagreeable.”148 She continues: “the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast. In some desolate sense it was the creation place of Blacks in the New World Diaspora at the same time that it signified the end of traceable beginnings … the Door of No Return, a place emptied of beginnings – as a site of belonging or unbelonging.”149 Slavery is the recognized or unrecognized haunting of Black bodies in the diaspora, according to Brand, giving way to “[t]he trope of captivity,” “the persistent trope of colonialism” at the root of contemporary Black experience in the Americas.150 In fact, the Middle Passage, made metaphor as the “Door of No Return,” is the determinant of any Black body in the diaspora: “That one door transformed us into bodies emptied of being, bodies emptied of self-interpretation, in which new interpretations could be placed. Phantasm, chimera, vision … I am, we are, in the Diaspora, bodies occupied, emptied and occupied.”151 As Paul Barrett puts it, Brand “does not attempt to restore or fill in the fissures and lacunae of the Middle Passage, slavery, and the black diaspora. Rather, she makes those absences palpable and material, depicting them as part of the very substrate of black diasporic life.”152 In Brand’s words: “Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting … Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience.”153 The legacy of slavery is thus as much historical as it is contemporary, as much past as it is present: “The body is the place of captivity. The Black body is situated as a sign of particular cultural and political meanings in the Diaspora. All of these meanings return to the Door of No Return – as if those leaping bodies, those prostrate bodies,

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those bodies made to dance and then to work, those bodies curdling under the singing of whips, those bodies cursed, those bodies valued, those bodies remain curved in these attitudes. They remain fixed in the ether of history. They leap onto the back of the contemporary.”154 Whether all Black people in the North American diaspora are captives of slave history may remain a serious or painful question of contention for some. But there is no denying that Brand’s essay powerfully illuminates the historical and contemporary workings of intersectionality. The body of the Black diaspora is an intersectional body, located at the junctures of race, gender, class, history, and even time and space: “A space not simply owned by those who embody it but constructed and occupied by other embodiments. Inhabiting it is a domestic, hemispheric pastime, a transatlantic pastime, an international past time.”155 Brand shows these intersectional structures and histories of oppression, exploitation, and consumption to be imposed, internalized, and then performed. As a striking example of such intersectional objectification and internalization, she discusses the music video show Midnight Love, which aired on Black Entertainment Television from 1985 to 2005: these extremely sexualized bodies are created, and inhabited or invaded, by Black women and men themselves. It is a curiously complicated doubleness. The Black person inhabits the Black body which is a cipher of the dreams, memories, horrors, and fears of Black bodies, in a performance of sexuality cut through with racialized assumptions of the Black body as “overly” sexual (whatever Puritanism that concept contains). This performance is primarily for an audience of Black people who are invited to join in this inhabiting and invading. The performances themselves are further exaggerations of sexual prowess; the sexual prowess is itself performance. At times inadvertent and at times mocking, these videos execute the racialized fantasy of the Black body.156 The perpetual captivity problematized throughout the essay results from intersectional modes of “ownership,” that is to say, racialized and sexualized, capitalist and multinational modes of invasion of a

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Black body “constantly struggling to wrest itself from the warp of its public ownerships.”157 The contemporary Black embodiment of slave history that marks Brand’s thesis in A Map to the Door of No Return also emerges in a photography series included in a 2017 Art Gallery of Ontario exhibit titled Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood. Camal Pirbhai and Camille Turner’s “Wanted” uses modern fashion photography to reflect on Canada’s own covert history of slavery, with one still from the series appearing on a digital billboard at Yonge-Dundas Square and another overlooking the gallery entrance. They draw from eighteenth-century Canadian classified ads placed by slave owners in search of their runaways, in turn dressed and disguised in their captors’ garb, with elements of the fashion of their day and of ours. The refashioned ads highlight not only Black resistance but also the Black body “dressed in its new habit of captive and therefore slave … embedded in all its subsequent and contemporary appearances,”158 again lingering within and haunting, according to Brand, modern Black subjects of the diaspora. The Toronto billboards, which I was able to see in the summer of 2017, could then be interpreted as having a double purpose: to highlight Black resistance and freedom, but also to draw attention to the impossibility of shedding that history from Black experience, from the Black body, and from the nation-state and Western capitalist culture of the present. To borrow from Sharpe, at stake is the “longer durée”159 or long wake of the transatlantic slave trade, and how it translates into Black living in the Black diaspora. Sharpe’s metaphor of the wake registers multiple meanings: mourning or vigil; the consciousness of wakefulness; the furrow behind a boat, recalling Paul Gilroy’s image of the ship in his work on the Middle Passage in The Black Atlantic; attempted returns  to the African homeland; and border crossings. Sharpe’s wake yields to a thinking process she calls “wake work,” which underlies her thesis about the “ongoing disaster” of slavery and contention “that thinking and care need to stay in the wake.”160 Sharpe essentially outlines Brand’s project in A Map to the Door of No Return, its rendition of the harm that the transatlantic slave trade has caused Black people living in the Black diaspora: “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding.” She continues: “I look also to forms of

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Black expressive culture … that do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this [Black] exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity.”161 And, more explicitly: “Brand does this in A Map to the Door of No Return as well [with] her hard insisting on the facts of displacement and the living in and as the displaced of diaspora.”162 Unlike the emancipatory objectives of the photography series, for Brand, “the patent freedom”163 that Black people or the reclaimed Black bodies of “Wanted” experience in the diaspora today remain confronted by the captive frame of A Map to the Door of No Return and the still fully operational systems of racial and sexual oppression – indeed a matter of her “hard insisting”: “If I can say it. Let me. I think that Blacks in the Diaspora feel captive despite the patent freedom we experience, despite the fact that we are several hundred years away from the Door of No Return, despite the fact that the door does not exist; despite the fact that we live in every state of self-agency, some exceedingly powerful, some less so of course but self-agency nonetheless. One might even argue for the sheer magnificence of our survival against history. Yet …”164 The Door of No Return, Brand recalls further, “exists without prompting. It exists despite all efforts to obscure it or change it or reinterpret it by its carpenters or its passengers. The Door of No Return is ocular.”165 Her stance about the ongoing struggles that pertain to race, racism, and sexism remains tenaciously critical, and sometimes dishearteningly pessimistic. But she makes a strict refusal of easy, emancipatory, neoliberal ideals. This refusal may not be so difficult to grasp given the systemic racism of US politics; the white supremacist rallies such as those in the wake of the 2017 events in Charlottesville, Virginia; the aforementioned murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police against which protests in the United States have spilled into Canada and elsewhere; and, also in late May 2020, Toronto in the grip of the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black woman of Mi’kmaq and Ukrainian ancestry who fell from her twenty-fourth-floor balcony while police were in her apartment.166 And, after all: “It is not the job of writers to lift our spirits. Books simply do what they do.”167 Good ones, we might say again with Haraway, stay with the trouble.

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As “one of the most regulated bodies in the Diaspora,” the female body appears in brief, cutting vignettes throughout A Map to the Door of No Return in the form of a series of intersectional women-subjects: “pushing a grocery cart through the city housing at Lawrence and Bathurst in Toronto … Young, perhaps a mother”; the woman who silently though skeptically endures her male companion’s academic “theory of pan-Africanism in which polygamy is the authentic family structure”; women brutalized by the Taliban, “entombed alive in burqas”; and again the media-regulated Black female body “having no ability to articulate itself outside of its given ‘natural’ functions.”168 These figures are all, not unlike Pirbhai and Turner’s models, “[f ]lung out and dispersed in the Diaspora.”169 The Black female body thus shares “with other brutalized bodies” the living legacies of colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal violence.170 Ultimately, Brand’s feminist analysis lends itself to a metafeminist reading practice. Her text recalls Angela Davis’s early examination of African American women’s experience in continuity with the legacies of slavery, which opens onto the articulation of race, class, and sex for understanding historical and contemporary systems of oppression and Black struggle for freedom. In so doing, Brand takes up, twenty-five years later, the Combahee River Collective’s challenge to address “the psychological toll of being a Black woman.”171 Again, “the extreme sexualizing of both the male and the female Black body,” namely by the entertainment industry in North America and pervasive media, is symptomatic of “the trope of captivity” that Brand explores throughout this text and others.172 Thus in a metafeminist gesture, Brand extends her critique of the cultural and sexual markers imposed on Black women to the people who inhabit these serialized Black bodies. She moreover extends her intersectional poetics to other lost individuals in the colonized space of North America who share in the “living ghostliness” of social oppression: the countless homeless of the city; forgotten Indigenous presence, with the Salish “woman from this land” but “with no country” asking for directions in downtown Vancouver, a place of “lost paths” that once belonged to her people; the Black bus drivers providing this Salish woman with directions and who is also without a country but “knows the way newly mapped, superimposed on this piece of land.”173 As Maia Joseph points out, Brand pushes beyond her stance

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as the voice of “post-national black lesbian feminist.”174 Brand also poses, I argue alongside Joseph, an act of feminist care toward this “array of others”175 populating her text. She forges an intersectional alliance with placeless individuals and their own distinct experiences of loss, and so opens “up the possibility of alignment across socially constructed boundaries.”176 Notably, Brand writes this narrative in the first person, situating herself among the descendants and living embodiments of the Door of No Return as a contemporary Black queer woman moving through the diaspora. Her writing “I” is at the junction of those ruling relations mentioned above, experienced both as a historical haunting and a lived and current reality. In many ways, the narrator is like the “Blacks in the Diaspora [who] carry the Door of No Return in [their] senses.”177 The experience of diaspora is thus affective: it is both internal and external, or intimate and collective, as are the various forms of feminist resistance inscribed in and through this text. Yet although the Black bodies in A Map to the Door of No Return are regulated by and captive of the cultural meanings projected onto them and the historical legacies they carry, and despite Brand’s refusal of emancipatory idealism, her speaker is not exclusively a fixed object of this violence either. Rather, she figures as a drifting subject “without destination … one of the inherited traits of the Diaspora,” with no “immediate sense of belonging, only of drift” – but still fighting, always, to wrangle herself from the spoils of colonial violence.178 The speaking “I” ambles through “large histories,” such as the transatlantic slave trade, as well as “small histories” of the everyday, accumulated as anecdotal renditions of past humiliations as well as moments of resistance, hers and others’, which constitute the “many stories, fables, and secrets in the Diaspora.”179 One salient example of such resistance is the author’s conflict over the name Dionne in a classroom as a twelve-year-old girl in Trinidad, when her English teacher insists that she answer to the more commonly anglicized and perhaps feminine name “Deanne”: “But this Deanne seemed to be a girl without a story. When Miss Sirju called Deanne, I did not answer. I was not being wilful.”180 In the face of this imposition of colonial control, Dionne disobeys and refuses the teacher’s erasure of her identity. Dionne may not be “wilful” in the sense of resisting authority simply to get her way. But she

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does take up the position of the wilful child, as Ahmed understands and reclaims this figure, a variant of her feminist killjoy model of resistance: “Willfulness: the acquisition of a voice as a refusal to be beaten.”181 Wilfulness is the refusal “to make one’s own cause the happiness of others,”182 and here, it is Dionne’s refusal to be complicit in the teacher’s colonial desire. Dionne’s willfulness is “not being willing to be owned,” also recalling Brand’s sympathy for, but ultimate criticism of, Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s “desire for relief from the persistent trope of colonialism. To be without this story of captivity, to dis-remember it, or to have this story forget me.”183 This last passage in turn echoes the lament in one of Brand’s most powerful poetry collections, Land to Light On (1997), in which the poet-speaker yearns for a place “where I am not this woman/fastened to this ugly and disappointed world.”184 Brand does not, again, surrender to any sort of fantasy of obliterating colonial memory. Nor does she remain statically caught within the trope or “spectre of captivity”185 that nonetheless runs through her book as a determining force of the Black diaspora. Rather, the text constantly meanders through this terrible heritage, which is paradoxically invisible and absent as well as visible and present. Brand assembles a history and legacy of irretrievable losses, refusing their silencing, while also projecting, or at least hinting at, possible opportunities for reconstitution. Precisely because the Door of No Return is “a place emptied of beginnings” and “does not exist”186 as a gateway to retrieval or origin, the speaker can make her way toward alternative, although always shifting, spaces of interpretation, habitation, and relation. This process most often involves an active, everyday care of others, love, and friendship. It emerges from the depths of the speaker’s intersectional awareness and recognition of others, which in turn enables her speaking subject to “feel” with and for others’ losses.187 Refusing the “romance” of origins “as a golden past of serenity, grandeur, equality” is as important as moving beyond both the “horror” of “three or four hundred years of slavery” and their contemporary legacies through “colonialism and racism”: “To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction – a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to

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escape it except in the radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing. So I am scouring maps of all kinds, the way that some fictions do, discursively, elliptically, trying to locate their own transferred selves.”188 These moments, like those of everyday care for others, counter “the unsavoury politics of belonging”189 that underlie the good but divisive intentions of multiculturalism. Brand’s Door of No Return thus opens the rare possibilities that might be afforded to those “transferred selves” of the Black diaspora. The means by which these moments can emerge, let’s say, beyond the Door of No Return, ensue from Brand’s employment of metaphor and the self-reflexive motif of the Door itself: The Door of No Return is of course no place at all but a metaphor for place. Ironically, or perhaps suitably, it is no one place but a collection of places. Landfalls in Africa, where a castle was built, as house for slaves, une maison des esclaves. Rude enough to disappear or elaborate and vain enough to survive after centuries. A place where a certain set of transactions occurred, perhaps the most important of them being the transference of selves. The Door of No Return – real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction.190 Fiction and imagination are given two distinct functions in A Map to the Door of No Return. On the one hand, in Stuart Hall’s terms, they “giv[e] rise to a certain imaginary plenitude, recreating the endless desire to return to ‘lost origins’”191 obliterated by the traumatic past. On the other hand, fiction and imagination unleash the subject from the determining and dehumanizing confines of colonial violence and erasure, through art, and particularly through metaphor and its constant reworking of concepts such as maps, doors, and doorways. Brand writes: “To reclaim the Black body from that domesticated, captive, open space,” from the multiple space-time and systems of  captivity, “is the creative project always underway.”192 Barrett remarks that is it “precisely Brand’s elliptical, glittering style that

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provides her with a means of expressing the elusive, of giving meaning to identity as absence, to the silent gestures and affectations of black diasporic subjectivity.”193 The metaphor of the Door shares with Paul Ricoeur’s bright metaphor (métaphore vive) the idea of being a rhetorical figure of both sameness and difference. With its power to not only evoke but newly describe a reality, “metaphor is not bright only in that it vivifies a constituted language. Metaphor is bright in that it inscribes the momentum of imagination in a ‘thinking further’ at the level of the concept.”194 In this way, escaping the horrors of history through art does not obscure but instead metaphorizes that history, presenting Brand’s “transferred selves” with alternative and relational subject locations and purposes: “The only gift that one, the one bending reluctantly toward the opening, could give.”195 This “gift” is precisely the difference and also the futurity at play in the métaphore vive, and indeed is “the momentum of imagination” that Brand employs throughout her poetic essay as she imagines Black diasporic subjects and their intersectional existence beyond the Door of No Return – where Black being is, at the end of her text: [M]arooned, tenantless, deserted … And it doesn’t matter where in the world, this spirit is no citizen, no national, no one who is christened, no sex, this spirit is washed of all its lading [shipping/loading term], bag and baggage, jhaji bundle [indentured servant], georgie bindle [small bundle of possessions], lock stock, knapsack, and barrel and only holds its own weight which is nothing, which is memoryless and tough with remembrances, heavy with lightness, aching with grins. They wander as if they have no century, as they can bound time, as they can sit in a café in Brugge just as smoke grass in Tucson, Arizona, and chew coca in the high Andes for coldness.196 Finally, Black being lives in the wake, in consciousness, and in care and recognition of others. Like metaphor itself it lives in excess of fixed meaning, in excess of “all the violence directed at Black life.”197 It lives in excess of itself.

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Indigenous Feminisms My discussion about intersectionality in women’s writing produced in Canada would be sorely incomplete without a consideration of Indigenous feminisms on their own terms; across colonial geographical borders; and within their own existing beliefs, practices, and sovereignty. It would also be incomplete without a reminder of my outsider position as a white settler. Framing Indigenous feminisms in relation to intersectional analysis demands, of course, careful attention to the particularities of indigeneity under and beyond settler-invader colonialism, and also of the internal complexities of Indigenous feminist theories and practices. Hopefully I can avoid (at least, as much as it may be possible to do so) assimilating the specific objectives of Indigenous feminisms into my own ends as a white, cis, heterosexual, settler feminist researcher and the metafeminist critical practice I am developing. The need to recognize Indigenous world views, languages, and relationships to land and the spirit world are key in coming to terms with the various dimensions of Indigenous feminisms, just as it is important to recall “a general anxiety” that exists around the term.198 It is Indigenous women and critics who must and will continue to shape Indigenous feminisms and decide on its possible limitations, usefulness, and expansion. As Shari Huhndorf (Alaska Native) and Cheryl Suzack (Batchewana First Nations), writing in 2010, argue, Indigenous women must resolve questions about feminism’s future in relation to some of its internal conflicts around Indigenous sovereignty; Indigenous tradition; and possible modes of resistance to settler, heterosexual, and colonial norms and violences. Huhndorf and Suzack also suggest that “Indigenous feminism – as a political strategy and project – requires the alliances that are built through the engagement, contributions, and support of Indigenous men and non-Indigenous men and women.”199 Published in 2020 and edited by Tk’emlupsemc critic Sarah Nickel and white settler scholar Amanda Fehr, the edited collection In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms addresses the usefulness and the expansion of Indigenous feminisms at this juncture of their thirty-plusyear history. As Nickel indicates, the volume “continues to broaden

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and deepen understandings of what Indigenous feminisms are, and incorporates theories, practices, and bodies outside traditional purviews.”200 It marks the “wish to cultivate cross-fertilizations and dialogue” between colonialism, heteropatriarchy, stereotyping, and the erasure of Indigenous gender and LGBTQ2 experience “as a way to connect previously separated conversations” across approaches, disciplines, geographies, and “positionalities (gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, age.”201 Meanwhile, that Indigenous feminisms “engage with kinship and relationships in both complementary and contradictory ways”202 is a rich, important, and indeed metafeminist facet that, like generational differences, the contributors to In Good Relation seek to promote rather than flatten. My responsibility, as I see it, is mainly to listen to Indigenous critics, scholars, activists, and writers. It is to learn what they are willing to share with me, and to resist reproducing settler-colonial manifestations and violent hermeneutics that appropriate experiences, traditions, legacies, or mythologies that do not and will never belong to me. In what follows, and in my reading of Lindberg’s Birdie later in this essay, I claim not to know or to write Indigenous women’s lives, but to try to read and write alongside them, making best practice of the analytical tools I have at my disposal as I aim to develop ethical responses to the rich complexities of Indigenous feminisms and women’s writing. Another thing to me is clear and uncontestable: settler colonialism is not a singular historical occurrence but a systemic and ongoing framework. Indigenous feminisms are intrinsically tied to this notion that “colonialism is a structure, not an event.”203 With this acknowledged, it can become easier to recognize how settler knowledge production, just as it seeks to mobilize indigeneity, can inadvertently strip it of its own existing beliefs, practices, and sovereignty. This is what Sarah Radcliffe demonstrates in her report on settler knowledge production and its “patterns of engagement with and oppression of indigeneity.”204 Moreover, Radcliffe’s argument about the need to resist patterns of oppression relies on a definition of indigeneity in intersectional terms: “As an analytical concept, indigeneity attends to the social, cultural, economic, political, institutional, and epistemic processes through which the meaning of being Indigenous in a particular time and place is constructed.”205 Intersectionality is also taken up in turn by Métis scholar Natalie Clark. Inspired by Quechua

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scholar Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and Anishinaabe researcher Dory Nason’s Red Feminism, Clark espouses what she calls Red Intersectionality and defends, along with Eve Tuck (Unangax) and Wayne Yang, “methodologies that are rooted in Indigenous sovereignty and are grounded in specific Indigenous Nations’ ontologies and epistemologies.”206 In connection with Million’s felt theory, Clark’s Red Intersectionality repatriates “oral histories and lived experiences”207 of earlier personal forms of narrative by Indigenous women – as Fontaine’s work, and later Lindberg’s emphasis on affect in Birdie, will reflect below. In their delineation of Indigenous feminisms, Huhndorf and Suzack point out the importance of intersectional specificities: “Although presumed to fall within normative definitions of women of colour and postcolonial feminism, Indigenous feminism remains an important site of gender struggle that engages the crucial issues of cultural identity, nationalism, and decolonization particular to Indigenous contexts.”208 Indirectly, they anticipate Clark’s Red Intersectionality; they also pave the way for Tuck and Yang’s discussion of the differences between anti-colonialism on the one hand and decolonization on the other, that is to say, of the differing objectives of social justice projects generally and of decolonization specifically. Particularly where the settler-state is concerned, “decolonizing the Americas means all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless.”209 In the same vein and for the same reason, the two critics argue that “Native Feminisms [are] incommensurable with other feminisms,”210 even though they also argue that incommensurability, as I will consider further on, does not necessarily preclude careful forms of allyship. Indigenous feminisms’ fields of influence are plural. In the second and revised 2016 edition of her book Neither Indian Princesses nor Easy Squaws, Janice Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe (AnishinaabeNehiowe-Métis) recalls the impact of Black American feminist theory on Indigenous feminisms. She understands the serious lack of scholarship about Indigenous women’s creative power and relationality – which she signifies with the Anishinaabe word Manitoukwe – in terms of hook’s critique in Talking Back of common assumptions made about the silencing of Black women as a natural sign of their submission to patriarchy. As Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe writes:

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“When hooks points out that Black women have not been silent, I am reminded of [Plains Cree Métis scholar and poet Emma] La Rocque’s insistence that Indigenous women have not been silent, that in fact our voices were suppressed by publishers who were ‘influenced by uncomprehending critics and audiences [and] controlled the type of material that was published.”211 Dumont also attests to having written and notably titled her first 1996 collection of poems, A Really Good Brown Girl, at a time when she was “reading a combination of Aboriginal/African-American women writers.”212 However, as Clark importantly recalls, if Indigenous feminist writings have been influenced by the early intersectional analysis of Black feminists, the intersections of colonization, sexism, and racism in Indigenous women’s lives “were identified long before the writings of the early African American women activists part of the Combahee Collective or Kimberlé Crenshaw.”213 For instance, Clark cites the early work of Sioux activist Zitkala-Sa and Paiute author Sarah Winnemucca on the connections between gender, age, and land exploitation “as they witnessed it at the turn of the century.”214 Even though writers like Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwes and Dumont may have been reading Black feminist theory in the 1990s, as LaRocque observes, personal, and intersectional, renditions by Indigenous women of colonial and racist oppression were rarely acknowledged by settler feminist or race critics. LaRocque also points out that the Canadian market was much more interested in a “softsell Native literature,”215 and then even that seemed to get negative translation as “too angry.”216As Million in turn sums up, the reception of Indigenous women’s writing was dire, and by 2010 Indigenous feminisms were still emerging as a scholarly mode of analysis and criticism, and remained often “under-examined in contemporary feminist theory.”217 Huhndorf and Suzack indicate that art and literature have had a key but critically neglected role in the development of Indigenous feminisms and in making Indigenous women “visible,” since women writers “have had to contend with scholarly narratives that privilege men’s work and deflect attention away from issues of gender.”218 Today, leading Indigenous authors receive more recognition in the mainstream, like Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau (Cree by her mother) and Joséphine Bacon (Innu) in Quebec, or Lindberg and Vermette, whose novel The Break won the Governor General’s

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Literary Award for fiction in English Canada in 2016, while both Birdie and The Break were Canada Reads contenders, the first in 2016 and the second in 2017. But if 2020’s In Good Relation is a major contribution to promote the centrality and multiplicity of Indigenous feminisms, Huhndorf and Suzack’s 2010 observation still holds true, despite efforts to give more serious critical attention to, teach, and review Indigenous women’s writing. In view of continuing erasures, assembling early and pioneering forms of intersectional praxis in Indigenous feminist writing takes on particular importance, and this is where a metafeminist lens can again be useful. Scholars like Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe, LaRocque, and Million take stock of Indigenous women’s narratives and storytelling in the 1970s and the advent of personalized accounts of experiences with colonialism, patriarchy and sexism, and racism.219 Million does her own metafeminist work in recalling Indigenous feminists who have been writing, since the 1973 publication of Campbell’s Halfbreed, about the silence imposed by male band leaders on women’s storytelling and histories. The cause of damaging internalized hatred, Métis disenfranchisement figures simultaneously as a political and a personal barrier in Campbell’s text – barriers that some women were actually discouraged from breaking down by their communities.220 Other Indigenous women writers who followed in Campbell’s stead include Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Beth Brant (Tyendinaga Mohawk), and Louise Bernice Halfe (Cree), while Maracle, Beatrice Culleton (Métis), and Jeannette Armstrong (Syilx Okanagan) also write about self-hatred and child abuse in a way that was previously unseen and unheard in Indigenous literature. Always at the cusp of the personal and the political, they write of colonization’s ongoing impact on body and land, drawing emphasis on subjective and affective truth and embodied emotion as worthy and legitimate forms of knowledge. “That silence. I’d like to write that silence,”221 the narrator of Fontaine’s 2011 Kuessipan declares, in the midst of young single mothers such as herself dealing with the cycle of fear and solitude of a difficult but also in many ways cherished Innu life on a reserve in Northern Quebec. Racism, discrimination, and sexual violence have long contributed to the persistent colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America, alongside patriarchal settler-state policy on Indigenous

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rights, governance, and relationships.222 Several writers and critics demonstrate how the violence and discrimination within mainstream culture’s colonial practices, as well as the internal power structures of Indigenous communities, contribute to the precarity and violence that Indigenous women face today. Maracle considers patriarchy as a result of settler colonialism, and how the latter’s removal of Indigenous women from positions of power has instigated settler gender roles within Indigenous communities. In line with queer theory’s intersectional questioning of sexuality as being at the heart of the modern liberal nation/settler-state, Audra Simpson (Mohawk) underlines how the settler nation of Canada is actually founded upon the disappearing of Indigenous women – a notion that women writers, I will show later, take up in turn. About the colonial disruption of Indigenous family structures, Million indicates: “the 1876 Indian Act radically reorganized Indigenous familial relations to conform to a uniform patriarchal order. Those societies that were matrilineal, or those in which both mothers’ and fathers’ lines had determined identity, property, and responsibility, were brought into a firm hierarchy, with Indian men positioned in a descending order of authority, with white male Indian agents and male priests at the top.”223 Given the gender discrimination at the heart of the Indian Act, women were not allowed to vote in band elections until 1951, and unlike Indigenous men whose marriages to non-Indigenous women allotted their spouse with instant Indian status, Indigenous women who married non-Indigenous men lost theirs. After 1970, Section 12.1b of the Indian Act “became a rallying point”; there followed fifteen years of struggle with male band leaders as well as with national Indigenous political organizations, including the National Indian Brotherhood, to get Canada to amend the act with Bill C-531, which “has never fully alleviated the issues of band membership that the women sought.”224 Million writes: “whether consciously or not, Indian men reinforced colonialism’s strongest defense: silence. At times the conformity between Indian and white men was overt, which Kathleen Jamieson, a Canadian legal historian, described as a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ … a powerful blanket of silence … temporarily imposed on discussion of the status of Indian women. It became taboo and unwise in certain circles even to mention the topic.”225

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As a result, one recurring critique directed at Indigenous feminisms is their supposed fracturing quality in the face of perceivably more pressing issues, such as the fight for political self-governance and land rights. Yet as some feminists weigh collective and tribal concerns against individual rights and women’s experiences, LaRocque argues that “it is not in the interest of any collective or culture to dismiss or abuse individual rights.”226 Some critics work hard to highlight the particularities of traditional gender roles in Indigenous communities and the complementarity of genders within the systems before colonial invasion and the patriarchal settler-state. In her examination of gender complementary traditions, which she opposes to the dichotomous and hierarchical fabric of settler patriarchy, Yaqui scholar Rebecca Tsosie recalls how colonial governments eventually placed ownership of resources in the hands of men, with several treaty negotiations recognizing only male political leaders selected “to sign away tribal rights to land that, under traditional custom, was within the ownership and control of Native women.”227 Meanwhile, Huhndorf and Suzack warn that feminists must be careful in recalling Indigenous traditions and their contemporary applicability; they ask to what extent these might be liberating to women today, observe that patriarchy itself has become tradition in Indigenous communities, and underline that gender oppression exists within them and not just within the dominant culture.228 According to Joyce Green (Ktunaxa and Cree-Scots Métis), “too many Indigenous women have been silenced or had their social and political roles minimized by invocations of appropriate tradition relative to women’s voices and choices.”229 Others, like Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) and Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Navajo), refuse the whiteness and colonial ownership of feminism in their unapologetic stances in regard to Indigenous feminisms’ roots in Indigenous thought.230 For her part, in an essay entitled “Indigenous Women and Power,” Maracle categorically refuses the use of gender complementarity as a useful opposing political stance for women: “WE ARE NOT FEMINISTS; WE ARE GENDER COMPLEMENTARY … I hear these words and I want to roll off my chair, gnash my teeth, and pound my fists. Although I believe the term gender complementary, coupled with the term governance, describes many societies of the past, it does not address our situation today. It unashamedly suggests that

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because we were gender complementary in the past we should not be feminists today. A different past does not form the foundation for opposition to feminism.”231 “I am an Indigenous feminist,” Maracle declares later in this essay, and continues: Unlike those who dismiss Indigenous feminists for being influenced from outside our world (as though men were not), I believe feminism is a response to the Canadian-state orchestrated invasion of our areas of jurisdiction by Indigenous men. The establishment of the chief electoral system that initially did not allow women to participate is not connected to community, but rather it is connected to the federal government. Unlike those who condemn women for operating outside our culture, I understand that they are operating from within the current reality. Indigenous feminism seeks the restoration of matriarchal authority and the restoration of male responsibility to these matriarchal structures to reinstate respect and support for the women within them. The dismissal of Indigenous feminists silences the whole.232 Innu poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine in turn affirms that “être féministe, pour une femme autochtone, est une évidence.”233 For Maracle here, and others like Green, patriarchal oppression is not simply an additional problem to be confronted under colonialism or after decolonization. Feminism is inherently part of anti-colonial and sovereignty work: “within some Indigenous and non-Indigenous political organizations there is some recognition that gendered analysis is critical for political legitimacy and for sound policy and strategy.”234 As “for [Kim] TallBear [Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate], for [Audra] Simpson, Indigenous feminism bec[omes] synonymous with ‘acting in good relation’ and ‘being responsible’ to community.”235 In the essays of Memory Serves, Maracle is adamant that within the patriarchal settler-state that has besieged Indigenous peoples, “the position of Indigenous women is decidedly lower than the position of Indigenous men.”236 According to her, the restoration of gender complementary systems, when “women were the great sociological governesses of the past that held jurisdiction over land and the wealth of families,”237 does not interest male elders,

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tribal leaders, or any other form of governing system. If governing power is to be restored to women, as Maracle argues it should be, the need for feminist analysis, despite its implications in settler approaches, is paramount, along with the “need to know how it came to pass that Indigenous women have become de-valued,” the need to “en[d] family and domestic abuse,” and the need to refuse to “put violence against women and children on the back burner.”238 According to Maracle, Indigenous projects of national liberation, of “political self-determination and economic development,” neglect to incorporate the place and active role of women in this agenda. Rebuilt forms of governance must include women holding power, that is to say, power within family structures as much as outside of them, to rectify the “systemic breakdowns” incited by colonialism and women’s ensuing “loss of power over the social relations inside our families and the internal world of our nations.”239 In short, as Maracle probes feminism’s usefulness to Indigenous struggles for restoration, hers, I suggest, is a metafeminist stance: she calls for “a deeper kind of feminism,”240 one that indirectly summons the specificities of Red Intersectionality and the legacies of Black feminism, as well as a consciousness that is first and foremost in tune with the specific knowledge, practices, and authority that Indigenous women need to reclaim and that nations and communities need to restore at the core of their governing systems and social fabrics. Dumont and Fontaine grapple with shared intersectional factors and the differences that constitute Indigenous feminisms in work that calls forth the plural form of the nomenclature. Dumont writes in  English and I discuss her work briefly below, while Fontaine writes in French and I discuss her work, less known in the Anglophone world, in a longer consideration. Both writers practice very distinct intersectional poetics. They also write from different locations, nations, backgrounds, and social positionings. Unlike Fontaine, who writes from a more deflected viewpoint, Dumont engages avowedly with feminist thought. As for the contemporariness of my text selection, I’ve allowed myself a quick pre-2000 foray into Dumont’s 1996 A Really Good Brown Girl, reprinted in 2015 with a foreword by Maracle and an afterword by Dumont. Like Brand’s nonfiction, Dumont’s poetry in this collection confronts head-on intersectional experience.

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Standards of Whiteness (Marilyn Dumont) Dumont stems from a near lineage of Métis women writers who include Campbell with her memoir Halfbreed and Culleton with her novel April Raintree.241 In Dumont’s eponymous poem in prose, “Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl,” it is the first day of school, and the young poet-speaker knows instinctually and immediately that she is the “halfbreed” outsider who must learn the rules of the white classroom and how to survive them. The repetition in the text’s early lines relates a sense of acceleration as the speaker’s acquisition of internalized shame and racism, of her learned otherness, is quick and brutal: “I am a foreigner, I stay in my seat, frozen, afraid to move, afraid to make a mistake, afraid to speak, they talk differently than I do, I don’t sound the way they do, but I don’t know how to sound any different, so I don’t talk, don’t volunteer answers to questions the teacher asks. I become invisible.”242 However, not even the reprieve of invisibility is available to her. White standards of female and middle-class acceptability mercilessly descend upon her, setting themselves as the norm by which the child will measure her moral worth and social belonging: “My skin always gave me away. In grade one … a little white girl stared at the colour of my arms and exclaimed, ‘Are you ever brown!’ I wanted to pull my short sleeves down to my wrists and pretend that I hadn’t heard her, but she persisted, ‘Are you Indian?’”243 Fearing the social repercussions of telling the truth as well as tormented by shame for lying, the poet-speaker answers no and walks away. The powerful Catholic symbol of the school’s St Anne statue, evoked through the alliterative connection between “skin translucent” and “fluorescent skin, as if a sinless life makes your skin a receptacle of light,” sets another model of comparison for the speaker’s sense of marginalization among the white little girls in her class: they have “porcelain skin like Ste Anne,” and also “like [her] dolls: bumpy curls, geometric faces, crepe paper dresses, white dresses and patent shoes.”244 But the poet-speaker does not feel that she can in turn “glisten with presence, confidence, glisten with the holiness of St Anne,” leading into another painful scene where she is taken to be “‘scrubbed the hell out of ” by her “brother’s white fiancée” for an upcoming wedding: “When it was over, I felt that every part of my

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body had been hounded of dirt and sin and that now I, like St Anne, had become a receptacle of light.”245 Though the sardonic humour of being “lathered, scrubbed, shampooed, exfoliated, medicated, pedicured, manicured, rubbed down and moisturized” ensues, in the midst of the fiancée’s vigour is a violent display of white supremacist values as well as the deep-seated stereotype of the “dirty Indian girl” – opposed to a white idealism of moral and physical respectability so “symptomatic,” Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe recalls, “of the colonial mindset.”246 Throughout this poem, Dumont’s young poet-speaker learns the racism underlying colonial compliance, to finally be awarded – as she indicates not without the facetiousness that writing this “memoir” poem as an adult affords her – for “most improved student,” having “learned to follow really well.”247 This example, as do other poems from Dumont’s collection, highlights the politics as well as the affective processes of internalizing systemic intersectional subjection to white supremacist standards of physical, linguistic, and, by extension, moral acceptability. But the poem also ends on a note of defiance when, as a university student, Dumont’s “really good brown girl” refutes the colonizer’s correction of her spoken language: “I am in a university classroom, an English professor corrects my spoken English in front of the class. I say, ‘really good.’ He says, ‘You mean really well, don’t you?’ I glare at him and say emphatically, ‘No, I mean really good.’”248 Like Brand’s scene of classroom resistance in A Map to the Door of No Return, Dumont’s willfulness reaches further than for simple refusal. The speaker takes back the meaning of “really good,” takes back ownership of her brown Métis self, and seizes for her own critical use the language employed by the colonizer to belittle her and impose white settler Catholic values and social moral norms. “[R]eally good” is what the poetspeaker learned to be, according to settler standards, growing up. Just as Campbell’s narrator wields the meaning of “halfbreed” away from racist and colonial discourse to transform it into her memoir, Dumont’s “really good brown girl” apprehends colonial language and, as in other poems in the collection, turns it on its head.249 This is the resistance that drives the poet’s intersectional feminism, whose point of view and experiences are specific to Dumont’s and her speaker’s Métis life and subjection to the racial, gender, and linguistic structures in place.

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A Deeper Feminism (Naomi Fontaine) To recall the internal tensions within Indigenous feminisms, Innu author Naomi Fontaine’s writing epitomizes efforts to strike a balance between collective and tribal concerns on the one hand, and individual rights and experiences on the other hand. It is never one or the other in Fontaine’s autofictional work, Kuessipan. As the term “autofiction,” widely used in Francophone literary criticism, denotes, Fontaine blends autobiographical and novelistic genres to foster a personal, memoir-like work of fiction.250 Narrated in the first person by its protagonist, Kuessipan is also a self-reflexive, collective project that seeks to name and record contemporary Innu life and intersectional experience on the reserve, recalling the personalized account of colonialism pioneered by Campbell in Halfbreed and theorized by Million – of affective language and experiential narrative as legitimate forms of knowledge and history. Although not an autobiographical text per se but a work of autofiction, Fontaine’s work adopts some of the literary strategies Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands identify in their study of Indigenous women’s autobiographical writing, which they characterize as a form that blends components of Euro-American tradition with Indigenous oral storytelling and emphasis on event, attention to the sacredness of language, concern with landscape, affirmation of cultural values and tribal solidarity. These properties of the oral tradition derive from a concern for communal welfare, the subordination of the individual to the collective needs of the tribe. Such concepts are not the material of autobiography in the Euro-American tradition, with its celebration of individuality and originality. Paradoxically, it is the element of individualism in American Indian women’s autobiography that is innovative: the conservative roots of the Euro-American literary tradition provide the tribal narrator with a new element essential to the process of personal narration – egocentric individualism. When the Euro-American tradition is merged with indigenous elements, a unique form of expression results that has been given the implicitly contradictory name American Indian autobiography.251

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Bataille and Sand’s imperfect description still points to a number of important aspects of Kuessipan that make it an interesting work to examine in light of the issues with which Indigenous feminisms currently grapple: blurred boundaries between the personal and the political; the relationship of the individual to community; and the adoption both of Indigenous forms of storytelling and of Western modes of expression with the presence, to recall Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, of the reliable first-person narrator of autobiography.252 However, self-sufficiency for Indigenous women, or the “egocentric individualism” miscast by Bataille and Sand in their definition above, is not “what the Western mind is likely to engage in [as] a concept of Western liberal individualism,”253 as Kim Anderson (Cree/Métis) points out. This distinction “runs contrary to values typical of Native cultures, where a sense of self and the individual is grounded within a sense of responsibility to community and relationships”254 – as it certainly is in Kuessipan. As Bataille and Sands also indicate, autobiographies by Indigenous women tend to “focus on the everyday aspects of life, family, social interaction, feelings and responses to experience, and record tribal customs and traditions as well.”255 Finally, the two critics insist on relationality, whereby Indigenous autobiographical forms convey a sense of “connectedness of all things, of personal life flow, and episodes often are not sequential but linked thematically to establish a pattern of character developing through the response to private experience.”256 It is in relation to this “personal life flow” that Kuessipan consists of both an intimate and also a collective history, rendered in the voice of its young, unnamed female narrator. Innu customs and traditions find themselves deeply disrupted by struggles with poverty as well as the neocolonial – industrial, political, ecological – ravages of the twenty-first century. Throughout the text, the speaker names, lists, and at times even maps out the geography of reserve life in Uashat. Created in 1949 by the Canadian federal government to promote mining exploration in the region, Uashat is part of Innu Takuaikan Uashat mak Mani-Utenam and is located on the outskirts of Sept-Îles, Quebec: “That’s the grade school that they built a few years ago. When you look at it from above, you see it’s shaped like a bird. An eagle, I think. Trying to be poetic … That’s the daycare. The project took a while to get off the ground. The place looks like a doghouse painted

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orange … If you keep going, you’ll come to the Catholic cemetery. There aren’t many graves, and its not because people aren’t dying … The ball field has always been there. The red paint is washed out, and the white is peeling … If you keep going straight, pretty soon you’ll have sand beneath your feet.”257 If Fontaine depicts Uashat as a place of neocolonial degradation, she also emphasizes its natural and communal beauty. Uashat, it turns out, is a site of both stagnation and ambition, of both brutal reality and hopeful futurity. Despite the ongoing devastation of colonialism and the generational trauma of residential schooling – “[h]ow the Indians, who never wanted to be white, were kidnapped, the children scattered, taken elsewhere”258 – the narrator follows a powerful impetus to record the present and to commemorate the past as well as the people who persist with Innu ways of life. In doing so, she confronts her desire to present or “invent” an alternative version of Innu existence: I’ve invented lives. The man with the drum never told me about himself. I wove a story from his gnarled hands and his bent back. He mumbled to himself in an ancient, distant language. I acted like I knew all about him. The man I invented – I loved him. And the other lives I embellished. I wanted to see the beauty; I wanted to create it. Change the nature of things – I don’t want to name them – so that I see only the embers that still burn in the hearts of the first inhabitants. Pride is a symbol: pain is the price I don’t want to pay. Still, I invented, I built a false world, a reconstructed reserve where kids play outside and women have children to love them and the language survives. I wish things had been easier to say and tell and write down on the page, without expecting anything except to be understood. But who wants to read words like drugs, incest, alcohol, loneliness, suicide, bad cheque, rape? I hurt, and I haven’t even spoken yet. I haven’t talked about anybody. I don’t dare yet.259 The traditions, beauty, and resilience expressed in this passage are not simply the result of the narrator’s desire to gloss over reality. Vignettes of Innu life, some devastating and hopeless, others resplendent and empowering, are the very make-up of Fontaine’s narrative. There are pregnant young women and forlorn young men who wander or

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die too early on Fontaine’s reserve; inebriated teenagers who hang out at the ball field; and the precarious conditions of those living in overcrowded, neglected houses beside a body of water polluted by the region’s aluminum smelter. Meanwhile, Fontaine also depicts traditionally nomad Innu families following the riverbank on their sacred four-day treks; women dancing to the beat of drums at a wedding ceremony; the sacred Nutshimit, “the back country, the land of my ancestors,” and “a ritual for caribou hunters”; salmon fishing season “on the Mishta-Shipu, which allows the community to reclaim the land, where again “the land is sacred” and “the men don’t come here to drink, and neither do the young people,” and where “silence does a world of good to those who listen to it.”260 Through Kussipan’s minimalist narrative style, there are silences that are made for “listening,” like that of Nutshimit, the land of the Innu ancestors, or the silence of the wind, animals, fish, and water. Again, in line with Indigenous women writers before her, Fontaine seeks to “write that silence.”261 A young single mother living in Uashat, the narrator relates the social conditions of several girls on the reserve to the intersectional experience of gender, racial, and material strife as the legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism. Gender roles appear through a different lens here than that usually familiar to modern Western readers, as here these roles are determined by the neocolonial conditions of the Innu reserve. The young men on the reserve face difficulties in defining their place in the community, in the shadow of immobility, confinement, and dependence upon the state, waiting for “a cheque on the first of every month.”262 No role models, remarks the narrator, have replaced “that masculine feeling of pride, not just because they were providers, but because they showed that they loved their families”; none are raising the young people of Uashat “to teach them how to become men and women, a nation in their own image – not to dominate, but to subsist and live on.”263 Yet these characters are not strictly figured in tragic or miserabilist terms: “The risk of not getting pregnant is greater than the other way around. All the girls want to give birth … a way of existing, strengthening the nation that others want to decimate, lust for life, and the will to stop dying: a child.”264 If Fontaine refuses to idealize teenage motherhood or trivialize its personal and social costs for the young women of Uashat – “She’ll

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blush when people ask her what her little brother’s name is … She’ll be twenty on his fifth birthday” – she also recognizes the complexity of its leverage: “he’ll have her eyes. His gurgling will sound sweet, and there will be splendor in his awkwardness. She’ll burn with the desire to live as he nurses. When he’s born.”265 In other words, if read out of context or in exclusively Western or settler feminist terms, Kuessipan’s statements about teenage mothers in Uashat might appear as a mere or troubling, if not cliché, recourse to biological determinism and normative gender roles. Yet Maracle’s “deeper kind of feminism” should be summoned before passing such judgment, given Fontaine’s emphasis on the specificities of contemporary Innu life, the limited options of neocolonial existence, and her attention to the intersectional circumstances of these particular girls and women. The narrative and its careful recording of life in Uashat ultimately pose gestures of care, consisting of the narrator’s concern for others as well as her response to “the language of a forgotten people, a call for help, out of modesty.”266 Confronted with a young female cousin tormented by her likely pregnancy, the narrator wants “to tell her that I know,” in her own “modest” narrative, and to answer the “call for help” of those who suffer and who risk being “forgotten.”267 This is a narrative solicitude that can also be devised from the book’s title, Kuessipan, which signifies “to you” or “à toi” in the Innu language.268 Underlying this address to the other is an ethics of care, which I will theorize further on and which ultimately shapes Fontaine’s intersectional poetics as her narrator dedicates her text to her people, known and unknown, deploying some gentle humour in the process: “These are letters to my baby. To my mother. To my big sister. To God. To my father. To Lucille. To Jean-Yves. To the education officer of the Uashat and Mani-utenam Band Council. To my ex’s parents. To my ex. To myself. To my little sister. To the Premier of Quebec. To my brother. To Gabriel. To my older cousin Luc. To Nicolas D. To William – not the prince. To the cruel world. To my tribe. To M’s father. To the sad people. To the children of the future.”269 Invoking the principle of kinship, or “all my relations” familiar to most Indigenous peoples,270 the narrator’s address includes her young husband deceased in a car accident, her son, her mother, her female cousins, the teenagers of the reserve, the ancestors. She designates the other through a continuous slippage of pronouns and demonstratives: from you to she and he;

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from that to these to we: “Those who once travelled the country, from ocean to ocean, never staying in the same place – and the people we have become since.”271 The work of recognition is paramount to the narrator as she resists turning Indigenous suffering into a form of tokenism: “I wish you could meet the girl with the round belly. The one who will raise her children on her own.”272 The almost psalmodic characteristic of the narrative most forcefully reinforces its commemorative function, evoked through the abundant usage of litany and allowing the narrator to put into words Innu lives on the Uashat reserve: “Oppression. Injustice. Cruelty. Loneliness. Love songs. Unforgiveable mistakes. The babies who will never be born.”273 It is as if Fontaine’s speaker surrenders to enumeration to say, or report on, what can never be fully narrated or contained by representation or perhaps by writing itself: “I threw a white veil over the dirt.”274 The use of enumeration also designates positive aspects of Innu existence, as the inscription of Innu words on the page functions as a glossary of terms to relay particular forms of kinship epitomized by Indigenous philosophies of relationality: “Neka, my mother. Mashkuss, bear cub. Nikuss, my son. Mikun, feather … Ishkuess, girl. Nitanish, my daughter”; and later her grandmother is named “Tshukuminu, as if she were the grandmother of the whole world.”275 Fontaine’s litany includes numerous places that define the precarious and intersectional oppressions, but equally so the communal life, of Uashat: “There’s the primary and the secondary school, the Band Council, and the Catholic church. There are hundreds of houses, but only three designs. The park has been vandalized.”276 Such invocations of community and relation convey not so much a form of nostalgia but a prolonged sense of time, a present stretched by a living past and an unknown future, a sense of time and knowledge that the narrator has learned from elders and ancestors: “of what we must never desert – a dusty, rutted road, especially in autumn, especially for us. Nomad: I like to imagine this is a natural way of living.277 As Paola Mossetto observes: “There occurs, like an overflowing wave, the insertion without warning of a litany of Innu terms, a series which is like a love story, the appropriation of the speech of a universe buried within the depths of the self, at the centre of the universe.”278 Reciting love and recognition through the constant invocation of the other – whether the lost lover, the ancestors, the narrator’s child, or

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even the reader – writing remains affective and sensorial: “I wish you could meet the girl with the round belly”; “I’d like to tell you that it’s always that way among the Innu”; “I wanted to bring you … I wanted you to see … I wanted you to hear … But what I really wanted to share with you is that unspeakable pride of being me.”279 The other is constantly invited to know, hear, see, and understand. The speaker wants her interlocutor not only to read but also to taste and touch the Innu world, to feel concerned, to care: “You’ll taste the salty air. The sun will start to go down. The sky will put on a show. Let the waves rock your senses. You will be comforted. Walk through those spruce trees and you’ll see the bay, the beach with its soft sand, the aluminum smelter, the islands, the river as wide as the sea. The ocean, from which you came.”280 It is through its address to the other that Kuessipan opens onto a crucial sense of futurity that goes well beyond mere survival and negative critique, as its conclusion highlights: “Your fresh eyes will see the beauty of the world for the first time. Your laughter will be the echo of my hopes. The sun will set as we look on, our thoughts elsewhere. No mist, no rain, no weighty past to stifle the living. Silence will envelope our dreams of the future. By the shore and the tides we will stand, Nikuss.”281 A metafeminist consideration of Fontaine’s depiction of her characters’ intersectional conditions on the Innu reserve of Uashat necessarily forces out a single feminist narrative about gender roles and emancipatory ideals. However, like its formal affinities with Euro-Western autobiographical or autofictional practices, Kuessipan’s enactment of a feminist ethics of recognition, relationality, and care – through a deeply localized, specific depiction of daily Innu life on the reserve – also suggest points of convergence with non-Indigenous feminisms and women’s writing. I turn to such possible alliances next.

Cross-Border Poetics Literary feminism in Canada has an important history of linguistic alliances, namely among experimental women writers who were publishing in the 1980s.282 Feminist collaborations and collectives between French- and English-speaking women that grew out of this

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period included a handful of writers – including Brossard, Dupré, Daphne Marlatt, Gail Scott, and Indigenous author and artist Jovette Marchessault – who read, critiqued, and translated each other’s work. Several critics have taken stock of such cross-cultural and cross-linguistic collaborations, which stemmed from the women’s movement and resulted in the bilingual feminist journal Tessera founded in 1984 by Barbara Godard, Kathy Mezei, Marlatt, and Scott; the EnglishFrench collaborations of Marlatt and Brossard in Mauve; the 1983 Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots conference; as well as several works of feminist translation. The alliances I explore here are certainly less seamless than these earlier collaborations. As I considered earlier, Indigenous feminisms have had a fraught relationship to Euro-Western feminism, given the latter’s focus on the problems that confront settler, middle-class women, and which, Huhndorf and Suzack remind us, “especially in academia, remains white-centered.”283 Meanwhile, the very appellation of Indigenous feminism, especially in the singular, risks erroneously suggesting a “single, normative definition of feminism.”284 So far, I have shown that such singularity is untenable, just as singularity is what a metafeminist framework problematizes and ultimately rejects. Thinking about intersectionality has also led to further feminist interventions in anti-racist discourse – particularly crucial when Indigeneity is called up in criticism – which complicates allyship even further. As Brand points out in A Map to the Door of No Return, settler colonialism implicates diverse settlers, including not only white people of European descent but also people of colour: “colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land.”285 Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd in turn works to “activate Indigeneity as a condition of possibility in ways that implicate diasporic subjects in the colonization of the Americas.”286 Byrd highlights the intersectional aspects of minority oppressions, and specifically the ways in which conditions of gender, race, class, and other forms of social oppression function beyond simple binaries of white and Black to cross marginal positions and power systems as well. The implication and impact of new, indeed new settler, Canadians in Indigenous oppression, even if unintentional, corresponds to Byrd’s concept of “cacophony,” used to decipher the

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“multiple interaction among the different colonialisms, arrivals, and displacements at work.”287 The “cacophonous” or varying degrees of settler colonialism in the continued displacement of Indigenous peoples is particularly applicable in a settler and multicultural society like Canada. In their 2012 article “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Tuck and Yang argue that just as decolonization “is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects,”288 it is also “necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity.”289 To be sure, women’s circumstances and perspectives vary from one Indigenous community and nation to another, in which histories, cultural traditions, relations, as well as living, social, and political conditions are often so distinct. Yet what many Indigenous women may share is a history of heteronormative patriarchal oppression, as well as a keen awareness of the operation of intersectionality in their lives: that is to say again, the imposition of various, simultaneous forms of oppressions – racial, sexual, material, social, cultural, personal – by settler colonialism. To take this notion of commonality further, several critics have been thinking through transfeminist, or what I prefer to call with Mohanty cross-border, approaches, to consider anti-racist and anti-colonial alliances between Indigenous feminists and feminists of colour.290 As I also mentioned earlier, Mohanty’s expansive (though not unproblematic) notion of “thirdworld” feminism includes the intersectional concerns not only of postcolonial women, but of Indigenous and other women of colour from settler nations as well: Third World women’s writings on feminism have consistently focused on the idea of the simultaneity of oppressions as fundamental to the experience of social and political marginality and the grounding of feminist politics in the histories of racism and imperialism; the crucial role of a hegemonic state in circumscribing their/our daily lives and survival struggles; the significance of memory and writing in the creation of oppositional agency; and the differences, conflicts, and contradictions internal to Third World women’s organizations and communities. In addition, they have insisted on the complex interrelationships between feminist, antiracist, and nationalist struggles.291

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This is also where an even more expansive cross-border vision can emerge: with their own internal differentials held firmly in view, various feminist projects and approaches – those of Indigenous women, Black women, women of colour, as well as white settler feminists – can be seen to share in the commonality of their (unequal) intersectional struggles, while the experiences, realities, and strategies of resistance within that struggle are varied, specific, and sometimes even in conflict. This undoubtedly fraught notion of feminist commonality is what I set out to explore, as well as the potential solidarities and allyship – possibly awkward, often unresolved – that might emerge. The question of what constitutes good settler allyship with Indigenous people is certainly topical, to which a quick survey of your search engine will no doubt attest. I now turn to poetry by Zolf and Connelly who, from their self-consciously avowed white settler positions, interrogate colonialism as it extends to systemic violence against Indigenous women, the institutional and cultural dismissal and erasure of that violence, and the larger national narrative of a patriarchal settler Canada. My goal is to devise critical points of feminist alliance or allyship. Within this potential “practice of feminism across national and cultural divisions”292 – and this is key – racial, national, cultural, material, and ideological differences and specificities must remain visibly at the forefront, as must various locations within the settler-state and varying degrees of privilege. “Sisterhood,” Mohanty aptly wrote in 1986 before shifting her attention to the less gendered and more metafeminist concept of solidarity, “cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis.”293 My reading and teaching of texts by settler writers who grapple with Indigenous women’s experiences leaves me with some nagging questions. For whom are these texts, and my own reading, designed? Who is their intended or, for that matter, unintended reader? During a rather weary class discussion when I taught Zolf ’s Janey’s Arcadia – weary in part because we were reading this challenging collection at the end of a long winter semester – one Indigenous student suggested that the collection was not written for them and so had little to elicit their engaged response. It is apparent, or at least

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it should be, that the critical alliance that I will devise below from Connelly’s and Zolf ’s work is pursued from a settler perspective – my own, and in relation to theirs. Maybe Zolf ’s poems weren’t, at least on that day and in that classroom, for my Indigenous students. Maybe they were for me, needed by me, certainly selected by me, a white settler woman professor whose epistemological and critical background has much to learn about Indigenous knowledges; the meaning and potential of alliances and borders; and when alliances are wanted and unwanted, and when borders should and should not be crossed. The following analysis, then, is not about Indigenous feminisms, but about white settler feminism. It is about white settler feminism’s engagement with Indigeneity and allyship as well as the potential pitfalls of such an engagement.294 In Mohanty’s thinking, the border figures as both a necessary limit and a potential passage, and therefore a particularly productive ethical site: Borders suggest both containment and safety, and women often pay a price for daring to claim the integrity, security, and safety of our bodies and our living spaces. I choose “feminism without borders,” then, to stress that our most expansive and inclusive visions of feminism need to be attentive to borders while learning to transcend them. Feminism without borders is not the same as “border-less” feminism. It acknowledges the fault lines, conflicts, differences, fears, and containment that borders represent. It acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border, that the lines between and through nations, race, classes, sexualities, religions, and disabilities, are real – and that a feminism without borders must envision changed and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division.295 I would think it possible to imagine such shared, public, feminist sites open to a wide sense of solidarity and resistant to banal, universalizing, or homogenizing notions of sisterhood. As Elizabeth Kalbfleisch suggests, Mohanty’s “feminism without borders” is really a cross-border perspective, especially useful as “shared spaces mean that women who experience different realities often identify with divergent histories; although they adhere to distinct cultural traditions, they may also

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grapple with mutual experiences.”296 But again, Indigenous-settler feminist alliances are far from being as seamless as their theorizing here might suggest, especially in light of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.297

Missing and Murdered In the words of the National Inquiry’s Final Report, “Canada’s staggering rates of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people” have drawn considerable media attention.298 Often, they figure as objects of a “‘shock and awe’ campaign” steeped in pathologizing, incriminating, and colonial overtones.299 The issue has been a focus of public interventions by Indigenous and nonIndigenous women writers. Several events provide not only context into the crisis of the missing and murdered, but also a familiar narrative of erasure, dismissal, and spectacle contested by feminist activists. Two years after the 2014 murders of Tina Fontaine (Sagkeeng First Nation) and Loretta Saunders (Inuk), which drew national attention to the systemic violence against Indigenous women in this country,300 eleven Indigenous women in Val-d’Or, Quebec, brought forth public allegations of abuse and intimidation against Sûreté du Québec police officers. The event drew the attention of Radio-Canada’s investigative television program Enquête, but Crown prosecutors eventually dismissed the accusations.301 In 2019 the Cindy Gladue case was ordered a new trial by the Supreme Court of Canada, since the murder victim’s initial trial, which saw her accused killer acquitted, was found to be tainted with prejudice and error.302 In fact, in 2014, the RCMP reported – and according to many experts underreported – close to 1,200 unsolved murders and disappearances of girls, women, and Two-Spirited people throughout Canada and, in particular, along the 725-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 in northern British Columbia, hauntingly referred to as the Highway of Tears. Since 1995, an alarming number of women have been reported vanished from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and half of the sixtynine women on the list of missing are Indigenous.303 Only in 2001 did authorities finally act on the disappearances after intense lobbying from groups such as the Native Women’s Association of Canada.

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A joint Vancouver Police Department and RCMP Missing Women task force was established. In 2002, already arrested on weapons charges, Robert Pickton, an owner of a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, was rearrested for the murder of two women, after a police search of his farm. DNA evidence found on Pickton’s farm, tracing back to thirty-three women of whom twelve were Indigenous, escalated the murder charges against him to twenty-six. Yet in 2007, he was convicted of only six counts of second-degree murder. In 2010, twenty charges of first-degree murder were withdrawn.304 Cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women throughout Canada remain unsolved. Many have been outrageously dismissed as incidental crimes for police investigation or, in the words of Métis playwright Marie Clements, as “unnatural and accidental.”305 The failure to more accurately recognize these cases as a colonial and sociological problem has prevented, until recently, a full public inquiry into the systemic femicidal and racial violence at their core. The urgent need for a special inquiry finally led to the Canadian government’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, although the latter saw many delays, resignations, and criticisms, and at several points lagged in both process and the information released to victims’ families and the public.306 In June 2019, three years after its establishment, the inquiry released its final report along with 231 calls for justice and recommendations, among them an overhaul of police practices. Connelly and Zolf are not alone in attempting cross-border alliances through literary writing, as Shraya’s recent works or Rita Wong’s eco-ethico poetics attest. Nor are Connelly and Zolf the first or the last white settler women writers to raise the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people, as well as the violence and misogyny of Canada’s colonial past and present. Colleen Murphy’s award-winning play Pig Girl was first produced in Edmonton in 2013 and published in 2015. It depicts, with what several of her critics justifiably consider unnecessarily graphic brutality, the slaughter of an Indigenous woman in the barn of a pig farmer. Other critiques particularly of the Edmonton production of Pig Girl underline its all non-Indigenous cast; the fact that the killer, taken to be Pickton, is given a prominent voice alongside his victims; and the question of ownership of this story overall.307 But the kind of painful controversy caused by Murphy’s depiction of a

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scene of violence against Indigenous women has not been limited to those by white settlers. Mixed-Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) settler poet Shannon Webb-Campbell’s 2019 collection I Am a Body of Land was pulled by Book*hug shortly after its 2018 publication under the title Who Took My Sister?, in the aftermath of scathing public criticism from Inuk author and activist Delilha Saunders over WebbCampbell’s failure to obtain her family’s permission to depict her sister Loretta Saunders’s 2014 murder.308 Webb-Campbell rewrote the collection, which was shortlisted for the 2019 A.M. Klein Poetry Prize, under the editorial guidance of Lee Maracle, who also wrote an introduction. The collaboration between the two women shows how generational mentorship – as is the case with Maracle’s aid to a younger Indigenous author – and not only internal dissent can be understood in metafeminist terms and lead, as it does here, to a poetics of healing and accountability. The poetry in Connelly’s Come Cold River and Zolf ’s Janey’s Arcadia self-consciously gestures toward feminist cross-border alliances. Connelly, especially in the collection’s opening prose section “Home for Good” and the poem “Enough,” prods the very language – semiotic, media, and symbolic – that enables colonial and sexual violence to endure as the foundation of national settler narratives and capitalist consumer culture. Zolf prods historical settler narratives by literally writing and over-writing them with software and her own experimental poetics. Connelly and Zolf, however, do not bear witness to the simultaneous impact of state, colonial, and patriarchal oppression on their communities with the same experiential immediacy or generational memory as do some of their Indigenous contemporaries, including Clements, Vermette, Kanapé Fontaine, and Rebecca Belmore of the Lac Seul Nation (Anishinaabe); and Campbell, Maracle, An Antane Kapesh (Innu), and Mini Aodla Freeman (Inuk) before them. Belmore, for instance, presents a cross-border artistic praxis with a video piece immersed in the intersectional specificities of Indigenous women’s experiences. It was featured in a solo exhibit, The Name and the Unnamed, and can be accessed on her website.309 Belmore’s art is a direct response to Indigenous femicide in Canada, and her 2002 performance on a street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside consists of a public commemoration of missing Indigenous women and girls. Gendered, racialized, and colonial violences serve as the context for

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Belmore’s intervention as she calls out, one by one, the names of those rendered voiceless, unheard, and too easily forgotten by mainstream society. Belmore also literally entangles herself in a shared, rather than co-opted, vulnerability with the missing women. In a reminder of Jaime Black’s aesthetic response to the missing and murdered with her Red Dress Project, Belmore nails the red dress she wears to a wall and then painfully proceeds to physically wrench herself from it. Her occupation of such a difficult urban setting confronts its residents and audiences with the unaccounted disappearance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women from the Downtown Eastside. By taking her performance to the street, the artist presents her audience with the opportunity to witness, and hopefully to take up, the ethical challenge of vulnerability and responsibility she enacts through her art. Connelly is an Anglo-Canadian settler author and Zolf is a Jewish Canadian settler author. Both poets respond to colonial violence from their distinct cultural and social positions, and both set out to relate various forms of colonial, racist, and sexual oppression. Connelly’s poetry hazards the alignment of colonialism with the personal and familial experience of what we can assume to be an autobiographical poet-speaker, given how Connelly refers to this collection as “a memoir in poetry, a very personal exploration of family politics, domestic abuse, and the carried-over costs of addiction.”310 Zolf ’s poetry deploys parody – and thus the internal ambiguities at its core – to carry out her poetic project. Through Connelly’s and Zolf ’s intersectional poetics, the potential for establishing allyship is both powerful and risky, as are the poems’ gestures of anti-colonial, anti-racist, representational, and historical redress. The alliances they seek, formed by a shared interest in reparative politics, begs probing as to its efficacy. Also, revisiting these poetry collections by Connelly and Zolf seems especially ripe a few years in the wake of Canada’s 150-year celebrations of Confederation – which justifiably drew criticism and renewed calls on behalf of First Nations and other groups for concrete political recognition.311 Our current times in Canada also seem ripe for this analysis given the troubling reemergence of instances of cultural appropriation within Canadian literature312 and on the Quebec stage,313 which expose the difficult and persistently whitewashed representations of Indigenous and Black experiences by white Canadian culture.

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Focked-Up Arcadia (Rachel Zolf ) The experimental poetics that compose the print collection of Janey’s Arcadia, along with Zolf’s video translation and recorded sound performances of some of the poems,314 provide its multiple speakers with a rhetorical and formal distance which, as I will consider further on, is not so readily available to the lyrical “I” of Connelly’s work. Zolf ’s writing also aligns with the recent Canadian feminist poetics closely examined by Heather Milne, who highlights what is essentially their metafeminist aspect, whereby “gender does not emerge as a singular concern … but as an implicit and ongoing one, or an ‘already jumping off starting point’ [with works] less likely read through the critical framework by which feminist poetics in Canada has largely come to be understood.”315 Milne differentiates these poetics from Canadian and Québécois feminist writings of the 1980s and 1990s, tied as they were to the explicitly political notion of écriture au féminin and its aesthetic focus on sexual difference as it pertained to subjectivity, desire, and the body in and of language. Yet perhaps also in keeping with the experimental practices associated with the fiction theories (or fictions théoriques) of writers like Brossard and Marlatt, Janey’s Arcadia self-consciously and avowedly adopts a poetics of différance. Coined by Jacques Derrida and his deconstructive philosophy, the term refers to his understanding of meaning and the process of signification as always already a form of deferral. Derrida comes as close to defining différance as follows: In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in its opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of différance, it no more follows the lines of philosophy of its

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symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.316 In Derridean fashion, then, Zolf ’s collection defies fixed truths and mastery – particularly their colonial versions – by foregrounding constant play and the deferral of meaning. The poems reappropriate, or repeat with a critical difference, missionary, immigrant, and other settler narratives that have promoted and contributed to the violent erasure of Indigenous presence on Turtle Island, known today as Canada. Amidst this archival material are the “toothless”317 1846 church court trial of Reverend James Evans, senior missionary among the Cree at Norway House, Manitoba; the white supremacist books of Reverend J.S. Woodsworth; passages drawing from works by Emily Murphy (aka Janey Canuck) and Kathy Acker; an 1886 Canadian Pacific Railway immigration and recruitment pamphlet that contains white settler women’s impressions of the Canadian North West; police documentation on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls; and a list of names of the missing and murdered, as first gathered by the Native Women’s Association of Canada and released by PhD student Maryanne Pearce. Yet unlike Connelly’s evocation in the poem “Enough” that I will examine below, the women’s names are interspersed throughout Zolf ’s collection, in the handwriting of “a mixture of Indigenous people and non-Indigenous allies.”318 The first of Zolf ’s Derridean “calculations without end” emerges through the eponymous and plural intertextual figure of Janey, proposing, as Zolf indicates, “a savage, fleshy rendezvous between”319 Janey Canuck, the pen name of Canadian suffragist and vocal eugenics supporter Emily Murphy – with the effect of unveiling the white supremacist views of first-wave Canadian feminists; Janey Smith, the iconic punk heroine of Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts; Jane Doe, the unidentified victim discovered on Pickton’s farm; and Janey Settler-Invader, a multifarious poetic persona – “a fracked-up, mutant (cyborg?) squatter progeny, slouching toward the Red River Colony, ‘Britain’s One Utopia,’ in the company of ‘white slave’ traders.”320 As Zolf indicates: “Janey’s opinions aren’t my opinions, though the point of the book (and the film, sound performance, polyvocal actions)

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is for settlers to recognize that we are all Janey, and to critique the racism that often goes along with not just settler colonialism but also white feminism.”321 In a setting that recalls mostly colonial Manitoba and the Albany settlement of the Qu’Appelle Valley in the mid-nineteenth century, Janey Settler-Invader finds herself “excited in leading to Chrisp [Christianity] many of those / whose homeland was invaded.”322 The use of irony and distortion to describe the residential schooling of Indigenous children – “and I never saw / evacuee schoolchildren more delighted / in hoeing and planting their separation”323 – culminates in the poem “Janey’s Elysium,” where the whimsical idiom of “gardens,” “heaven,” and “amorous” contrast with the sinister vernacular of “horny” applied to children and the abusive realities being expressed: Many children play in these gardens. The sisters run an industrial school where 250 orph8ns and Indign children are cared for at the horny sauce of discord … ...................................... .. … the entrance to heaven by way of a garden where little children play with the amorous subject.324 A second strategy akin to différance underlies the mediated forms that characterize Zolf ’s writing. She uses optical character recognition (OCR) to generate poetry, with results full of linguistic errors and brutal excesses of meaning. “Janey’s Settler’s Person,” for example, uses Eurocentric, pseudo-moral, and scientific observations of “Indigns” through “misreaings” enacted by Zolf ’s use of OCR. Signifiers such as “Indian” and “Christian” become “Indign” and “Chrispian.” The techno-poetics at work also modify “Good” and “God” to “Gord” and “Goy,” as in “Goy save Oirland.”325 The mutated letters not only subvert the meaning of these signifiers but also aggress the authority invested in them; any one of Zolf ’s recorded readings from Janey’s Arcadia emphasizes the brutal noisiness of this poetic assault and spits out settler ignorance, violence, and the self-serving exploitation and disavowal of indigeneity by colonial invasion and capitalism. As Zolf ’s speaker points out in one of the end sections of the collection, “What Said Author Says of the Canadian North-Wasp [SIC]”: “There are errors of Optical Recognition and the errors of face-to-face

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recognition.”326 Mutations such as “Esquimaux,” “half-breedze,” “palefeces,” and “half-brood” render ludicrous and cruel the invader narrative of European settlement and white colonial supremacy as OCR’s “noisy glitches or ‘errors of recognition’ of seemingly unreadable text” point to the catastrophe of “mis- and non- and dis- and un-recognition”: “We are clever people, we British submerged in astonishment. / We do not only smote these erstwhile salvages, hip and thigh, but / we make them dance to us.”327 The deployment of this “always-already-complicit, glitched, queered witnessing” of the past and its ethics of accountability are one form of settler alliance or allyship proposed by Zolf: the twisted text reflects the twisted self-justifications of relentless colonial invasion, to advance “a poesis of acknowledgement and response-ability and honouring treaty.”328 Janey’s “focked-up arcadia,”329 reflected by Zolf ’s fucked-up poetics, is not only about the past. After all, the settler-invader arcadia of the mid-1800s that we read on the page is machine-generated, just as different temporalities and anachronisms regularly slip into the poems. “There are a time and space and a vocabulary that were then and there are a time and space and a vocabulary that are now and a time and space and a vocabulary to come,”330 Zolf ’s “said author” indicates. The colonial violence of Zolf’s settler-invader Janey, here in a direct borrowing from Murphy’s Janey Canuck,331 mutates into the racism and stereotypes of today’s labels and transpires into the denial of the humanity, presence, and rights of Indigenous peoples: They do not pay taxes, have no “at home” days, do not have to re-bind their skirts ............. … They need not serve on a jury, or in the militia. They need not Fletcherise their food, need not shave and never heard of a financial stringency. You think

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booze, sex, coke, rich food, etc., are doors out? .............. … Of what other blessed raice can this be said?332 What was stolen then, such as natural resources and knowledge – “Even so the Indigns. There are quite a few of us / who think we might imitate them with advantage”333 – is stolen now. Zolf evokes Canada’s lucrative oil and agricultural industries in terms of the consumption of Indigenous lands and bodies: “when his blood is mixed with treesap.”334 If “[p]ioneering to-^day is not so serious a matter / as it once was,”335 continued colonial violence is just as destructive. Zolf emphasizes this point most intensely through the images of brutalized female bodies scattered across Janey’s Arcadia – of European invaders “fucking the land,” with “all the land cultivated / and wild turned private”336 atop the accumulation of human cost and remains. Zolf gives voice to these forgotten casualties, the testimony or “sweet story of a little Indign girl”337 in the Evans trial exceeding the limits of the book pages, uncontained by history, and apparently uncontainable by the settler Zolf and her poetic rendition. The casualties of settlers fucking the land also chillingly materialize in Zolf’s inclusion of the list of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, which appears intermittently in the four parts of the collection. The same names appear again amid white settler women’s statements about “The Indign Question” in the immigrationrecruitment pamphlet What Women Say of the Canadian Northwest that Zolf torques as well with OCR. The pamphlet documents white married women’s confirmation of their privilege in the settlements and their sense of safety from Indigenous people, who are supposedly either nowhere to be found or kept out of sight and at a far distance. Here, too, appear the names, crossed out, followed by their own “simple statement” that ranges from the violent act committed, the location of where a body was found, the year of disappearance, or declarations of lack of evidence from police reports. The lists of the missing and murdered women’s names, torqued with “misappellations and misappropriations that lists tend to produce,”338 consist of eruptive and interruptive segments. As they

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punctuate and slow down our reading of Zolf ’s twisted play with settler narratives and language, they disassociate entirely from the irony and parody that imbue the rest of the collection in a necessary refusal of the reader’s textual pleasure and thus possible complacency. Zolf ’s lists emerge at the end of each major section of the volume. If computer-generated text overwrites the words and phrases of the colonialist narratives that Zolf seizes and spews out so perversely anew in Janey’s Arcadia, handwriting, with its painstaking attention to each commemorated individual, offers an embodied rendition of these names. It is not just the body politic that is at stake in Zolf ’s gesture of commemoration, but the embodied names of individually mourned women as “bodied inscriptions of grievable names and lives.”339 Zolf steps back to make way for Indigenous people, their allies, and the motion of their bodies. A writing takes place of the body, by several bodies, some of which have likely experienced similar or related violences and all of which are alive and well to fight against erasure and in the name of a futurity that Fontaine’s text projects as well. Zolf ’s poetics of re-transcription, of repetition with difference or of différance, are still at work in these segments. But they materialize otherwise here, as they bear the traces of the embodied subjectivities of the living scribes who have penned them and who are able to project not only the violences of the past and present but, like Fontaine’s Kuessipan, actions for future resistance and betterment.

A Way to Stand (Karen Connelly) The poetic materiality of Zolf ’s mediated and disruptive poems makes her attempt at allyship less potentially problematic than Connelly’s intimate poetry. The question I consider in my reading of Connelly’s collection is whether its representation of domestic abuse, and its attempts to “ask the reader to consider not only the origins of family and gender-based violence, but the origins of violence in an entire country,”340 transcend or exacerbate white-settler and readerly spectacle. Moreover, as a feminist alignment across social, cultural, and experiential boundaries emerges in Come Cold River, is it nonetheless confined by a framework of brutality and

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victimization? Finally, how does vulnerability underlie these poems in personal, poetic, and critical terms, and how does it address key questions about Indigenous-settler relations? The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls confirmed throughout its findings that the tally of disappearances is higher than the formal statistics provided by the Canadian government. Under-reported or unreported cases, caused by systemic indifference, inefficiency, and institutional racism, constitute the root of this disparity. Only in February 2002 with the excavation at Pickton’s farm did the murder of women from the poverty-, drug-, and prostitution-stricken area of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside finally reach mainstream consciousness, later amplified by Pickton’s 2007 trial, which filled Canadian news. My statement just now, however, comes close to reproducing “the representational violence of news media”341 that indiscriminately refer to these women as “drug- or crack-addicted prostitutes.” In 2015, the Globe and Mail covered former Vancouver police detective constable Lori Shenher’s memoir, which made public the deficiencies of police investigations into the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people, including the underfunding and insufficiencies of British Columbia’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry concluded in 2012. The newspaper’s coverage reverted to similarly reductive language about the victims: “Convicted serial murderer Robert William Pickton has also haunted Lori Shenher, the former Vancouver Police Department detective constable who in 1998 was assigned to investigate the growing number of missing persons’ cases involving drug-addicted women working on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.”342 Despite calls for an inquiry that would consider the institutional racism and sexism at work in these cases; instead of asking why so many women are impoverished or live in the isolation or despair that exposes them to the dangers of the Highway of Tears; and instead of recognizing the personhood of those who may be parents, siblings, children, partners, and friends who are loved and missed, media reports have tended to reduce them to a set of notorious and judgmental labels. Such coverage propels a deterministic narrative of criminality and victimhood, recalling the legal language that Clements brings to light and critiques in her play The Unnatural and Accidental Women.

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In the vignettes that constitute Act I, Clements demonstrates that some of killer Gilbert Paul Jordan’s ten murder victims – including Mavis Gertrude Jones, Marilyn Wiles, Penny Florence Ways, Brenda A. Moore, and Verna Deborah Gregory – in the Downtown Eastside between 1965 and 1988 were found to have high blood-alcohol levels, and so police pronounced and dismissed their deaths as legally “unnatural and accidental.”343 Meanwhile, other deaths – like those of Rose Doreen Holmes and Valerie Nancy Holmes – were found to be unsuspicious, devoid of foul play,344 with rulings again solely based on the coroner’s blood-alcohol reading. Only when a white woman – Vanessa Lee Buckner, believed to be Jordan’s sixth victim – was found murdered did police finally investigate; Jordan was convicted on one count of manslaughter, and released from prison six years later.345 As Connelly writes in the poem “Enough” commemorating Pickton’s victims: Yes, a lot of the girls were Native. We try not to discriminate except when it comes to this. To them.346 Julia Emberley demonstrates how Canadian newspapers such as the Vancouver Sun indulged in similar judgmental labels and erasure throughout its reporting on Pickton’s trial. Within the dehumanizing media narratives of alcohol abuse, drug addiction, and prostitution, the women Pickton murdered became objects of slaughter and capital, media consumption and spectacle, and judgment and dismissal. Supplementary digital coverage of the Pickton trial by the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun reveals the “semiotic violence”347 underlying affectively provocative, though disconnected and misleading, photographs of the lot where the women were found. Media reports on the murders and photos of evidence showcase in particular Pickton’s pig butchering equipment, throughout coverage of the excavation of the women’s bodies, and then again during the ensuing criminal trial. It is these repeated images of consumption and slaughter that Connelly’s poem “Enough” confronts:

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Yes. The pigs. The country’s clean white teeth crunch crunch grind the matter back into the manageable dirt of everyday. Our headlines. Our chatter.348 Visually associated with forms of “bio-capital exchange,”349 the women in Connelly’s poem figure as nonhuman waste for quick, “manageable,” easy, “everyday” disposal from our consciousness as viewers and now readers. The women, the poem suggests, have been separated from the social and even the human world. Presented through the sole determining factors of alcoholism and prostitution – supposedly key to their downfall and existence – the women register as the background noise of the viewer’s or reader’s despair and ultimate indifference, confirming the racist and sexist assumptions of “our headlines / our chatter.” Female bodies, akin to Pickton’s slaughtered animals, figure as “objects of social wastage … signs of social debris.”350 The connection between “sexual difference, aboriginality, and violence [appears as] inevitable and unchangeable”351 – if not normalized, and even deserved. “Acá nada. Kanata. / Oh Canada, what do you really mean? / How can I sing you / without lying?,” asks Connelly’s poet-speaker at the start of Come Cold River, before she, as one reviewer notes, “unburies the women murdered by Pickton, not as skeletal remains, but as 68 fleshy women: mothers and daughters”: “Our own torture chamber. / And that’s just one of our national / killing floors.”352 Connelly uses memory, “[a]nother spring [that] cracks open,” as a major motif of the collection, evoking the unsettling exposure of racial and political violence plaguing Canada since the first colonial encounters.353 Recalled by name, Pickton’s victims, along with fortytwo other Vancouver women who disappeared during the peak time of the murders, emerge through the poet-speaker’s incantations in “Enough.” Connelly’s words de-root the colonial, racial, and gender abuse that rests at the heart of the missing cases and that upholds

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the Canadian nation-state and its visible traces of colonialism and patriarchal violence. Come Cold River proceeds to name and thus publicize these unspoken dimensions of Canadian nation building. Meanwhile the poet-speaker has already recalled her own tortured girlhood of domestic violence and the painful legacies of family addiction. “To think, haltingly, confusedly, about this fact,” according to the speaker, also means that I have to look back at my early childhood, which was marked by various losses. But it was also marked by Cree, T’suu T’ina, and Siksika words and places. Every single day, they were there in my life: home, river, ponds, fields, asphalt streets. All were haunted. And I loved them. Forget. Forgot. Forgotten. Then the season changed: another light, a new time. And I began to remember.354 The collection proposes its own form of allyship, which occurs through Connelly’s careful inscription of a cross-cultural subject position. In an introductory essay to another poetry collection, Grace and Poison, Connelly addresses how language is rooted in shared spaces, in terms of both landscape and memory, giving way to the entangled concept of “home” and also connected to “a sense of self and beyond-self.”355 In keeping with this aesthetic, Connelly’s attempted alliance in Come Cold River recalls Mohanty’s early articulations of “building a noncolonizing feminist solidarity across borders,” even as the feminist struggle continues to face “unequal power relations among feminists” themselves.356 Connelly argues for similar border crossings, particularly where the role of poetry, as a distinctive form of personal and public intellectual work, is concerned: “Like knowledge, writing (and reading) is both a path in and a path out, letting us move beyond our accustomed borders but also bringing us back, close to home, to the source. Because the great work of poetry is to close distance, to lay bare the unity of disparate things, peoples, and places, it can transport us to a different realm and bring us to the source simultaneously.”357 In Come Cold River, shared landscape markers allow the speaker to place domestic,

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gender, and racial violence as well as “family life and political life as part of the same continuum.”358 Different kinds of violence occur in a shared – though far from identically experienced – historical and colonial landscape. Blurring the borders between the personal and the political, the poems question hegemonic notions of nation, home, and family with an astonishing directness and accessibility, making their intervention all the more relatable. The poet-speaker’s subject position in “Home for Good” leads to her claim: “All were haunted. And I loved them.” In this ethical space of connection between self and other occur the cultural crossing and alignment of experiences of loss and displacement. It is again the poem “Enough,” physically and figuratively central to Connelly’s collection, that undertakes the naming of the “fleshy”359 women who disappeared during the years of Pickton’s murders. The women named in the poem are by extension invisible victims of the current colonial nation-state, until, she writes: “Finally, there are enough / dead women / to begin”: Forty Fifty sisters Sixty eight girls Sixty eight women mothers Sixty eight daughters.

Marcella Creison Elsie Sebastian Heather Gabrielle Chinnock Angela Arsenault Olivia William Brenda Anne Wolfe Dorothy Spence360

The poet-speaker recites these vulnerable bodies of girls and women bearing, like the girls in a poem titled “The War,” the consequences of domestic abuse and brutality. Positioning her own vulnerability, Connelly’s speaker remembers and inscribes the unspoken violence of her girlhood earlier in the collection:

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between the door frame and the slightly-open door, the child cut in half by the every-day war and the beloved hands that waged it, the sister twisting on the bed, the father beating the life out of her, out of himself.361 Juxtaposing very different scenes of violence, “Enough” and “The War” create significant if startling or even awkward experiential alliances, and reveal how material and representational violence work hand in hand. But does “Enough” inadvertently create what Métis artist and critic David Garneau fears can easily become the result of settler reconciliatory attempts: “primarily a spectacle of individual pain”?362 Is it repeating the scene of violence against Indigenous women, nonIndigenous women, and women of colour for yet further mainstream consumption? Despite its radical critique of representational violence, does the poem allow for any other way of thinking about these women than within a framework of all-encompassing exploitation and overwhelming violence? While Connelly’s well-intended disruption of settler historiography marks the nation’s erasure of colonial and representative destruction, it may seem uncertain as to whether she calls readers to move past the projection of Indigenous women and the women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as always and singularly objects of white male violence. Moreover, who is healing, and who is still hurting in Connelly’s collection – in other words, for whom is this gesture of alliance? Through the symbol of the running river, Connelly’s personal poetic “I” finds a healing break from the cycle of familial violence and from the psychological hold of an abusive father: the lone grace of a tree out there speaking plainly

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Watch here is a way to stand in the world.363 “Enough,” however, offers no ready “way to stand” or lyrical, affirmative “yes! Come / cold river / rush in”364 of renewal to the missing and murdered women it commemorates. And so, yet more questions arise: Whereas Zolf ’s gesture of allyship assumes head-on settler responsibility while also proposing a coalition of incommensurability by giving way to others’ inscriptions of missing and murdered women’s lives, do Connelly’s poems amount to a form of “settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering”365 that deflects from her colonial complicity as a settler on stolen land? Does Connelly’s alliance amount to “moves to innocence”366 that the commensurability proposed by her poetics might entail? Is the collection, and “Enough” in particular, ultimately subverted by the very representational logic it so intelligently chastises? While other readers may feel differently, I suggest that Connelly does not inhabit the other’s pain in these poems; she does not appropriate the suffering of the women recalled in “Enough” as her own. Rather, she inscribes herself in solidarity to the women and girls she commemorates as she writes her pain alongside theirs, within a cross-border space of experiences that are kept distinct from one another – the very necessary principle of any form of intersectional feminist alliance. Connelly’s poetic stance may invite questioning and criticism, but it also brings to light the potential that intersectional feminism today has in working to “build a bridge between class, colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and sexual politics such that it becomes impossible to think of imperialism without also thinking of gender, race, sexuality, and class.”367 While commemorated within a frame of feminist outrage and critique, the women listed in “Enough” run the risk of being contained within a singular framework of men’s violence and “poor, drug-addicted” victimization. Yet by recalling the sixty-eight women, including the Jane Doe who disappeared in the Pickton years, Connelly’s poem, like Belmore’s Vigil, also “lets each woman know that she is not forgotten: her spirit is evoked and she is given life by the power of naming.”368 I would not underestimate the recognition brought to these women’s absence but even more

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so to their presence – as named and remembered loved ones – by the poetic and public utterances that Connelly’s text performs. Such poetic naming is a reminder that the women exist on a plane other than one of despair and settler harm, as it gestures toward the recognition not only of past and present wrongs but also of the futurity that commemorating carries: the promise word song word vow my mother’s name my child’s name.369 I would argue that Connelly’s poetic continuum breaks away from essentialist objectification. It breaks from the exclusive association of Indigenous women with victimhood precisely because readers are prompted to understand violence as intersectional, “within other historically and geopolitically [as well as personal and familial] specific conditions,”370 including the poet-speaker’s own. Connelly’s poetic insurgence against her own experience of abuse and violence does not erase the very specific experiences and situations of the women named in “Enough,” just as the acknowledgment of white privilege is not a denial of a white person’s suffering and struggles. On the contrary, Connelly brings specificity to light, underlining connections through differences, and working toward cross-border feminist resistance and recognition. As a form of potential “conciliation”371 rather than reconciliation, Connelly’s work proposes reparation as a perpetual and mutual process for both Indigenous and settler people. But more importantly, it aligns with the goal of conciliation as “not to repair Indians but to heal [settlers] themselves.”372 As a white settler woman indeed aware of “the forgetful privilege of [her] own skin,”373 Connelly undertakes a poetics of self-reparation through exposing the continuum of violence and oppression across social and cultural lines. In her writing, Connelly risks a profound vulnerability on various levels: critical, poetic, and personal. Notwithstanding the negative criticism it also risks drawing to itself, “Enough” points toward the social redress that the power of poetic naming can solicit. Poetically, Connelly’s direct, gaunt, sometimes-jagged style in Come Cold River

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invokes a vulnerability that recalls Butler’s 2004 concern in Precarious Life. “The body,” Butler writes, “implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well … The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine.”374 Situating the body in a middle space of private and public, and of possession and dispossession, Butler intervenes in humanist and neoliberal conceptions of individual autonomy. While she outlines the limitations to claiming vulnerability as an ontological and political position, there is something to be gained from the ethical potential of rethinking, as does Brand in her nonfiction, embodied vulnerabilities across subject and cultural boundaries. This potential is what Connelly interrogates, and risks, in her poetry. The poetic speaker’s body in Come Cold River is and is not hers: it emerges in poetry from a cross-border space of shared as well as very distinct, and so unshared, experiences. Feminist writers are no strangers to the discourse of vulnerability as a “shared and differentially inflicted”375 phenomenon, and also as a position of demand for rectification. In her own cross-border perspective, Marianne Hirsh observes: “Feminist theorists acknowledge the vulnerabilities we share as an embodied species but have also underlined the differentially imposed and socially manufactured vulnerabilities faced by marginalized groups throughout history. They have seen vulnerability – both shared and differentially inflicted – not as weakness or victimhood but as a space for engagement and resistance emerging from a sense of fundamental interdependence and solidarity. Conscious of some of the pitfalls that follow from a claim to vulnerability, they have nevertheless used this claim to imagine and to demand social and political institutions that will lessen injury.”376 Connelly’s poems ask readers to ponder the origins of racial, sexual, and domestic violence; of family, home, and nation; and of gender- and colonial-based vulnerabilities. In “Enough,” poetic language makes the too-often invisible violence of sexism, racism, and colonial devastation visible; murdered women’s names are inscribed in an enlarged and enraged, indeed affective, bold font. Connelly’s challenge is a poetic and ethical one that compels readers to look through the lens of poetry to witness pain without containing or

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co-opting it. Her poems consider vulnerable female bodies not simply as victims of catastrophic racial, sexual, and colonial ill, but as sites of relationality, resistance, and even solidarity. In this “commonly shared vulnerability,” to borrow from Braidotti, perhaps “the bodies of the empirical subjects who signify difference (woman/native/earth or natural others)” will no longer need to become “the disposable bodies of the global economy.”377 Through a poetics of shared vulnerability, victims cannot be so readily reduced to the stereotypes featured time and again in Canadian media. “Watch / here is a way to stand / in the world,”378 Connelly charges: accept the poem as a possible archive and public recognition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s presence rather than absence, of their names rather than namelessness, of their distinct realities and common challenges. The poems by Zolf and Connelly examined here constitute a record that never was, and could never be, enough: “‘Enough is so horribly not enough that part of me did not want to publish it,” reveals Connelly.379 Yet they undertake the work of social justice by publicly denouncing the dehumanizing depiction and erasure of sexual and racialized violence. Theirs is important work in so far as their feminist poetics, however potentially if not necessarily fraught, raise some of the crucial questions that currently circulate in Canada about reconciliation: the possibilities and limits of allyship. If these settler attempts at feminist alliances highlight the ontological vulnerability that Butler outlines as a common, though intensely variable, experience, their drawing of a personal and political position also raises the idea of the felt or affective conditions of knowledge and recognition. Familiar tropes related to affect, emotion, and feeling in feminist theory constitute my focus next as I turn to writings by Brossard, Lai, and Lindberg.

The Turn to Affect Emotion is a form of knowledge, and this is the basic definition of affect that I work with here. The critique of the Eurocentric West’s traditional dualism of emotion and knowledge is a very familiar stance of most if not all feminist epistemologies. “Writing the body,” écriture feminine, and écriture au féminin – feminist aesthetics

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associated with the early theories and literary practices of Irigaray and Hélène Cixous in France, Brossard in Quebec, or Marlatt and Nourbese Philip in their early work in English Canada – align with such rethinking of metaphysical principles. The three writers I discuss below develop a feminist aesthetics of feeling through their very different literary worlds, which ultimately inscribe a relational ethics. Lai’s work is immersed in an intersectional concern with materiality  – with that “matter,” Berlant and Kathleen Stewart say, which “has a heartbeat”380 as it is internal to embodied being. Lindberg’s work in turn stems from Cree epistemologies and modalities of storytelling understood as a form of felt theory. Meanwhile, all three writers activate affect in their expressions of subjectivity as immersed in emotion and matter, or in the felt, lived body as “the very stuff of subjectivity,”381 in its human and nonhuman encounters. Here, I bring together affect and materialism, or more specifically feminist theories on affect and the body, to consider feeling as a form of embodied being in feminist literary practices. In the first instance, though, I critically revisit the “affective turn” in humanities scholarship along with the supposed newness associated with contemporary theories of materialism or lived materiality. My aim is to recall – as do Brossard, Lai, and Lindberg in their work – feminism’s long-standing preoccupation with feeling as knowledge, as bodily life, and as tied to a posthumanist condition. I cannot think of a paradigm as profoundly metafeminist as the so-called affective turn in humanities scholarship and its influence on feminist thought over the past fifteen years. It would be an understatement to say that the impact of affect studies in humanities scholarship on feminist thought has been considerable. Or rather, it would be a gross understatement to say that the impact of feminist thought on the theories of affect in humanities scholarship has been considerable. This reversal is a somewhat ambitious argument on my part, not unrelated to hook’s that “feminism is for everybody.” As Linda Ahäll argues, “if scholars are serious about analyzing the politics of emotion, feminist knowledge on affect must not be ignored.”382 Moreover, since “affective processes – both between and within bodies – are already social,” as I will consider further, they have “everything to do with gender” as well as race, ability, class, age, with “how bodies matter politically.”383

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This millennium has seen hundreds of feminist works published on affect in the form of monographs, edited volumes, articles, and posts.384 These emerge from various engagements with philosophy’s longstanding grappling with affect, from Spinoza to Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Irigaray, Sylvan Tomkins, and Sedgwick. I have chosen to style the term as “affective turn,” with scare quotes, but I should really style it as affective turn, struck through, to contest the very notion of a turn in the first place. Koivunen goes as far as to state that the “affective turn never happened.”385 To keep arguing that it did is not only an erasure of feminist epistemological history but also a disavowal of Black and women of colour feminism, which precedes and disrupts the whiteness of affect theory. Such a disavowal, Claudia Garcia-Rojas indicates, occurs through the politics of citationality that reinvest affect studies “in the White sociality of Western-European thought.”386 Sociologist Patricia Clough, for example, often considered to be the instigator of the idea of an “affective turn,” draws “a straight line of thought from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri back through Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson.”387 Michael Hardt attempts to extend this line to include feminist and queer scholarship, but the people he names in a valiant footnote – Berlant, Butler, Grosz, and Sedgwick – are all white. As Garcia-Rojas argues: “Clough and Hardt’s reliance on Western-European epistemologies to draw attention to fundamental notions and questions that predate the conceptualization of the term ‘affect’ spotlights a larger systemic issue, namely how epistemic practices culminate into the disappearing act of historically marginalized women of color.”388 A critical discourse focused on the “clamor for uniqueness and newness”389 of affect within feminist theory itself is also contestable. Along with social constructionists and feminist care ethicists, Fischer argues, feminists have been working for some time to “redress dualisms, particularly the cognition-emotion dualism, the mindbody dualisms … and the implications such dualisms have held for women.”390 Accounts of gendered, queered, and racialized embodiment and feeling, of materiality and subjectivity, certainly go back well more than thirty years: for instance, to Lorde’s work on anger, lesbian eroticism, and, later, fear; hook’s reimagining of the Black body; Butler’s attempt to think together the material and the discursive in Bodies That Matter; Grosz’s insistence on “weighty materiality”;

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Moraga’s “theory in the flesh”; Irigaray’s positive affirmation of female corporeality; and de Beauvoir’s phenomenological engagement with the female body as (negatively) experienced in specific situations.391 While these same writings also contrast one another, Fischer argues that “it is best to understand the ‘new’ theories of affect and materiality as continuous with, rather than disruptive of, previous feminist and philosophical thought,”392 just as current affect studies amplify feminist analysis. This metafeminist critical point seems to me paramount in taking stock of the history of affect studies by way of feminist thought. It is worth repeating with Koivunen that matter and affect – as states of mind and body – “were always already there in feminist self-consciousness,”393 especially since the so-called secondwave or the Combahee River Collective. “Formations of knowledge that speak to the political implications of affects [can thus be found] avant la lettre,”394 just as feminists of the past (like Lorde) and present (like Ahmed or Million) can be seen to disrupt white and colonial affects and their study. Assuming that “re-emergence” is a more apt term to understand the focus on affect in feminist theory, the area of contemporary thought that also comes into view is materialism, when associated with theories of embodiment and posthumanism.395 The “move to an intensified interest in affects, emotions, sentiments, and feelings” within humanities scholarship has established itself in “parallel to a renewed attention to the body as a challenging problematic for knowledge and experience,” drawing attention to the mind as embodied.396 Stewart in turn links affect and material studies together: “Affect helped return anthropology to sense and sensation, materialities, and viscera. It proposed a world that is lived, though not simply anchored in the consciousness of the humanist subject or its categories of thought. Rather, a world charged with affect is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves people ‘improvising with already-felts’ (Manning 2009, 30).”397 Affect is therefore an integral part of cognition, and cognition, many feminist scholars have long insisted, is implicated in the body: in what Ahmed and Jackie Stacey term, in Thinking through the Skin, “lived and imagined embodiment.”398 Feminism has for some time been debunking the classically metaphysical and hierarchical opposition between mind and body and, by extension, reason and passion as well

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as culture and nature. Although much feminist work has also reread early Western philosophers (like Descartes and especially Spinoza) to demonstrate that such polarization is never as neat or definite as it may seem,399 this hierarchical binary remains central in the Euro-Western tradition of philosophical thinking. Namely, humanist thought upholds a supposedly universal, but what we recognize now as masculinist and anthropocentric, Cartesian or Enlightenment understanding of selfhood and of the human itself; such thinking is steeped in mind-body dualism, in addition to white- and class privilege. As Peter Armitage observes and Million cites: “Emotions have had an ‘ethereal existence’ in sociology because Western rationality has excluded them as unobjective forms of knowing and they have been feminized by a masculine philosophy and historical culture.”400 This exclusion, as I will examine more deeply below, is doubly apparent in Euro-Western culture’s division of thought and emotion, whereas many Indigenous cultures understand them “as an inter-related process.”401 Renewed interest in affect and materialism corresponds in large part to critical discontent with the (more appropriately termed) linguistic turn in cultural theory. This particular turn is usually associated with the period of high theory in literary and cultural studies, namely poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction – the theoretical streams in which I was trained under Hutcheon’s supervision and mentorship at the University of Toronto. The supposed anti-biologism of feminist theories of subjectivity, sexuality, and gender, and the constant push-back against essentialism were also subjects of debate. Charges directed against psychoanalytically driven French feminism, often though not exclusively by more pragmatically and historically focused materialist/Marxist feminists, have been at the fore of age-old nature versus culture debates. Philosophical compromises such as the idea of strategic essentialism, coined by Spivak and espoused by others, to confront difficult though ontologically and politically useful theories of sexual difference or maternalism, ensued. Meanwhile, rereadings of theorists like Irigaray, Cixous, and Julia Kristeva have gone a long way to redress limited and reductive interpretations of these thinkers’ work on sexual difference.402 By the early 2000s, but already in Grosz’s earlier work such as Volatile Bodies (1994), the pendulum began to shift away from poststructuralism’s

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focus on language and the social forces that constitute subjectivity. As Sedgwick and Adam Frank complained in 1995, “human language is assumed to offer the most productive, if not the only possible model of understanding representation.”403 Clough also views affect as a move away from language-focused theory: “a substantive shift in that it returned critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter, which had been treated in terms of various constructionisms under the influence of poststructuralism and deconstruction.”404 She continues: “The turn to affect points instead to a dynamism immanent to bodily matter and matter generally – matter’s capacity for self-organization in being informational – which, I want to argue, may be the most provocative and enduring contribution of the affective turn.”405 Yet in the preface to Clough and Halley’s collection, Hardt recalls that “the two primary precursors to the affective turn … are the focus on the body, which has been most extensively advanced in feminist theory, and the exploration of emotions, conducted predominantly in queer theory.”406 Feminist scholars, and in particular feminist literary critics, have investigated the “inseparability of affect and interpretation”407 since the dawn of feminist hermeneutics, just as theories breaking down dualisms of public and private, self and other, individual and collective have in turn insisted on the centrality of affect. Notably, some feminists preoccupied with affect can be viewed as “straddling”408 the poststructuralist and material approach. Braidotti “bridges poststructuralist theories of the subject and the turn to ‘life itself ’ … ‘real bodies’ as an effect of bio-technologies and ‘genetic social imaginary.’”409 Haraway broaches nature both “in its essential reality”410 and as “a public discourse”411 – an approach that is both material and discursive, and “which refuses to separate the two.”412 The late Teresa Brennan’s understanding of affects insists on breaking down any “dichotomy between the individual and the environment and the related opposition between the biological and the social.”413 Emphasis on bodily matter or lived materiality has thus produced recent theoretical work often identified as material feminisms or feminist neomaterialism.414 Designated this time as an ontological turn by some, material feminisms hold in their purview both the social conditions and also questions of organic processes and multiple – human and nonhuman – ecosystems in the constitution of bodies

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and subjectivities. Like Indigenous feminisms, the approaches, here to embodiment and affect, call for the use of the plural in the nomenclature. This attention to the corporeal and the environmental aligns with applications of evolutionary biology and new vitalism (the concern with life itself ) to think about the body, and the self, as embodied affective subjects. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty insists and Haraway and Barad take up in turn, natural and social elements of subjectivity cannot be disentangled. As I mentioned earlier, Alaimo and Hekman’s understanding of feminist materialisms involves a critique of the high theory of language-focused postmodernist and poststructuralist thought. The supposed “impasse caused by the contemporary linguistic turn in feminist thought”415 that they identify recalls Sedgwick and Frank’s complaint, sharing with affect theory a critique of the overemphasizing of language and social forces in the constitution of subjectivity, which, as Alaimo and Heckman argue, reproduces traditional binaries such as those between nature and culture. However, the assumption of newness tends to emerge in the critical discourse here as well. To think of material feminisms as new or a turn, as do to some extent Alaimo and Hekman, forgets previous feminist philosophy and science such as Grosz’s work beginning in the early 1990s, Haraway’s cyborg feminism beginning in the mid-1980s, or Barbara Smith’s pioneering Black feminist scholarship beginning in the early 1970s. One has to wonder how “emerging”416 the group of material feminist theorists that Alaimo and Hekman reference and anthologize really is. Again, did such a turn really ever occur in feminism? Look to Grosz’s 1994 Volatile Bodies and you’ll find the body theorized as “a site of social, political, cultural and geographical inscriptions”417 but also of organic processes, not unlike Irigaray’s critique of masculinist philosophy and psychoanalysis and her imagining of female corporeality instead as a basis for selfhood. Grosz in fact already argues for “the fact that bodies construct and in turn are constructed by an interior, a psychical and a signifying view-point.”418 Like Ahmed after her, Grosz harks back philosophically to MerleauPonty’s phenomenological understanding of experience as situated “midway between mind and body.”419 Already she reconceptualizes the self as an embodied, posthumanist subject steeped in affect, her desires, her social location, her difference, her technology.

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A metafeminist lens can prove useful: the emphasis on embodied experience, integral to feminist theories of affect, can and must be viewed as engaging with earlier forms of feminist critique as much as amplifying those earlier theories of the material and social constitution of a subjectivity in and of the world. But let me return to my opening consideration of the “affective turn.” Koivunen inadvertently puts it in metafeminist terms when she characterizes feminist and queer interest in theories of affect “as a further moment in the historical process of critical self-reflection, as one of further reconceptualization of the subject feminism.”420 As she draws from de Lauretis’s 1990 definition of feminism – whereby feminism’s own internal self-displacements are germane to the very possibility of feminist theory – Koivunen argues that recent scholarly interest in affect engages as much with earlier forms of feminist critique as it amplifies them in the continued effort for cultural signification, relational ontology (or being), and the multiple ecologies421 that constitute a subject. But let’s muddy the affective waters a bit further where the idea of epistemological turns is concerned. Speaking of affect studies as a turn does yet another injustice: it erases the multifariousness of the field of affect studies itself as well as the diverse approaches to thought and emotion.422 From psychoanalysis and philosophy to anthropology and literary criticism, there is little unanimity over the definition of affect either within or across disciplines. For instance, according to Tomkins and later Sedgwick, affect is a measurable biopsychological phenomenon. Meanwhile, moral philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Rorty refer exclusively to emotion in their work. Or, according to social theorist Brian Massumi, who explicitly reworks Spinoza’s philosophy of affect as states of mind and body, a distinction between affect and emotion is key, especially to a new materialist way of thinking about subjects and objects. Massumi understands affect as indeterminate and “irreducibly bodily and autonomic.”423 Emotion, however, remains “the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal.”424 This distinction of emotion from affect is one that Elspeth Probyn also upholds, just as emotion, according to Lawrence Grossberg, cannot “simply be described as affect, even as configurations of affect … emotion is the articulation of affect and ideology. Emotion is the ideological attempt to make sense of

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some affective productions.”425 Yet affect and emotion for Brennan are “basically synonymous,”426 and for Ahmed are interchangeable and must remain so for important ontological reasons to which I will return in a bit. Admittedly, Massumi’s insistence on “the autonomy of affect”427 and his distinction of affect from emotion is not without its appeal. Particularly in the material feminist approaches that I outlined above, recognizing the intensity of the prelinguistic, bodily forces within us highlights the notion of embodied, relational selves. But I think we need to take heed of warnings such as Ahmed’s against the risks of reinvoking metaphysical dualisms with such a neat distinction between affect and emotion – binary thinking that has been thoroughly unkind to women, Black people, people of colour, and colonized and minority subjects.428 As Fischer warns: “Although professing to wish to undo philosophical dualisms, Massumi, like other affect theorists, actually prioritizes one dualistic oppositional over another … From a feminist canonical perspective, such expositions are contentious, as they display a sharp dualism between cognition and emotion, the mind and the body.”429 Ahmed compares the relation between affect and emotion to an egg: “The activity of separating affect from emotion could be understood as rather like breaking an egg in order to separate the yolk from the white … That we can separate them does not mean they are separate.”430 She argues that it is better to “begin with the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near.”431 This is where affect gets “sticky”: emotions are evaluated through both body and mind, “and hence show the instability of ‘the biological’ and the ‘cultural.’”432 In her work on the negative feeling of depression as a possible site of transformation, Cvetkovich also rejects the need to distinguish between affect and emotion. Possibly taking her cue from Sedgwick, Cvetkovich “favor[s] feeling in part because it is intentionally imprecise, retaining the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences.”433 Like Fischer and Koivunen, Cvetkovich positions her work on affect more generally within the historicity of feminist thought, particularly in terms of a metafeminist “rapprochement with legacies of 1970s feminism such as consciousness-raising, personal narrative,

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and craft.”434 Without denying the biological aspects of depression, she approaches negative feelings much like Stewart and Berlant: as relationally and socially formative, and as externally and internally driven, on and by the mind and body. I, too, retain “feeling” to denote “the multiple tethers of the subject to the world (and of the world’s to the subject).”435 I find feeling to be the more potent notion for feminism in its permutation of conceptual boundaries between interiority and exteriority and, by extension, of the binary oppositions I have already mentioned: body and mind, personal and collective, and nature and culture. Feeling, to borrow from Sedgwick, joins the idea of “beside”: “Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it … Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.”436 Central to my understanding of affect and its circulation in the literary works to which I will soon turn is also Berlant’s call for the necessary “interruption” of individuality, “that monument of liberal fantasy, that site of commodity fetishism, that project of certain psychoanalytic desires, that sign of cultural and national modernity”437 – although my examination deviates from Berlant’s study of intimate publics and of femininity as a historically commercial public sphere. My readings of the three authors featured below will focus on their preoccupations with affect as corresponding both to constructionist and to embodied notions of the subject. This hybrid, metafeminist perspective takes me back to a long tradition of feminist theories of subjectivity. Million’s felt theory brings a fundamental perspective to this understanding of feeling. A felt form of analysis, as I discussed earlier, is also and primarily tantamount to Indigenous feminist writing, whereby the storyteller’s emotion and subjectivity are considered to be legitimate epistemological and historical truths. As Fee argues, “most mainstream theories are based on a secular and scientific foundation that strips them of any nuanced consideration” of spirituality and affect, “which has made it difficult for non-Indigenous people to understand Indigenous cosmologies.”438 Million reclaims affect as an embodied (and thus lived), material, and emotional form of knowledge and social life, devised particularly from Indigenous

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women’s personal narratives and locations. Once relegated to silence and the private sphere, such narratives embody, as Million observes, “the importance of felt experiences as community knowledges” – as “culturally mediated knowledges, never solely individual.”439 Million also takes stock of Indigenous women’s narratives of the late twentieth century as “appeals as a history that can be felt as well as intellectualized [that] successfully took down the barriers between the political and the personal.”440 Broaching the specific history of residential schools in Canada, Million argues that the alternate but no less legitimate historical truths of survivors and intergenerational victims cannot be apprehended by a tradition of disembodied historical studies. In my reading of Lindberg’s Birdie, I will return to Million’s essay, particularly her insistence on and legitimation of the power of affect: of “felt knowledge.”441 Like Million, Ahmed recalls affect as both an individual and a communal aspect of subjectivity. In other words, rather than relegate it either to a (psychological) “inside out” model of individuality or to a (sociological) “outside in”442 focus on emotions merely as social forces exercised on the subject, Ahmed understands affect again in terms of proximity or relationality. Emotions are, or better yet do, these things: they “show us how all actions are reactions, in the sense that what we do is shaped by the contact we have with others.”443 For Ahmed as for Brennan, there is no such thing as an “emotionally contained subject.”444 Brennan argues: “The origin of transmitted affects is social in that these affects do not only arise within a particular person but also come from without. They come via an interaction with other people and an environment. But they have physiological impact.”445 While Ahmed similarly writes: “emotions are not ‘in’ either the individual or the social, but produce the very surface and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects … The objects of emotion take shape as effects of circulation.”446 I have spent some time here relaying theories of affect and material feminisms because I believe it is important to intervene in some of the erasures that have gone into positing such bodies of thought in contemporary theory in terms of newness and turns. In the writings of the three authors to whom I now turn, it is where affect is understood relationally that it opens onto an ethics: that it opens onto, in Braidotti’s terms, “an affective, material, expanded, and relational

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self that functions in a nature-culture continuum.”447 It is also where Braidotti’s notion of transformative ethics becomes critically productive. “Being an affective entity,” she argues, means essentially being interconnected with all that lives and thus being engulfed in affect, emotions, and passions.448 Braidotti posits “an open-ended, interrelational self,”449 which corresponds to the feminist care ethics of Lindberg’s Birdie. This notion of the affective, relational subject is what allows Braidotti to empower the feminist subject with positivity and the capacity for agency and change. Brossard’s post-9/11 work, Lai’s poetry, and Lindberg’s novel are salient examples of this move and ensuing transformation.

Unpredictable Tenderness (Nicole Brossard) Although Brossard was not in the United States at the time of the 11 September 2001 attacks, she crossed the border three days later on her way to Ogunquit, Maine, and had also recently spent six months in New York City.450 In the essays of her 2004 collection L’horizon du fragment, Brossard chronicles 9/11 in pronouncedly affective terms: those of “a species caught in the flagrant crime of hatred, terror, tears and democracy tangled up.”451 Seasoned readers of Brossard, who has been publishing avowedly feminist experimental texts since the early 1970s, will likely notice a distinctive turn in her writing since the start of the new millennium. After 9/11, Brossard published the novel La capture du sombre in 2007 (translated in 2009 as Fences in Breathing) and the poetry collection Ardeur in 2008 (translated in 2015 as Ardour), among other titles. Riddled with anxious prose and haunted verse, and against a backdrop of terror, Brossard’s post-9/11 work has proven not only to be dystopian in nature and scope, but notably more intimate and even lyrical. As American feminist critics like Susan Faludi and Scott examine at length, the post-9/11 world may have had newly situated local, global, social, and economic challenges, but feminism has always confronted such issues. In 2003, Kaplan argued that “the era of terror is largely a US media construction – and it is partly that,” but “this construction is already having profound effects on consciousness: it is impacting materially on local and national policies as well as on economics

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(e.g. on jobs for women globally), and finally it is impacting on social practices and ways of being in daily life – things that have always concerned feminists.”452 Today, feminist critique plays a crucial role in the analysis of how such realities are represented, and Brossard’s work, much like Lai’s, shows this particularly well. As Kaplan recalls, feminism cannot afford to not think globally; nor can the effects of globalization afford to go unexamined by feminism’s longstanding methodologies of critique and analysis where hegemonic claims of domination – over women, Indigenous peoples, minorities, individuals, and the environment – are concerned. In what follows, I will show how metafeminism marks the post-9/11, intimate, affective trajectory of Brossard’s early twenty-first-century writing, and how it thus widens the scope of its own feminist social and ethical concerns. Anticipating Lai’s and Atwood’s postapocalyptic work, Brossard’s writing sets themes and scenes of impending, real, and perceived terrorist and bioterrorist threat, ecological and economic doom, corporate domination, torture, heightened surveillance, and state control in the face of global menace and the framework of vulnerable times. But it is still an affective, queer, feminist ethics that intervenes in Brossard’s social dystopia, while her post-9/11 writing shows a metafeminist turn in that it both transgresses and harks back to familiar feminist positions, including perhaps above all else her own. Publishing since the 1960s, Brossard’s feminist writing emerged from the second wave of feminism and Québécois literature’s engagement with postmodern language aesthetics, and so away, as far as can be imagined, from the personal or intimate writing of the lyrical poetics that would come to characterize Quebec poetry by the mid1980s. Although widely recognized for her experimental feminist fiction, poetry, and essays, the affective potential of language has always been a distinctive feature of Brossard’s poetics since her days at the helm of the feminist journal La nouvelle barre du jour (1977–90). It has served to express lesbian desire and intersubjectivity seeking to counter normative heterosexuality and inscribe new forms of corporeality. What characterizes Brossard’s twenty-first-century writing is still affective representation, but now of post-9/11 events, and how they relate to the writing subject’s sense of social, personal, and aesthetic crisis. Intimacy, a term that in Francophone criticism denotes the personal forms and tones of Quebec literature for the

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past two decades, has also become a surprisingly defining aspect of Brossard’s more recent, more personal, even more lyrical writing style – again in the terms that prompted Saint-Martin’s initial notion of metafeminism.453 Poète intimiste par excellence Hélène Dorion distinctly evokes this connection between the turn to intimacy in Québécois women’s writing when she writes: “I look at those women who have leaned forward, who lean forward in order to speak, to write. They have exchanged effect for affect, invented a singular and plural feminine, have surrendered themselves to the interstices of the word.”454 The configuration of world events and particularly of 9/11 is never far from the affects of a narrator’s personal history in Brossard’s postmillennial writing. Nor is it far from her characters’ or speakers’ intimate ponderings of both the limits and the possibilities of literature’s agency and of their own as subjects being in and acting upon the world. One striking example of Scott’s notion of reverberation, or of the elasticity of the rapport of feminism and contemporary writing I discussed earlier, is Brossard’s recent work. In a distinctly metafeminist gesture, Brossard places her writing in an oscillatory, rather than linear or evolutionary, relationship to feminism, again even her own. The utopian, radical, experimental Brossard of Amantes (1980), Le désert mauve (1987), or L’amèr (1977), where “To write: I am a woman [was] full of consequences,”455 seems worlds apart from the somber, globally grounded Brossard of the post-9/11 novel La capture du sombre, the gloomy poems of Ardeur, or the worried personal essays of L’horizon du fragment. These latter works situate themselves in the aftermath of the terror in New York City. They respond in particular to the internally and externally aggressive responses of the United States as well as the mass-media manipulation of the discourse of terror and crisis. Brossard recalls Berlant’s notion of an affective “wearing out”456 when she discusses her own aesthetic and political convictions about a transformable world. As Brossard’s opening essay of L’horizon du fragment indicates: “After all these years, never would I have believed that the question, ‘What can literature do,’ would again loom on the horizon of my thoughts like a necessity, a derisory repentance of having dropped too easily the curious, utopian, the fascinating, devastating side of things.”457 This can come as an astonishing statement for a

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reader of Brossard’s work up until this point. Having diverted from the exclusively lesbian focus of her utopian imaginary, Brossard’s writing now becomes more self-consciously nuanced and mitigated, and certainly troubled. Lesbian protagonists still populate her work. But their deterritorialized and utopian dimensions are put into question. Whereas a troubled but promising “horizon” was one of the symbolic tropes of renewal in her postmodern novel Le désert mauve, in Fences in Breathing, “there is black on the horizon, a surface that does not reflect light and steals space from the very precious volume of life.”458 Meanwhile, the speech act “I am here” appears throughout the essays of L’horizon du fragment as it does in Fences in Breathing, yet without the consistent conviction of its own agency: “I was there and I was worrying,” Brossard writes. “Every day, I am at the edge of the abyss.”459 At stake in Brossard’s millennial novel are no less than the affective limitations of this agency, notably in the face of a post-9/11 world of surveillance, war, and civil and ecological breakdown: the “global hardship” that haunts the prose, “the irrationality of the world, that chaos without volume and without a face, molten in its own erosion.”460 Anne, the protagonist, writer, and translator of Fences in Breathing, a familiar figure in Brossard’s fiction, faces the “unnameable” menace and extinction of her ability to find meaning through words, a “task of consolation”461 that no longer seems to be in her grasp. Brossard’s novel is also a critique of George W. Bush’s 2001 Patriot Act and the mainstream media discourse on the war on terror. In the aftermath of 9/11, former and surer convictions about the power of writing are thus destabilized: “Since September 11, planes are bombs, trompe l’œil tombs in the sky, and I have lost some of that happiness, which, while it was never quite tranquility, nonetheless left me with joy deep in my soul, certain that the world and the meaning of my life could not so readily fall apart. Ever since then, words can no longer rise to the task of consolation.”462 Having taken refuge in Switzerland to relearn her craft in another language, the disillusioned narrator is daunted by facing a “worn-out” language: “In my language, I have exhausted the vocabulary that would have allowed me to name that intriguing, approaching black: raven, vulture, feline, the black of volcanic sand, of marble, of ink and soot, of leather, of cassocks, of niqab and chador, and of burnt corpses. In need of other words for this darkness of nature and civilization now encroaching.”463 Amid the apocalyptic

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“ruins” of “September 2001,” where fire “devours the things of life” and “the sun has disappeared” into “the darkness of the great fog of civilization,” the narrator finds herself “caught in the trap of words that do not drown out suffering so many cleft words and worried embraces that I no longer know how to make use or hope of so evil and mean has the world become.”464 Brossard’s speakers and fictional characters face (or are unable to face) the unstable, global, and violent world that surrounds and to a large extent defines them and their sense of agency. The poet-speaker of Ardeur in turn grapples with a sense of emptiness, anger, the incapacity of dialogue, destruction, mourning, sadness, darkness, and oblivion: “the angle of destruction,” “the simple present of the abyss”; “thousands of unclassifiable gestures / at the bottom of oceans and in the outline of wars / thousands of bodies, and we would like to cut corners? / yet I am vast / when everything strikes carnage around us.”465 References to civilizations, futures, and abysses emerge as now-familiar dystopian tropes in Brossard’s work: yet I cannot get used to the darkness the soldiers and the archives I do not know in what order to repeat the opaque of civilizations the grey appetite for mercantile immoderation what can I say over and beyond that without harming the future and getting nowhere let us leave: old abyss of horizon466 But to stop at the pessimistic, abject tone of Brossard’s recent writing would be to mislead and misread the complexities of her reflections. It is Ahmed who recalls that unhappiness, like the feminist killjoy, can be affirmative. Anti-racist, queer, and feminist critiques as well as “the very exposure of these unhappy effects,” Ahmed argues, can lead to “an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or better life. If injustice does have unhappy effects, then the story does not end there. Unhappiness is not our endpoint.”467 The story does not end there for Brossard, either. Instead we may ask alongside Butler’s post-9/11 meditation in Precarious Life: “what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war”?468

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The “desire to take up again the senseless quest for meaning and beauty”469 still drives Brossard’s reflections on writing, especially in the essays of L’horizon du fragment. This search is still first and foremost for zones of poetic intimacy and the transformative eroticism of women’s words and bodies, for “the unpredictable tenderness / and the strong core of words” in Ardeur, attempting to “ramify the senses and the caresses / all form of loving thwarted.”470 The language of affect does not restrict itself to discontent or terror, but figures as one of transgressive desire and corporeality in Brossard’s well-known poetics of the senses. The familiar Brossardian metaphor of the spiral emerges in Ardeur, a symbolic representation of the poet-speaker’s gesture toward shared, embodied, and desirous spaces of meaning that characterize earlier works. One poem’s eponymous ardour is described as an “aerial journey of exhilaration.” Elsewhere, a “whirl” of “togetherness” creates “paragraphs of eternity,” the lovers of the poems “fine-new” and “ready to intoxicate themselves of tongue and eternity / suspended acrobats.”471 On the one hand, projections of renewal can be quickly, even within the one poem in Ardeur, mitigated by images of planetary breakdown: “[t]he tenderness you could see it / coming at the moment of waking / and comparisons, yet at night / fragments of words and fucking chaos.”472 On the other, love, and the desire for the language of queer intimacy, continue to entail an ethical concern with social well-being: “for oneself and for us  / in the breathing space of living tongues.”473 Overall, Brossard recognizes the necessity not of exclusive utopian projections, as some of the earlier work may suggest.474 Instead, she sets out to face and act upon the harsh and difficult world of her post-millennial writing. Thereby stands the “need to reinterpret reality.”475 In both its deviation from and reinscription of its own poetics as an ethical gesture toward transformation, Brossard’s radical feminism has become a form of metafeminism, more anxious and less utopian, looking for ways to “still dare believe” in the “fertile aspect of the other in me.”476 Fences in Breathing in turn seeks self and social renewal in another’s language, for “the ideas necessary to comprehend the world”477 no matter how dreadful it may appear. According to the narrator, it is “imperative to dive into the heart of reality in order to thwart lies and the filthy imprints they’ve left on time.”478 “How to translate,” she asks further, “what would be our nature in the face of darkness and light?”479

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The speakers in these works are sporadic, uncertain witnesses of a present (rather than future) dystopian world. The affects that circulate in these texts can be read in a metafeminist light in so far as this troubled response is at once anxious and hopeful of its capacity for self- and social transformation. If the idea of agency in the first person emerges from the fictional narrative – “I am everywhere I am. I am here to understand and to escape” – a feeling of ambivalence closes the text: “I am tenacious in the landscape. I would love to be able to give darkness a new name. The war is still raging over the Northwest Passage. I am everywhere I am. I don’t dare write: I am frozen, fossilized in combat position.”480 Ultimately, Brossard’s metafeminist treatment of global crisis opens up to the possibility of agency, and thus the alternative futurity and spaces of connection and social change ultimately projected in the poems of Ardeur: “I become again a piece of time / set in our species,” in “the fragile strangeness / of dawn and of lucidity,” and always through the very act of writing: “over the ink / with each fiction / one less sorrow.”481 The need to “think all that / humanity in one gesture” in Ardeur echoes the speaker’s renewed ontological promise, in L’horizon du fragment, “to say yes again I am there,” to be “everywhere well and alive, with my attention turned to the world … perfectly anchored in the present of the world.”482

Inward Sisters (Larissa Lai) If, so far, affect involves human experience, it also raises, in its connections to materiality, the question of what it means to be part of the nonhuman world. Such a posthuman framework seeks not to annihilate but to trouble the self-evident category of the human and to continue the work of destabilizing the subject, including humanist foundational notions of autonomy and individualism. In much of Larissa Lai’s work, as she and Rita Wong point out in the poetry collection sybil unrest, “It is into this unstable subjectivity that we attempt to reinject questions of gender, race and class, as well as geography, movement, power and hope.”483 The connection between affect and posthumanism is a good place to begin, since Lai’s underlying question in her poetry collection Automaton Biographies is the following: what happens to a subject’s affective life or emotions

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in a posthumanist world? In an interview about the collection, Lai ponders: “I suppose if there is a research question that holds the book together it is something like: How do selves come into being, what holds them together, what makes them fall apart, and when and why do they feel or not feel emotions?”484 Through themes of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the dehumanizing as well as gendered and racialized aspects of late capitalism, Lai’s collection questions the origin and stability of selves. It does so by interlacing the biographies of those who are her and not her; who are human and nonhuman; and who are at once female, Asian, machine, and animal with an ever elusively autobiographical poet-speaker. All are engulfed in commodification and consumption, but all are also tied to resistance and transformation. To return to Braidotti’s terms in The Posthuman, Lai’s multiple intertexts consist of a posthumanist aesthetic, with writing conceivably moving in “webs of encounter and ideas, others, texts … the never-ending flow of connections between the texts and their multiple ‘outsides.’”485 With references that include critical discourse, history, literature, film, popular culture, and politics, the poems self-reflexively draw a posthumanist vision of subjectivity and of a subject’s emotional processes. Intertexts abound in Lai’s work, primarily with Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later retitled Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and Ridley Scott’s cult movie adaptation Blade Runner, as well as biotech multinationals like the agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto (now Bayer), CNN, Marxist theory, and the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party of China). These intertexts make up the material world in which Lai’s poet-subject not only partakes but is ontologically, physically, and affectively enmeshed. A quick revisiting of Braidotti’s arguments about postanthropocentrism can provide further philosophical context to the complexity of Lai’s poetic work. Similar to the focus on affect and materialism that in turn underlies her thinking, Braidotti considers the postanthropocentric subject in a metafeminist light, given that it provides “a way of updating critical theory for the third millennium.”486 In addition to the anthropocene,487 what also informs Braidotti’s view of the posthuman and postanthropocentric are current biogenetic technologies and death- or necro-technologies (for instance, war

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drones), which join globalization as the commercialization of every aspect of life on Earth. Similarly to Brossard’s 9/11 world, such technologies consist of the “dark” side of the posthuman predicament, even though, for Braidotti, the posthuman ultimately provides a way “of engaging affirmatively with the present.”488 The human subject is decentred and joins the nonhuman, then, not only in the anthropocene, but through the creation of technologies. Braidotti’s material understanding of subjectivity emerges in the context of the effects of scientific and technological advances such as biogenetics, just as it resists a “trans-humanist fantasy to escape from the finite materiality of the enfleshed self.”489 Braidotti’s dystopian view of the posthuman corresponds to what Lai’s Automaton Biographies depicts, particularly through its intertext with Blade Runner, and the bio-genetic capitalism incarnated by Dick’s Tyrell Corporation that turns human and nonhuman matter into commodity for consumption, trade, and profit. In Lai’s poems, the human, nonhuman, and more-than-human are subject to the forces of market imperatives, whose excesses threaten the sustainability of the planet. Yet Lai’s poems, like Braidotti’s posthumanism, are not merely apocalyptic in that the posthuman subject also has the potential of overcoming the predicament of the necropolitics that, in part, constitute it.490 First published in 2009, Automaton Biographies consists of four long poems. Although divided in distinct sections, they overlap in terms of ideas, poetic voice, and stylistic, ontological, and political concerns. The poems focus on the othering of those perceived as human but not quite human, or as “almost human but not white.”491 The first poem, “rachel,” inscribes the voice of cyborg replicant Rachael Rosen, who serves as Lai’s poet-persona struggling with memory, feeling, and exploitation throughout this collection that self-consciously “wrings dystopia.”492 Lai sets the stage for her landscape of postapocalyptic urban decay ten years ahead of her book’s publication date in near-futuristic 2019 (also the year in Dick’s novel and Scott’s film). If even more true for us reading Lai’s book today, the future is already here in the text, as the postapocalyptic would have it. The future is also here particularly for a writer of Lai’s generation, for whom several of the traits in biotechnology or atomic and molecular science, proposed as sci-fi artefacts in the 1980s, are now part of everyday life or what Braidotti might call our current posthuman predicament.

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As a comment on contemporary cultural and political matters, and notably the second invasion of Iraq by the United States, the second poem, “nascent fashion,” deals with the effects of war, neoliberalism, and multinational corporate dominance on agricultural, economic, and cultural life. Just as Lai’s poems question racist, male-dominated capitalism – “imperialism’s imperative” – in both poems, “nascent fashion” also underlines the white privilege inherent in the history and politics of Canada, again through the voice of Lai’s female cyborg figure who struggles with her material, human and nonhuman, existence: “i language my body to being / ontology’s on-switch / tender as rubber nipple / my skin flushes / flesh full as any cyborg.”493 The “ham” section, meanwhile, is titled after Ham the Astro Chimp, known by his handlers as Chop Chop Chang, who was launched into space by the United States in 1961. The poem interrogates Western hegemonies about scientific and military success, imperialism, and genocide, recognizing again the posthuman condition: that which “segues human to non,” and in this poem specifically, the “arc from animal to cultural.”494 Finally, “auto matter” is the most readily autobiographical piece in the collection and arguably the least readable. Lai both enables and disables a first-person, autobiographical poetic “I,” which refuses origin and unitary subjectivity but consists of a cacophony of voices and random inscriptions of her own as well as others’ memories, lives, and affects. Scattered across this last poem are alphabetical transliterations of Lai’s maternal Cantonese, which “traces [her] own imperfect assimilation to ‘white’ Canadian culture.”495 Like the more-than-human subjectivity throughout the collection, the autobiographical self is only partial, immersed in the matter of body, technology, and imperfect memory, and always already relational. I will focus primarily on the collection’s first long poem, “rachel,” since this is where Lai works most visibly with theories of affect and materialism, and with the relational ethics that a notion of embodied subjectivity can yield. As a cyborg, “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,”496 Lai’s “rachel,” in addition to its intertexts with Blade Runner, is a direct adaptation of the half-human, half-machine feminist figure of Haraway’s 1984 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” written at the height of postmodern feminism and reproduced in Simians, Cyborgs and

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Women. Deployed to theorize what was a new socialist, materialist politics at the time of the essay’s publication, the cyborg embodies the intersection of technology with human, or more-than-human, subjects, resting within the confusion of origins, that is to say with Lai, of “who makes and who is made.”497 As Lai cites Haraway in the epigraph of her collection, questions of materiality and affect both confront the cyborg as they do the posthuman: “It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices … There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. The replicant Rachael in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion.”498 She is a blend of maker and made, whereby intimacy and selfhood are both human and machine. As Braidotti proposes via Deleuze, she is “autopoietic” in so far as the latter “accounts both for living organisms, humans as self-organizing systems, and also for inorganic matter, the machines.”499 Lai’s rachel is also partly the subject and object of myth-making, and in this unstable subject position, gender and race are interjected: i athena my own sprouting this knowledge colds me in my ice-fringed room my asian fits this frost.500 The blurring of rachel’s material components occurs stylistically through the blurring of nouns, verbs, and their grammatical functions, with the syntax putting into question the boundaries of origins and the determinacy of language: “i tower my mythic birth,” “i half my memory.”501 This inscribed first-person abounds in “rachel,” and while it may mimic the humanist “I” of autobiography, it does so very imperfectly, not only as an “i” in lowercase, but within the syntax that constitutes it: notice how the distinctions between subject and object are undermined. It is out of this refusal of normative language that the cyborg rachel emerges, fully embodied by and situated within the organic, linguistic, and technological matter of her gendered and racialized existence. It is through this embodiment that she feels.

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Automaton Biographies, and “rachel” in particular, insert moments of stunning lyricism, often through the perfect symmetry of verses that are spoken, after all, by a perfect human replicant: “my heart exudes a kind of love / a kind of mourning”; and, in a quintessential Deckard/Rachael Blade Runner moment: “the murderer in me / loves the murderer in you.”502 Evoking cyborg culture’s struggle with affect and identity crisis as so vividly depicted by Dick or Scott as well as by Denis Villeneuve in his 2017 remake Blade Runner 2049, this pull of emotions and memory in the replicant again undermines the nature/ culture dualism rejected by posthumanism. Lai’s rachel grapples with the fear she “prides” herself in feeling as the real human she half believes she is, with the “hate” she “clutches” as a sexualized, commodified object, and with the “rage” and “ugly feelings” that overtake her in the face of the dystopian landscape that has borne her: i pride my fear i clutch my hate my soft youth dolls plastic as capital want .......... this rage i told you i toy my own mind quick computation brings ugly feelings .............. and what’s right with the world?503 Although evoking here Sianne Ngai’s work Ugly Feelings on the cultural forms of negative emotions, rachel seems to stand more as a figure of Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” defined as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.”504 Lai’s rachel ultimately questions whether affects are given or whether they are her own, whether they are nonhuman or human, and whether, as in affect and emotion, there is even a difference between the two: as she takes “pride,” “clutches,” and “rages” against the feelings she may or may not call her own. Ugly affects abound in the “rachel” poems: “this melancholy pisses me off / i rank my anger/rail against solitude”; “i mourn purity/in

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guilt in fear”; “between misplaced love and violent rage / we abject ourselves.”505 However, like Braidotti’s posthuman predicament, Lai’s rachel does not remain stuck or resigned to the cruel optimism invested in her human realness that she senses through the false/real memories implanted by Tyrell. Like Haraway’s cyborg, rachel is “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,”506 but she also takes away the affirmative side of her posthuman condition: the notion, in Haraway’s terms, that women can also seize new technologies to reinterpret bodily boundaries, to “recode” themselves with their own tools: to “athena [their] own sprouting.”507 Lai’s rachel is “about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities.”508 It is through affect, or feeling, that a rachel who signs her computer-coded letter to her mother with love insists on her own agency; she does so even to the point of expressing gratitude to her own formative intertexts as Lai playfully includes rachel’s own acknowledgments at the end of the collection.509 Throughout the long poem, rachel is caught up in the process of her own more-thanhuman perfection and exploitation by her “father’s fascist dream.”510 But her processing of the world occurs through the affects of poetic language, as she speaks her “want”: her desire, her love, her hate, her fear, her mourning, her rage, her loneliness, her melancholia.511 Affect dwells in the “rachel” poems just as the human dwells in the machine and the machine in the human. Affect also suggests an alternative ontological framework for the posthuman in the collection: the “new cultural politics of intimacy”512 projected in the “ham” poems, where new forms of relationality again emerge – interrelating the human and the nonhuman, the self and the other, the personal and the political: new cultural politics of intimacy i am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together birds of a flu fish of a feather pooling cellular capacity to hybridize our chameleon.513 To borrow from Braidotti, this is where the “technological mediation is central to a new vision of posthuman subjectivity and that it provides the grounding for new ethical claims. A posthuman notion of the enfleshed and extended, relational self keeps the techno-hype in

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check by a sustainable ethics of transformations.”514 Again, it is not a renewal of the normative (i.e., white, Eurocentric, male) notion of the agential subject that Lai’s rachel embodies: “i’m unhinged unsteady / street shimmers absence / presence doubled over.”515 Rather, rachel bears witness to contemporary calamities as a racialized female subject: “i see double / … / mine slant half-bred,”516 as well as one who carries the feminist legacy of embodiment and boundary-breaking cyborg theory. This double seeing may also be what allows glimpses of the regenerative aspects of the posthuman condition in Lai’s poetry, as rachel’s Asian, cyborgian, gendered self displays her affective engagement with the world: i dream an ethic pure as lieder pale as north moth before industrialization.517 Dreaming, as only consciousness and memory can, is the underlying theme of Dick’s novel, and is here the aspiration for a new ethos also underlying Haraway’s cyborg, Braidotti’s posthuman philosophy, and Lai’s material poetics: “light gold flecks our eyes flutter / the wisdom of inward sisters.”518 This is the memory, or metafeminist incorporation, of feminist solidarity, of an internalized, past and future, feminist community. It projects rachel as not simply an isolated being in the male apocalyptic landscapes of Dick’s novel or of Scott’s film, but as a postapocalyptic figure of potential reparation. For Lai’s rachel carries or indeed dreams “inward”519 the debris of feminist agency and the affects of embodied life into a posthuman future.

Sensepowers (Tracey Lindberg) As far as Lindberg’s novel is concerned, as a white settler critic I am limited, as I have been in my readings of other texts by Indigenous authors, by my position outside the culture I read and now discuss. The sources for most of what I write are second- if not thirdhand, derived from perspectives and accounts by Indigenous scholars like Million and Betasamosake Simpson, or from the extensive interviews

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with Indigenous elders and female storytellers that Anderson records in her work. A scholar in her own right, Lindberg may not explicitly delve into the theoretical poetics characteristic of Brossard’s or Lai’s work. Yet Birdie certainly contains a distinctly Indigenous feminist poetics of thought, notably on the self, understood in the interrelated terms of body, feeling, and spirit. Recalling Bataille and Sands on Indigenous women’s autobiography, Betasamosake Simpson makes a case for Nishnaabeg storytelling as both an emotional and intellectual, as well as relational and spiritual, practice. But most of all, Nishnaabeg story is a form of theory: A “theory” in its simplest form is an explanation of a phenomenon, and Nishnaabeg stories in this way form the theoretical basis of our intelligence. But theory also works a little differently within Nishnaabeg thought. “Theory” is generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice and within each family, community and generation of people. “Theory” isn’t just an intellectual pursuit – it is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence and emotion, it is contextual and relational. It is intimate and personal, with individuals themselves holding the responsibilities for finding and generating meaning within their own lives.520 Taking Betasamosake Simpson’s cue, and with Sneja Gunew’s attempt to consider affect outside a Euro-centric framework in mind, I argue that Lindberg’s novel is as much a theoretical text as Brossard’s post-9/11 writing or Lai’s collection; but it is feminist theory on its own terms and according to its own Cree (rather than Nishnaabeg) epistemological traditions. As mentioned earlier, Million conceptualizes theory in affective and distinctly Indigenous terms. “A felt analysis,” Million recalls, constituted by personal narrative and “lived experience, is also rich with emotional knowledges”521 that several Indigenous women writers have reclaimed; it is “one that creates a context for a more complex ‘telling.’” 522 As Fee, whose research on Indigenous storytelling and affect gives prominence to elder narratives of land and kinship, also recalls: in several Indigenous worldviews, “emotions and reason have been connected to the idea that humans are part of a relational

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system where every living being is expected to sustain the others as kin, physically and emotionally.”523 And so not unlike Brossard and Lai, Lindberg brings together theory and narrative, and conceives of them as relational and stemming simultaneously from the physical, intellectual, and spiritual experiences of her main protagonist. To borrow again from Million, “what [Birdie] feels are her frames … thus, feelings are theory, important projections about what is happening in our lives.”524 If a connection to the posthuman could in turn be detected in Birdie, a wholistic theory of subjectivity, belonging, and interrelatedness yields more accurately to Lindberg’s novel. An understanding of profound and complex interdependence is inherent to several Indigenous knowledges and, as Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi) and Chris Cuomo point out, “forms the basis for justifying and motivating ethical responsibilities in human and ecological communities.”525 This understanding informs Lindberg’s nonlinear plot narrative, which is interspersed with traditional Cree storytelling (designated by acimowin) and dream or vision sequences (pawatamowin). In Birdie, affect figures as an embodied experience in line with this wholistic notion of being both in the material and in the spirit world. It is literally as “resting in sadness” that we encounter protagonist Bernice Meetoos, also the eponymous Birdie in Lindberg’s novel: “When it was time, and when the fury of her past began to race ahead of her future, she simply lay down.”526 Like the novel’s narrative, Birdie’s long sleep has her flowing “through past and present easily” with “time becoming fluid.”527 In this “wakesleep,” Lindberg writes, “[s]he becomes aware of her physical self because the emotions pain her.”528 Feeling is therefore always experienced in the body in Birdie, and significantly, the body is experienced in what might appear to be negative feeling but is expressed in different terms: “Inside her, she swells with memories and prickles with bodily reminders of her life. Before. Here. Her body and her emotions are inseparable now, her Sealy mattress a vessel within which one thing becomes indiscernible from another. Lying there, filled with a mix of emotions and feelings: hurt, pain, longing, love and remorse … This is a gathering.”529 Feminist affective theory is no stranger to such reassessment of negative feelings like anger or sadness. Cvetkovich’s work, as I discussed earlier, turns to depression as a cultural and social

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phenomenon rather than simply as a medical disease. Not denying that depression is connected to biological responses and can require medical intervention, Cvetkovich works toward a place beyond the master discourse of biochemical disorder and genetic mishap, sold and insisted upon by corporate medical culture. Instead of seeing depression as the failure to be a sovereign individual that neoliberal culture promotes and medicalizes, Cvetkovich insists on the need “to depathologize negative feelings.”530 Instead of being disavowed, she refocuses “inertia and despair” as “the slow steady work of resilient survival, utopian dreaming, and other affective tools for transformation.”531 Cvetkovich also proposes that “felt experience of everyday life” can be potentially productive sites – “a gathering” as in Birdie – of personal and political transformation, as can “remaining or resting in sadness without insisting that it be transformed or reconceived.”532 Lindberg does not, in turn, allow the narrative to label Birdie’s sleep-state or silence as depression or trauma. And so: “It is strange, while immobile,” Birdie’s dreamscape makes her “fee[l] more awake, aware and engaged than she ever has.”533 Nor does the novel’s modest, deflected depictions of a childhood plagued with violence and neglect enable what Clark calls the pathologizing and colonizing “shock and awe”534 of the Western gaze upon the harm incurred particularly by Indigenous girls’ bodies. Lindberg’s narrative, peppered with biting humour that spares not even Birdie herself, is a conscious refusal of such a projection. Birdie resists what Million denounces as “thick pathology narratives”: those “medical and individual definitions of trauma [that obscure] a more critical, historically-situated focus on social problems under a (neo)colonial state that contribute to violence.”535 There is no twelve-step program or linear, normative process toward an individual’s healing in Birdie. In fact, whether or not Bernice will ever come out of her stillness is held in suspension throughout the novel, just as her cousin and aunt are deeply unnerved as they try to care for a formerly heavy Bernice who is visibly wilting away. As early as the novel’s prologue, affect figures as “sensation” as well as a form of knowledge, possessed by Maggie who “knows the love by heart”536 that she holds for her daughter Bernice. The narrative’s emphasis on affect as feeling – on knowing, as does Maggie, literally by the body’s heart – plays a central role in the novel’s radical

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resistance to Euro-Western colonial paradigms of mental health and trauma. Birdie’s defiance of the classic models of trauma includes their tendency to pathologize the unspeakability of violence and abuse. Bernice’s refusal to speak her pain is not a form of traumatic amnesia and unspeakability à la Cathy Caruth.537 Rather, Birdie’s silence is one of self-sufficiency and potential reparation in community with body; environment; and worldly and nonworldly, or human and nonhuman, others. It might here be judicious to recall Anderson’s enlightening qualification of self-sufficiency within Indigenous knowledges: “When women, for instance, speak of a need for self-sufficiency, what the Western mind is likely to engage in is a concept of Western liberal individualism. This runs contrary to values typical of Native cultures, where a sense of self and the individual is grounded within a sense of responsibility to community and relationships.”538 Birdie depicts trauma in collective or generational and historical, rather than individual, terms. Trauma is a symptom of the legacies of settler patriarchal colonialism and deep-seated racism and their impact on the lives of Indigenous people, and particularly of men, the uncles in Birdie who inflict violence on their sisters, daughters, nieces, and wives. Recall that for dealing with colonial trauma, Clark adopts an approach grounded in Red Intersectionality, which includes “practices rooted in Indigenous communities’ ‘unique body of knowledge.’”539 Red Intersectionality, Clark writes, “uses an Indigenous wholistic, or intersectional framework that assist girls in understanding and locating their coping as responses to larger structural and systemic forces including racism, poverty, sexism, colonialism and a culture of trauma.”540 It is in this vein that Lindberg reframes Birdie’s affective responses to the violence that shaped her past and extends into her present. The author also does so through evocative word play, which allows the expression of her Cree characters’ negative affects to exist over and beyond those of a medicalized discourse of pathology that is “rooted in European hegemony, resulting in psychiatric and medicalized definitions of trauma, thereby perpetuating a subsequent form of cultural imperialism.”541 The narrative’s compound neologisms also defy the dualistic quality of the English language and of the affective subject, as Birdie finds herself “thinkfeeling” her way through her inertia with “delighthorror,” “sensepowers,” or “smellmemory.”542 Although, as Lindberg signals

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elsewhere: “Somebody had called them compound words, and I don’t think of them that way … I just think of them as big enough. Finally, there was a word big enough to encompass what I was feeling or thinking and I would press them together and they made sense to me.”543 The continuum of body, emotion, thought, and spirit is central to what ultimately proves to be a productively restful, embodied sadness and to Birdie’s resistance to descending into socially reactive “ugly feelings”544 of shame, remorse, or pathologized trauma: “In that continuum that now exists between her body (which she has come to think of as a shell) and her spirit (within which emotions, thoughts and memories layer over each other, tendrils of fog on a road), she recognizes that her body is emotively moving. Anyone watching her would think she was in the throes of a deep sleep and suffering from restless leg syndrome. In the tendrils, Bernice realizes there is remorse in her body and she is trying to kick it out. Her shell rejects remorse. Shame. Feeling bad over feeling good.”545 Moreover, the narrative’s linguistic shapeshifting reflects Birdie’s shapeshifting in her connection to the Cree spirit world. She has inherited the ability to transform herself from her mother Maggie, who in the novel’s prologue has already crossed over to the spirit world and in turn “feelhears” the spirit of her “littlebigwomandaughter.”546 The gift has also been passed down by Birdie’s kokhom, Rose Calliou, whose own “emotion and body” are so “intertwined” that she appears “disconnected … from her body” on a picture Birdie finds in a book called Shapeshifters her grandmother gave her.547 Like the shapeshifting abilities she developed living on the streets of Edmonton, when “her dream life and her waking life had begun to fold over each other, seamlessly, like dough in a pan,” Birdie’s current dreamscape defies the settler “hyper-individualism that negates relationality.”548 Though some “might have found this … this vacancy of self – confusing and terrifying,” it falls within Birdie’s new normal of “learn[ing] to leave.”549 In other words, resting in sadness, like Birdie’s ability to shapeshift, is a form of escape from her suffering and loneliness and further defies normative categories of feeling. In her stillness, all of her senses blend – “colours felt like tastes and sounds poured like liquid” – ensuing a transformation again beyond any Euro-Western notion of the unitary self, as “she thinks that she is somehow becoming. Something. Else”: both a self-dependent and a

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wholistically relational being.550 This transformation may be akin to the posthumanist existence steeped in relationality and posited in Lai’s rachel. But more importantly, it is in keeping with a wholistic notion of being, espoused by many Indigenous thought systems, in which sense is both physical sensation and mental cognition: “She stirs and feels sweat on her skin, the sheets wet with too much of some sense she doesn’t understand.”551 It is also through skin, or by thinking through the skin, that Birdie finally feels the spring of “anger” as well as the self-knowledge that anger can contain and that will eventually awaken her to her everyday life.552 Another way that Lindberg’s narrative defies the ideal of sovereign intimacy – of a subject risen above her personal trauma and promoted by neoliberal culture – is through the emphasis on female kinship, Cree ceremony, and a feminist care ethics (which I will further theorize below). Lindberg’s use of compound words conjure the close emotional and cognitive ties among Bernice and her female kin: Freda, “her sistercousin seemed an inverted version of herself ”; to Maggie’s sister Valene, Bernice is the “daughterniece” whose spirit makes her auntie proud; and Val is Birdie’s “kee kuh wee sis, [her] little mother.”553 Compound words also evoke, in Anderson’s terms, the extended view of mothering as a spiritual ideology of “a lifetime responsibility to nurture the people.”554 As Anderson continues: “In the Indigenous world, mother, auntie, and grannie are fluid and interchangeable roles, not biologically defined identities.”555 Feminism is nonetheless a vexed notion for the Metoos female clan; there is only one, and humourous, reference to the term, when Valene calls her strong kohkom a feminist and the elder yells at her claiming to not know what she means: “if you ever say it again, I will put you out on your ear.”556 However, women’s interconnectedness in Birdie still recalls, in metafeminist fashion, certain feminist principles while it leaves others behind. Women’s kinship proves to be a necessary source of survival, both physical and emotional, for the Metoos women. Their connections, over generations and through traditional ceremony, is what their survival and renewal (at least for Birdie, Val, and Freda) depend on, however “unlike” each other they may be or have been: if there is one thing that all four women shared, it was their absolute reliance on only themselves. Having seen all of their

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fathers and husbands walk out the door (with booze or a brunette in hand), each woman understood most completely the nature of women’s interconnectedness. Being reliant upon only women also had meant that the particulars of problem solving were addressed in ways known to women and using women’s methods … There was some sort of over-responsibility that weighed on each one of them, as if carrying the load that the men had dropped cost them posture and emotional affluence that could not yet be counted.557 Bernice also “wonders how far back, how many generations ago, it was that women took on children, family, home and provisioning” as “the men went away.”558 The sexual abuse she suffers at the hands of the uncles – particularly the eldest Larry, whose house Bernice later burns down with him in it – is a central aspect of the plot. Yet the narrative’s focus is not on the men’s individual deficiencies. It is on the women’s own community of care, rooted in intergenerational knowledge-sharing; it is rooted in theory, to borrow again from Betasamosake Simpson’s Nishnaabeg understanding of this term. And it resists, as Simpson also says, “the permanence of settler colonialism as an unmovable reality.”559 Lindberg seems to heed Anderson’s reminder that the struggle against patriarchal structures and gender violence imposed by settler colonialism and poisoning some Indigenous lives and communities is not simply “a struggle against men and individuals.”560 Along with Maracle, Anderson argues that heteropatriarchal dominance brought on by colonization is the root cause of family violence; its related ailments of neglect and sexual abuse are what lead to the suffering of Bernice and the women in her family. Both scholars, along with Lindberg in her insistence on the interconnectedness of the Meetoos women, are clear that decolonization and restoration can only occur by examining and bettering the lives of Indigenous women. The strife and equally the redeeming power of female relations, or what Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe refers to as Manitoukwe as I discussed earlier, are constants throughout the novel. A community of care, however imperfect, emerges in Birdie as the pathway toward understanding, restoration, and futurity. As I will explore further below, feminist care ethics are in turn rooted in affect,

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embodiment, and relationality: in “corporeal existence and affective relationships.”561 From Maracle’s description of an Indigenous worldview of “non-intrusive survival”562 and women’s role in ensuring the practice of this ethics stems such a notion of care. “[N]urtured balance” remains key, Maracle insists, in the medical practices and theory developed by women, as well as the community-based “allo mothering systems” and “the balanced engagement of the natural world.”563 As I also discussed earlier, Maracle’s engagement with feminism as it pertains to the need to restore women’s power in Indigenous governing systems is unequivocal. “Their loss of access to tribal territory” under colonialism is nothing less than “their loss of their role as caretakers of the nation, and their loss of right as mothers to determine their villages’ wellness destroyed the social fabric of our world.”564 Care, specifically of the balances and imbalances of humanto-earth and human-to-human relationships, figures as a politics, a social action, and thus an affective ethics belonging both to the private and the public sphere. Various forms of care materialize in Birdie, but not all forms of care are beneficial or benign. As the history of residential schooling in Canada, recorded by the Truth and Reconciliation Report, amply shows, some forms of care can be downright catastrophic. The institutional care that Birdie receives, first from well-meaning white foster parents and then at a Vancouver sanitorium, reproduces the racist and colonial structures that put her in such a vulnerable position in the first place. Maggie, beleaguered by a history of abuse similar to Bernice’s and “fighting for survival as generations of Metoos women had from uncles,”565 in turn fails to protect and care for her daughter’s physical and emotional well-being. This is so both when Maggie is at home and when she leaves, and then disappears or “get[s] missing”566 from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. On her end, Valene, as a substitute mother to Bernice, is far from a vigilant guardian. However, positive, in fact crucial, caregiving occurs in Birdie’s emotional life. Valene and Freda closely watch over her during her dreamscape, providing presence, care, and affection. Bernice’s oddball white landlord and employer Lola offers concern, work, and friendship. The three of them – “[t]hat womenfamily”567 – care for one another through baking, chatter, jokes, bickering, teasing, and physical affection in Lola’s kitchen as they keep watch over Birdie.

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Care can come with a terrible price as well. Freda, “related by awful birth to Maggie and Val” as the child of Maggie’s rape by Larry, has benefited from Birdie’s protection against the uncles’ advances. Caring in this way for her cousin’s safety has cost Birdie’s “lifebody so Freda could have her own.”568 Finally, the extension of care to the nonhuman – earth and spirit – world is essential to Birdie’s trajectory. An ethics of care rests at the heart of the Cree worldview espoused by Lindberg’s novel, as well as the following observation by Wahpimaskwasis, Janice Alison Makokis (Cree): To understand the Cree worldview in its entirety, we are encouraged to seek out ceremony to help us learn about the connectedness we share with our non-human relations in order to fully grasp the gifts Creator has given to us on Mother Earth. It is in this phase of questioning in our lives that Elders tell us to seek out our “Truth” and to find the meaning of who we are and what our purpose on this earth life is. In “truth seeking” we are exposed to a broader interpretation of what is encompassed within a Cree worldview. During this process, we uncover the meaning of self-determination or known in Cree as iyiniw pahminsowin.569 Birdie’s reconnection with the traditions connected to the Pimatisewin, a rare tree environmentally threatened by pollution, is integral to her emotional restoration. As Wahpimaskwasis might say, “nehiyaw pimatisiwin (A Cree-Indigenous Way of Life)” becomes Birdie’s way to self-determination: “from an anti-colonial framework … the spiritual space in which Indigenous peoples utilize and practice our systems of knowledge and ways of being, found in our language, our teachings, our stories, our songs, and our ceremonies.”570 After Valene lays pine boughs at the tree’s base and leads her niece “to the shelter they had built beside the Pimatisewin,” Birdie, who is on her period, can “make good medicine”571 for herself, according to the Cree ceremony, during a final lying-in of four days in the shelter built by her kin. The ritual harks back to “traditional understandings of menstruation … as a spiritually charged occurrence.”572 The seclusion that Val orchestrates for Bernice stems from a tradition around the first menstrual cycle,

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but as Freda begins to point out this detail along with Val’s use of the wrong kind of boughs, she is quickly hushed and the ceremony takes place: an important “reminder … that ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ are living entities, subject to constant change, as are people.”573 Birdie follows another Indigenous ceremony by feeding the decrepit tree, and receiving nourishment in return: “On the ground before her, the food they have made for Pimatisewin has leeched into the soil and has disappeared. She feels some energy in her limbs, as if she has eaten the food herself, and stands up, the Cree on her tongue having flowed to the tree.”574 As Fee learns from the Indigenous storytellers she carefully references in her work: “The land and everything living on it has an emotional life dependent on relationships with others, including human beings.”575 The most powerful evocation of Birdie’s restoration occurs in one of the many pawatamowin sequences that open each of the novel’s chapters. In the thirteenth chapter, “Home Coming/Coming Home,” Birdie dreams of entering a sweat lodge to undergo a sacred healing: pawatamowin She stood beside the sweat and bent at the waist … As she drew closer to the hole, she instinctively knew (as she knows when she sees a dress too small for her on a perfectly sized mannequin) that she would not fit in the entry. She didn’t want to but knows that she must attempt to enter. She squeezed herself in to the depth of her armpits, the ring of the doorway cutting into her like a too-tight casing on a sausage. Womanly hands grab her, smooth her belly with lambda olive oil and she is pulled into the lodge like a reverse birth.576 Recalling Shirley Williams’s work on Ojibway spirituality, Anderson points out that “the sweat lodge ceremony … is often referred to as a symbol of a mother’s womb” and “a place for purification.”577 The unctuousness that pulls Birdie into the sweat lodge so she may undergo its healing ceremony recalls the birth fluid that allows the newborn’s passage through the mother’s body. Similar to the female care throughout the narrative, Birdie’s “reverse birth,” the renewal that overcomes her cultural alienation and social exclusion, is an

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embodied, collective process as it occurs ethereally and tangibly at the hands of women. It is a dreamt, spiritual, material, and affective experience; a shapeshifting of sorts; and a ceremony of care that propels Birdie back into a wholistic Cree world of human and nonhuman belonging. What better segue than this turn to care in Lindberg’s novel? Next, I will tackle the feminist care ethics, first in theoretical thought and then in the writing of Atwood, Toews, and Younsi.

Ubiquitous Care As a white, cisgender, heterosexual, French-Canadian settler woman; as a tenured professor and feminist scholar; as a daughter, a partner, a mother, a friend; and even as a cat and dog owner and seasonal gardener, care is at the centre of my life. This is not to say that I always care adequately or sufficiently. Or that caring – either mine in its culturally and socially privileged context, or in the general sense of the term – is automatically or inherently an ethics. But care and all of its semantic variations – as a noun (for concern, anxiety, attention, solicitude, charge, protection, sorrow), a verb with or without object, or the multiple idioms to which it gives rise (to take care, to not care less) – define the core of the different roles that I often struggle to honour, fulfill, or manage. Care is a ubiquitous aspect of being and staying alive. It is vital to an infant’s survival and required throughout life. It is also an aspect of deteriorating and of dying well. Care is essential to any form of survival or restoration, whether of health or of justice or even democracy. As Peta Bowden writes, “Caring expresses ethically significant ways in which we matter to each other, transforming interpersonal relatedness into something beyond ontological necessity or brute survival.”578 The ethics of that care constitute the ideal of care, and is to what several philosophers, writers, and health practitioners aspire, as does poet and psychiatrist Ouanessa Younsi: “Healing falls under science, care falls under the soul. Poet, psychiatrist: these two roles are fed by this way of taking care. It is a profession of faith. I have no other profession.”579

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Unless held to the Euro-Western understanding of self-sufficiency and persistent neoliberal fantasy of autonomy, selfhood cannot exist without care. Subjectivity, as modern psychoanalysis and ethical philosophy have long insisted, is nonexistent without relations of care. The subject is preceded by the mirroring of, or call of, an other, depending on whether one wishes to espouse Lacan or Lévinas on alterity (the relation of self and other) and its complicated lineages. Care also reminds humans both of our humanity and of our connection to the nonhuman – nature, animals, technology – that surrounds, defines, and sustains embodied beings in our material environments. Care extends to a way of being when one is learning the importance, as my colleague Christine Stewart writes, of being “in good relations with … extended kinship systems on a local and global level,” a principle she devises from “the Elders and the knowledge keepers of Treaty 6” and their understanding of the “interconnectedness and balance”580 among human and nonhuman entities. Stewart and I are both settlers occupying Treaty 6 and Métis Nation Region 4 Territory, which stretches from western Alberta through Saskatchewan and into Manitoba and includes fifty First Nations and other First Peoples such as the Papaschase. While the very notion of care implies relationality and connection, as with any ethical model there is nothing given or certain about its outcomes. The particularities of care practice are multiple and must be intersectional; they can be violently neglectful and abusive, as the atrocious treatment of elderly people in Canadian senior care homes has amply demonstrated during the COVID-19 crisis, and they can expose the profound social and economic inequalities of our Western societies in which Black people and people of colour disproportionally suffer and die from the disease. Care requires an ethics. I have been writing about ethics and feminism since my first monograph on Canadian and Québécois feminist writers and ethical theory, a result of my doctoral thesis as a comparative literature student in the early 1990s. I have also been thinking about metafeminism since that time. But it is only fairly recently that ethics and feminism together opened up to care theory for me. Like the intersectional, cross-border, material, and affective feminisms that I have discussed so far, the ethics of care that emerged in feminist scholarship in the

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1990s, and with renewed focus in the 2000s, can be better understood through a metafeminist lens. Critics have recently turned to care theory in their analysis of Canadian literature, as I have as well in relation to Indigenous, Canadian, and Québécois women’s writing.581 Further below I offer readings of three very different texts: Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, Toews’s novel All My Puny Sorrows (AMPS), and Younsi’s nonfiction Soigner, aimer. Toews and Younsi respectively tackle mental illness in a political light. Toews depicts the largely generational roots of a woman’s intractable suicidal impulses obscured by the rhetoric of psychiatric treatment and neoliberal scripts of happiness. Younsi presents a medical practitioner’s first-person literary meditation on psychiatry’s insufficiencies, deep conservatism, and even possible obsolescence. In these narratives, it is another form of care – tentative at best, but still radically subversive and (if not because it is) personalized – that intervenes in the predicaments of mental illness. Meanwhile, in Atwood’s dystopian fiction, the internal plurality of storytelling puts into play the human and nonhuman interconnection at work in any care ethics. It is through the second and third novels’ female characters that care operates as a form of reparative intervention in the posthuman predicament of Atwood’s postapocalyptic trilogy. But what does care have to do with metafeminism? Well, everything. Of late, and as it has in regard to affect, feminist theory has turned, or returned, to the care ethics espoused by the foundational work of psychologist Carol Gilligan, initially published more than thirty years ago. Care ethics has the potential to prompt deeper thought into contemporary modes of interdependence and responsibility. This potential has made it into the political form of feminist intervention that it is today.

Ethical Care In her 1982 work In a Different Voice, Gilligan develops a moral theory that has become known, and pluralized, as the feminist ethics of care. Unless invoking one particular theorist’s model of care, and as

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with Indigenous and material feminisms, I will refer to the ethics of care in the plural, given the various forms that care can take and the multitude of disciplines that they dovetail. Gilligan’s work subverted the traditional, androcentric tradition of moral philosophy, upheld by the research of Lawrence Kohlberg, whom Gilligan assisted as a graduate student in the 1970s. Her study found that Kohlberg’s psychological research had not accounted for women’s responses to his famous Heinz dilemma, which posed a moral question based on the short and simple narrative of a desperate man who stole an expensive drug that he couldn’t afford in order to save his dying wife. Answering the question of whether or not the man should have stolen, Gilligan found that her respondents had a “different voice” concerned with justice – and not in abstract and absolute terms of rights and rules, as tended to be the case with male respondents.582 Rather, they were concerned with context, and wanted more information about the complexities of the Heinz’s social, geographical, and material conditions. With their social conditioning so often steeped in relationship power dynamics and determined by the demands of ordinary life, Gilligan’s respondents’ “mode of thinking” in solving moral dilemma generally sought more “contextual and narrative” detail and clarification about the situation. Meanwhile, Kohlberg’s subjects tended toward “formal and abstract”583 principles of moral fairness or individual right and agency. Gilligan’s work found itself at the centre of second-wave feminist debates about essentialism and sexual difference, as critics quickly began to challenge her so-called championing of a women’s morality. Several scholars since, including Tronto, Vanessa Nurock, Patricia Paperman, and Julie Perreault, demonstrate that such criticism results from a serious misreading of Gilligan’s work, especially of the very difference her study found in women’s responses to moral dilemma and ethical judgment. As Paperman points out, Gilligan deciphers this difference “empirically in certain women, but not all, and in certain men as well.”584 Further, if one revolutionary aspect of Gilligan’s psychological work was that it listened to women’s voices on moral dilemmas and ethical action, these were not the only thing it heard. As Gilligan points out, the “conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development concretely around the understanding of responsibility and relationship”; it takes into

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account those everyday material circumstances to which the “different voice” of Gilligan’s respondents gave prominence.585 Gilligan then developed an alternative feminist notion of morality that her successors would eventually theorize as the ethics of care. In other words, in Gilligan’s foundational work, care ethics were initially feminine, but ultimately are feminist: “The different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and it is primarily through women’s voices that I trace its development. But this association is not absolute, and the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex.”586 Gilligan would have been well aware that Western culture traditionally devalues care, feminizes and marginalizes it, and assigns it to the subaltern whether in sexual, class, or racial terms. But forms of care, and the types of activities they epitomize, comprise an ethics worthy of a central place in how human life and behaviour are understood. Care ethics belong to the realm of morality, of how a person should be to recall Sheila Heti’s first novel. But they also extend, in (my favourite of ) Gilligan’s words, to the realm of social justice: “Justice speaks to the disconnections which are at the root of violence, violation, and oppression, or the unjust use of unequal power. Care speaks to the dissociations which lead people to abandon themselves and others: by not speaking, not listening, not knowing, not seeing, not caring and ultimately not feeling by numbing themselves or steeling themselves against the vibrations and the resonances which characterize and connect the living world.”587 This important political thread in Gilligan’s thinking would be picked up by Tronto, one of the most prominent political and care philosophers writing today. As Tronto was already querying in her 1993 work Moral Boundaries: “What would it mean in late twentieth century American society to take seriously, as part of our definition of a good society, the values of caring – attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meeting others’ needs – traditionally associated with women and traditionally excluded from public consideration?”588 For Tronto, while still a moral ideal, care had to be understood, in keeping with the subjects’ concerns in Gilligan’s experiment, as a practice always

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within a context, a locality, and a social particularity, as well as with keen attention to the intersections of sexual and racial oppression. Moreover, Tronto argues: “Care is a way of framing political issues that makes their impact, and concern with human lives, direct and immediate. Within the care framework, political issues can make sense and connect to each other. Under these conditions, political involvement increases dramatically.”589 Thus understood in metafeminist terms, the ethics of care dislodge themselves from a “women’s morality” and Gilligan’s initial premise, while retaining some of the values inherent to that morality. At the heart of feminist care ethics is the political purpose of taking those ethics seriously, with an eye on the social and political transformation that Tronto later proposes in Caring Democracy: As the historical records shows, if one wishes to exclude some people from participating in democratic life, then the problems of care are easily solved. One assigns the responsibilities for caring to non-citizens: women, slaves, ‘working-class foreigners’ (More 1965 [1516]), or others who are so marked. But once a democratic society makes a commitment to the equality of all of its members, then the ways in which the inequalities of care affect different citizens’ capacities to be equal has to be a central part of the society’s political tasks. And furthermore, making care into a political concern will improve not only the quality of care, but also the quality of democratic life.590 Put differently, and to recall my discussion above, imagine if the elderly’s and minority groups’ right to proper, unbiased, and respectful care had been recognized, and how different their experience, indeed their survival rates, would have been during the COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine, with Gilligan and Tronto, if an ethics of care had been taken seriously. As a metafeminist theory, the feminist ethics of care reverberate, to borrow Scott’s term, with the social psychology of Gilligan’s early work as well as with the rereadings of her inheritors throughout the 1990s and especially since the beginning of the new millennium. In her preface to the French translation of Moral Boundaries, Tronto already designates her philosophy of care in metafeminist terms as

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“the fruit of [her] experience with women’s movements since the 1970s”591 as well as “a way to move from exclusionary politics to more inclusive ones.”592 The feminist ethics of care, as I will contemplate further down, have also amplified and extended into posthuman and material theory, but without unlearning the elements of a feminism still focused on sexual and racial equality, identity and difference, and postmodern anti-foundationalism and social constructionism. Ahmed’s notion of feminism as doing its “most ‘moving’ work”593 when not restricted to the critique of patriarchy can be useful here. As a metafeminist mode of thought, and at their juncture with posthuman thought, care ethics become again more feminist than feminine, more planetary than domestic, and more posthumanist than humanist, as well as linked to the intersectional, material, and affective feminisms I have explored so far. In sum, stripping not only care of its traditional paradigm of femininity, but also ethics of their supposed universality, impartiality, and individualism, Gilligan’s theory was first to release care from an exclusive and marginal association to domestic service, female work, and racialized servitude; to noncitizens including women, indentured enslaved people, foreign and migrant workers; and to racialized people. She insists on the centrality of care to all human and material relations, as well as the potential transformative elements of care as forms of public activity and social justice practice. As such, Gilligan’s theory of care required the political reflection that Tronto, among others, would later bring to it, just as Gilligan’s care ethics involve a form of feminist resistance to patriarchal binaries around gender roles and the social values ascribed to them. There is still the need to tread carefully when it comes to this idea of the inherent component of care in personal and social life. Care, as an ethics, may imply relationality and connection. Yet as with any ethical model, there is nothing natural or certain about the ethics of care and their outcomes. The specifics of caregiving or practice are far too varied, contingent, and unpredictable; they can be potentially harmful, unwanted, or exacted. To borrow from DeFalco: “caregiving is prone to shape shifting: one person’s altruism can be another’s narcissism, one person’s compassion another’s condescension.”594 As Elsa Dorlin points out, in so far as racialized servitude is concerned, it is still very much a part of our contemporary economies, and the

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work of care can quickly slip into forms of “dark care.”595 While care theory can bring about political change through its radical shifting of individualist frameworks and its recognition of subaltern work and values, its transformation into an ethics, let alone a politics, is not a given. Embodied care, attentive to the experiences of racialized, queer, trans, and elderly people and the ethical relationality that such embodiment represents consist of a possibility, not a guarantee. As Maurice Hamington recalls, “our corporeal existence and affective relationships encompass ambiguities that preclude … certainty.”596 The imperfect care exhibited by Lindberg’s women characters is a case in point. We need to tread lightly in the face of mythologizing care when it comes to (1) the work of women, and women of colour in particular, which still accounts for the majority of caregiving roles and practices in Western and colonial societies; (2) neoliberalism, which benefits from the very domestic, classed, and racialized care labour that it dismisses as marginal and socially insignificant; and (3) Canada’s national and international reputation as a “caring nation.” Certainly not all feminist scholars embrace care as a useful theoretical modus operandi. The aversion that care can invoke may be understandable – especially when forms of care are only, and reductively, considered a persistent and oppressive burden ultimately carried by women, or when they are equalled to unrestricted responsibility and selfsacrifice. Bellacasa warns against the trouble around a ubiquitous notion like care and its appropriations by neoliberal self-care and self-help markets.597 Yet as Sarah Miller recalls, again in line with Gilligan, such misgivings usually mollify when care is recognized and practiced as “an obligation by which all humans, not just female ones are bound,”598 and also when society and politics take seriously the principle of reciprocity as well as the very work of care. Again, these are some of the ideals the feminist ethics of care espouse; in practice, our Western societies have a long way to go. Care theory can also underline, and potentially overlook and even condone, the gross inequalities of a neoliberal society like Canada’s. To romanticize the exploitation of under- and unpaid care labour – largely undertaken by women and people of colour including new Canadians and immigrants – would be to obscure the fact that such labour sows benefits and privileges that are unequally

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“distributed throughout society,”599 in which, moreover, “paid care always seems too expensive.”600 As DeFalco argues, “private, domestic labour provided largely by women has significant social repercussions, in effect subsidizing the very neoliberal society that dismisses the inevitability of dependence and the value of care.”601 Canada’s “neoliberal practices,” DeFalco also notes, “privilege the independent, active, able-bodied, young, wage-earning individual at the expense of the disabled, vulnerable and dependent aged subject.”602 These neoliberal values are a far cry from the ethical model expounded by care theorists and philosophers, since they are founded, as neoliberalism always is, on the principles of personal autonomy, strength, and independence. The relationality, vulnerability, and dependence that go into recognizing the ubiquitous need and purpose of feminist care ethics are a far cry from such neoliberal values. The argument for a political understanding of feminist care is, in this dark scenario, all the more crucial. Finally, facile and inaccurate perceptions that uphold Canada as a caring nation are not uncommon. A totalizing ethos of a compassionate, morally righteous Canada is continuously presented to the rest of the world, particularly in reference to its universal health care and the collectivism that it enshrines.603 The autocratic era of Donald Trump in the United States and its hateful anti-immigration legislation, border politics, and increasing proclivities toward overturning Roe v. Wade can make a country like Canada look better, more welcoming, and indeed more caring of the world’s most vulnerable: refugees and migrants; the victims of the Syrian crisis; or women seeking abortions. I, as a Canadian, will admit I am prone to appreciating such contrasts. But again, we cannot obfuscate the colonialism and racism at the heart of this caring nation’s history and its ongoing practices, biases, and injustices, particularly around Indigenous-settler and race relations within its often-idealized multicultural society – which “legislates,” but does not necessarily carry out, “pluralism and tolerance.”604 Lest I need to illustrate the point about the country’s history of racism and brutal injustice, briefly recall Canada’s historical implications in the transatlantic slave trade; its residential school system and the Sixties Scoop; the Chinese head tax; the immigration policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that excluded South Asians and Jewish people from entering;

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the Japanese Canadian internment; or the continued genocide of Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirited people. Feminist care theory faded into the background as more prominent feminist voices of the decade following In a Different Voice emerged. In the 1990s, scholars of so-called third-wave feminism became concerned primarily with social class, colonialism, and the unending internal debates and sites of conflict within feminism itself, including the politics of race and ethnicity outside the concerns of care per se. However, Tronto’s work on care in Moral Boundaries did, according to her, grow out of her attention to the intersections of race and gender.605 Other US feminist theorists, such as Nel Noddings and Virigina Held, turned to the feminist care theory that Gilligan pioneered, and have continued to do so mostly from their research disciplines of philosophy and social and political thought. Later, the 2000s and 2010s ushered in many new perspectives that care ethics now bring to political thought, the environment, social policy, literature, ethnography, and Inuit history.606 But let us return for a moment to the contested sites of feminist theory that I discussed earlier: the self-consciousness that Kavka finds has been so paralyzing, and the highly divisive and, in Butler’s thinking, inconclusive debates over sexual difference. Recall that in Moral Boundaries, Tronto suggests that care theory can address or at least monitor such rifts, which she sees as the cause for some of the “bad faith”607 that plagues third-wave feminism – those between women of different races, ethnicities, religions, social classes, sexual orientations, and gender identities. According to Tronto, care ethics as a mode of understanding intersectionality and of critiquing and potentially transforming the institutional and social structures that promulgate inequality and discrimination could begin to newly establish trust as well as alliances between feminists. In this regard, a noteworthy feature of feminist scholarship in the 2000s was the revitalization of feminist thought, particularly in France, through care theory: initially by a renewed interest in Gilligan’s care ethics and the revised translation of In a Different Voice into French in 2008, and subsequently by the critical work that ensued internationally from this effort.608 A noteworthy aspect of the revival of care theory in Francophone scholarship is the persistence of the English term in works on “les

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éthiques du care” over its French equivalent, soin. Sophie Bourgault and Julie Perreault, who identify with a second generation of care theorists, follow a number of Francophone feminist scholars who contend for the English usage, which, in their view, captures “the complex dimension of a reality that presents itself simultaneously as a universal human activity, a very concrete social practice, an epistemology and an ethical position.”609 Yet Bourgault and Perreault’s justification of the common use of the English term “care” points to an even more compelling and, in a sense, historical tendency. Current interest in the feminist ethics of care demonstrates a new interlinguistic and intercultural dimension in feminist scholarship that usage of the English word “care” in French-language theory epitomizes. This linguistic, and ultimately methodological, rapprochement once again recalls the exceptional practice of feminist fiction theories (fictions théoriques) in Quebec and English Canada of the 1970s and 1980s, which saw French-English dialogues and collaborations among women writers, theorists, critics, and translators like none seen in Canadian literature before or since. At the centre of the twenty-first-century resurgences of Gilligan’s moral theory in French-language scholarship, and of its transformation into the feminist ethics of care developed by US scholars like Tronto and Noddings, exists the “double conversation” that Bourgault and Perreault recognize “among the works on care realized in French and in English … a veritable dialogue between the works pursued in the two languages, a modest effort to exceed the ‘two solitudes’ in studies on care.”610 Just as Bourgault and Perreault predict, recently in Canada some feminist care scholarship seems to veer toward this cross-linguistic and cross-cultural approach, as Carrière and Hétu demonstrate in their extensive critical bibliography on care theory and feminist ethics as they freely list and contextualize research items in English and French. Cross-linguistic methodologies also surface as feminist care theorists turn to environmental and animal studies as well as human and nonhuman vulnerabilities, such as the “four-way conversation on madness, care and large-scale collective afflictions”611 signalled in the subtitle of a work by US-based researchers Anne Lovell, Stefania Pandolfo, and Veena Das, and French scholar Sandra Laugier; or the collection Tous vulnérables: Le care, les animaux et l’environnement, edited by Laugier. These two publications reflect the posthumanist

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epistemology recently adopted by feminist care thinkers. As Lovell points out, care concerns all forms of life, and an ethics of care can also redefine how we perceive both the human and the nonhuman.612 Or, in Braidotti’s terms, “our relationship to other inhabitants of this planet”613 is what makes up our posthuman condition. The concern with redefining human subjectivity and ethical action in relation not only to other humans, but also to nonhuman entities, also points to the urgencies of the anthropocene. Our very thinking about the nature versus culture binary shifts once and for all in the anthropocene, and feminist approaches to this geological designation of our epoch have driven the work of earth science scholars, anthropologists, philosophers, and cultural critics alike.614 As Braidotti remarks: “If anxiety about extinction was common in the nuclear era, the posthuman condition, of the anthropocene, extends the death horizon to most species.”615 It is this “commonly shared bond of vulnerability”616 that opens to the need for an ethics of care in The Posthuman, to which I next turn.

Posthuman Care Contemporary material feminists are no longer content to simply deconstruct the nature versus culture hierarchy that feminists – ecofeminists among them – and poststructuralist theorists have undertaken for decades now. The impetus is to learn to think through the interconnection of the two and the impact of their connection on the physical world; human and nonhuman survival; and, of course, moral and ethical orders. A number of contemporary theorists, especially since the 1990s, have been engaging with posthumanism, a term with variable uses. The concept has roots that go back to the 1960s, and specifically to Michel Foucault’s notion of the “archaeology” of thought about “man” and the possible end of this invention.617 Cary Wolfe helpfully defines posthumanism, which he opposes to the oft-related but different idea of transhumanism: “posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended – but only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism itself” as well as the transhuman’s fantasy of

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“transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether.”618 I will focus on Braidotti’s philosophy in The Posthuman, which aligns with Wolfe’s posthumanist understanding and grows directly out of her earlier feminist work on nomadic subjectivity as a site of multiple overlapping variables. More importantly to my purposes here, it is through the recourse to care that Braidotti advances an affirmative posthuman ethics, to counter what she considers “a perverse form of the posthuman” instigated by globalization and “advanced capitalism and its bio-genetic technologies,”619 and which Atwood depicts in her postapocalyptic trilogy. According to Braidotti, such a posthuman predicament is composed by “death-technolog[ies]” in the post-Cold War world of technological warfare; the proliferation of environmental catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina related to the climate emergency; the commercialization of bodies and of the planet’s resources; biogenetics; and the techno-science of contemporary medicine and particularly psychiatry.620 Braidotti provocatively notes “the four horsemen of the posthuman apocalypse: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science.”621 It might appear conspicuous that I leave ecofeminism out of this discussion. But I do so not because care ethics are irrelevant to ecofeminism, but because its crucial concerns, and its metafeminist development into the feminist ecologies that more recently preoccupy theorists like Alaimo, Haraway, or Métis scholar Zoe Todd deserve a closer examination than I can give them here. Yet as Atwood’s work will illustrate further, the posthuman condition includes the negative imperatives of our environmental no return. Furthermore, it corresponds to what Braidotti refers to as “the contemporary bio-mediated context,”622 a material world view that she inherits in part from Guattari’s Three Ecologies. The posthuman condition is premised on “a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction,” Braidotti argues, which is what makes matter and all life “relational,” constantly interacting with “a variety of environments” that constitute subjectivity, or the postanthropocentric self.623 Braidotti names this relational force of her “vitalist material view” zoe: “the generative force of zoe – life beyond the ego-bound human.”624 As in the anthropocene, the biological, the technological, the environmental, and the global overlap in this posthuman world view,

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with their boundaries, like nature and culture, “to a large extent blurred by the effects of scientific and technological advances.”625 Aligned with the theoretics of material feminisms, Braidotti’s philosophy looks to posthumanism not only to oppose but also to provide an alternative to the anthropocentric individualism inherited from Enlightenment humanism. The latter is predicated on the white man of reason who dominates nature with culture. Meanwhile, the humanist tradition has also denied matter, or material reality – “the self-organizing,” intelligent, and relational vitality present in all living matter; it has privileged metaphysical truths and anthropocentric (or centrist) assumptions about subjectivity, life, and death – that ultimate nonhuman dimension of living.626 Braidotti thus proposes a “posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject,” which begs “an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism.”627 She continues: “as embodied and embedded entities, we are all part of nature, even though academic philosophy continues to claim transcendental grounds for human consciousness. How to reconcile this materialist awareness with the task of critical thought? As a brand of vital materialism, posthuman theory contests the arrogance of anthropocentrism and the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Human as a transcendental category. It strikes instead an alliance with the productive and immanent force of zoe, or life in its non-human aspects. This requires a mutation of our shared understanding of what it means to think at all, let alone think critically.”628 In its understanding of human subjectivity not just as a product of language and social construction, posthumanism intersects with material feminist perspectives – Barad’s notion of “agential realism”629 for instance – and thus the interaction rather than the hierarchical binary of matter and culture. According to Braidotti – and this is where an ethics of care explicitly comes in – the posthuman posits a “new knowing subject [as] a complex assemblage of human and non-human, planetary and cosmic, given and manufactured, which requires major re-adjustments in our ways of thinking” about care and care giving in particular.630 As a metafeminist approach, Braidotti’s posthuman philosophy contains and goes beyond the anti-humanism and social constructionism that fuelled the feminism as well as anti-racist, socialist,

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and decolonization movements of the 1960 and 1970s.631 Or, as she indicates: “the posthumanist position I am defending builds on the anti-humanist legacy, more specifically on the epistemological and political foundations of the post-structuralist generation, and moves further … [to] create other visions of the self.”632 If the posthuman subjectivity that Braidotti theorizes is not entirely anti-foundationalist, it is because it is based on a metafeminist premise of ontological oscillation: a vision of the subject that is decentred and denaturalized, but “embodied and embedded, firmly located somewhere, according to the feminist ‘politics of location,’” therefore “materialist and relational” – “a vision of the subject that is ‘worthy of the present.’” 633 There’s a lot of Braidotti here, but I find it extremely productive how self-reflexively she positions her feminist posthumanism as a form of theoretical genealogy, that is to say, in relation to the modes of thinking that have fed it throughout her work: the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari (which in turn is primarily neo-Spinozist), and also of Cixous, Foucault, Irigaray, and Haraway. In other words, Braidotti does not shy away from articulating her double, metafeminist gesture of encompassing and exceeding her theoretical influences. Avowedly indebted, along with her material feminist contemporaries, to Haraway’s socialist-feminist cyborg theory of the mid-1980s – an early analysis of gender at the crossroads of class, race, and technology – Braidotti’s turn to the posthuman is also metafeminist in that it “moves beyond ‘high’ cyber studies (Haraway, 1985; Hayles, 1999) into post-cyber materialism (Braidotti, 2002) and posthuman theory (Braidotti, 2006). A nomadic zoe-centered approach connects human to non-human life so as to develop a comprehensive eco-philosophy of becoming.”634 In a vein similar to Sedgwick’s reparative criticism in Touching Feeling, Braidotti ultimately insists: “Politically, we need to assess the advantages of the politics of vital affirmation,” comprised of the “‘matter-realist’ vitalism” predicated on a material view of existence, again devised from Deleuze’s “neo-Spinozist political ontology of monism and radical immanence, engendering a transversal relational ethics to counteract the inhuman(e) aspects of the postmodern predicament.”635 “Ethically,” Braidotti continues, “we need to re-locate compassion and care of both human and nonhuman others in this new frame.”636 Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, theorized as a “becoming-posthuman” in turn comprised of a set of “multiple

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ecologies of belonging,” spawns an ethics of care: “the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self.”637 As this notion of becoming opens Braidotti’s affirmative posthuman ethics to an ethics of care, one that is at once embodied by and embedded in an environment, her philosophy is also one that “respects vulnerability”638 – the condition of all life form in the anthropocene. Returning to Laugier, Lovell, and Tronto, all three argue that a feminist care ethics must include an understanding of the material (corporeal and social) conditions that marginalize the most vulnerable bodies, and of the complex human and nonhuman interrelations that produce human subjectivity. As Laugier writes: “The reality of dependence is also the awareness of our tie to the environment and the animal world. And so, vulnerability no longer narrowly refers to one category of ‘vulnerable ones’ – humans to whom we would owe specific attention and whom we usually neglect. It can therefore extend to the non-human: animal vulnerability, but also that of everything in nature which is fragile, to be protected – biodiversity, the quality of water, etc. The discovery of vulnerability, its centrality, brings to light interdependence: of human, animal, environment.”639 The care ethics that Laugier espouses in her insistence on the “centrality of vulnerability”640 are well poised to intervene in the posthuman predicament brought upon by the anthropocene. Again, for Braidotti, a posthuman ethics must open onto a self that is postanthropocentric, that is to say, made up of the nature-culture continuum, of the nonhuman-human continuum, which the feminist care ethics theorized by Tronto (here with Fischer) has in fact advocated since its early expressions: “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”641 Heavily influenced by feminist care theorists, especially Gilligan and Tronto, Hamington in turn delineates the corporeal aspects addressed by a social ethics of care. “[C]aring habits,”642 Hamington writes, are always “caught up in the concrete characteristics of situations and human entanglements.”643 It is, moreover, the ability to care about unknown or unfamiliar others that leads one “to consider one’s subject position and power”644 and, I could add in the spirit of

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Braidotti’s thinking, one’s anthropocentric fallacies about the self. In anticipation of my reading of Atwood’s postapocalyptic fiction, this line of thinking also leads Bellacasa to explore care in relation to a posthuman disposition: of the human-nonhuman relations of “naturecultures”645 – of things and objects, and of more-than-human ecologies, including other animals, living beings, physical forces, technology, spiritual entities, and humans. Care, Bellacasa argues, is not “a human-only matter” but an ontology, a “doing” and a “being,” a “‘species activity’ with ethical, social, political, and cultural implications” and the recognition of “interdependency as the ontological state in which humans and countless other beings unavoidably live.”646 Finally, it is worth noting that Whyte and Cuomo extend an ethics of care as they consider the rapprochements between Indigenous environmental theory and feminist philosophy: “The gendered, feminist, historical, and anticolonial dimensions of care ethics, indigenous ethics, and other related approaches provide rich ground for rethinking and reclaiming the nature and depth of diverse relationships as the fabric of social and ecological being.”647 They emphasize in turn human and nonhuman reciprocities, as well as the contextual and the political. In their criticism of colonialism, neoliberalism, sexism, racism, and of a utilitarian approach to Western human rights and capitalist forms of ownership, they posit care at the heart of the Indigenous world view that they discuss, a view that is effectively metafeminist in scope and practice in that it requires Maracle’s “deeper kind of feminism”: an intersectional consciousness deeply enmeshed in the work of restoring power to Indigenous women, and to which Lindberg’s Birdie has already pointed.648

Readerly Care Several scholars make the case for understanding the intricacies, ubiquity, and importance of care through literary experience. Nussbaum, for one, proposes literature as a “social habit of care.”649 Accordingly, she argues that literature “can contribute to our diverse knowledge of others”650 – of an unknown or irreducible other whose fragility, exposed through narrative, could also be my own. Nussbaum argues that the literary imagination, and reading literature, can awaken

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a profound and transformative empathy for the other, fulfilling a human need as well as putting into practice care as a potential and transformative politics. Nussbaum’s notion of “poetic justice” is not without its critics, especially when it comes to the normative grounds of the moral role she seems to ascribe to literature, not to mention the limitations that several critics involved in affect studies have found in theories of readerly empathy. These critics, Berlant and Ahmed among them, link empathy, sympathy, and compassion to the possible appropriation of others’ pain or the development of false feelings of benevolence that can reinforce the status quo or conservative values.651 In her critique of cross-racial empathy in “Eating the Other,” hooks links the white empathizer to “a hostile erasure and symbolic ingestion”652 that prevents such figures from recognizing their own privilege and complicity in the structures, such as racial or sexual oppression, that can so often be the root of pain. Ann Jurecic and Kimberly Chabot Davis, while they do not dismiss these important critiques, resist the reduction of empathy strictly to white imperialistic urges or to the empty catharsis that, for instance, worries Berlant. They urge for the recognition of the legitimate, multidimensional facets of empathy that, much in keeping with the theory of care espoused in these pages, guarantee nothing. Both critics consider how some texts can “invit[e] readers to experience the interplay of connection, distance, and difference, knowing that their understanding will always be incomplete and imperfect.”653 Toews’s and Younsi’s works, as I will consider further, set such an interplay in motion and invite readers to consider the very ambiguities of empathy and care, and how these can at once fail and solicit meaningful engagement. Atwood’s dystopic fiction, meanwhile, attempts to engage readerly care, particularly in regard to her ecological and social critiques, through its claims to realism. Reading matters, Jurecic continues, not because it necessarily changes readers or their politics, but because it “slows thought down [as an] invitation to dwell in uncertainty and to explore the difficulties of knowing, acknowledging, and responding to others.”654 Davis in turn recalls the cognitive dimensions of emotions, and warns against “dismissing experiential reading … emotions and the private sphere [of reading] as apolitical.”655 Like Jurecic, Davis recognizes that there are adverse and beneficial dimensions to readerly empathy. But she

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goes on to show, through her study of white book clubs’ responses to African American literature, that empathy can also be productive when experienced on relational grounds. Davis’s argument draws from ethicist Jessica Benjamin’s compelling concept of identificatory love, or the “ability to share feelings … without demanding control, to experience sameness without obliterating difference”656 – a mutual recognition that Younsi’s understanding of care highlights. Returning to Nussbaum’s emphasis on repetition and habit as generators of caring, Heather McRobie recalls that “perhaps a better way to think of Nussbaum’s argument about the moral imagination is to think not of literature in terms of what constitutes the ‘literary’ but of story-telling as a central facet of our humanity.”657 DeFalco proposes a similar argument about narrative and its display of the elements of an ethics of care, such as “everyday scenarios of dependence, responsibility, compassion, and care,”658 including their complexities and the breakdown of their relations. In a way that recalls Gilligan’s emphasis on narrative and context in her care theory, Hamington argues that “care is most adequately reflected in the stories of people’s lives, where more is brought to light than the rules or outcomes of a given situation. Those interested in care would do well to investigate literature as well as first-person stories to discover the degree to which care flows through everyday experience.”659 Care, as I will now consider, is certainly a theme in works by Atwood, Toews, and Younsi, and at the same time solicits the thorny working of reader empathy.

Now That History Is Over (Margaret Atwood) Readers of Atwood will recognize her worlds in Murray Abrams’s classic definition of dystopia as a “‘bad place’ … a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected in some disastrous future culmination.”660 Like Brossard, Atwood has had a long writing career, and her millennial work has focused on the global threats of war, corporate greed, and ecological disaster. From her earliest works, such as The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Surfacing, to her novels Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, unruly heroines emerge to disrupt the nation and its colonial history and mindset. The gothic,

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macabre, and disorderly aspects of these protagonists have not been lost on the plethora of Atwood criticism. Yet the MaddAddam Trilogy distinguishes itself from these feminist disruptions of grand national narratives that characterize Atwood’s earlier oeuvre. To recall Brossard’s recent poetics, this marks a shift, though obviously a different one, in Atwood’s writing: it becomes a postmillennial, and posthumanist, pursuit of her earlier interest in speculative fiction and, as I will consider here, opens onto a feminist ethics of care. The MaddAddam Trilogy, which includes the novels Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), follows in the footsteps of the speculative fiction of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s 1985 Orwellian depiction of a patriarchal, totalitarian theocracy recently repopularized by its MGM Television and Hulu adaptation by Bruce Miller.661 However, as Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan demonstrate about Oryx and Crake, the backdrop of the trilogy is fuelled by the repercussions of 9/11 in a way that The Handmaid’s Tale could not anticipate.662 The three novels, especially the third, still present historiography as a form of feminist defiance of logocentric narrative. Yet, this work belongs to a more expansive, metafeminist outlook that both encompasses and surpasses Atwood’s earlier concerns with sexual difference, social transformation, and, ultimately, the human and the posthuman. In a familiar feminist form of storytelling, the processes of historiography are initially taken over by Atwood’s woman protagonist Toby in MaddAddam. Yet this role, which is depicted also as one of care, will be passed onto – and perhaps somewhat pirated by – the young, bioengineered humanoid Craker boy Blackbeard – certainly one of the many forms of “inter-species co-operation”663 and posthuman relations that occur in the novel. In a 2004 essay, Atwood writes that “with the legendary 9/11 World Trade Centre attack in the year 2001 … it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once – open markets, closed minds – because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance.”664 Such is also the corporate- and state-controlled, terror-wielding, and, ultimately, postapocalyptic world of the MaddAddam Trilogy. Apocalyptic tone is most strongly evoked by The Year of the Flood’s cultish, egalitarian, ecofriendly, and semi-satirized God’s Gardeners. Depicted at length in the novel, the Gardeners prepare for a cleansing

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waterless flood, which will materialize as the man-made haemorrhagic virus Crake unleashes on all of humanity. Toby’s foray into the postapocalyptic world captures the profoundly dystopian nature of the trilogy as a whole: “This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery.”665 As one might expect from Atwood’s fiction, women fare especially badly in this dystopia, whether after the great disaster that prevails upon humanity or in the time before the ecological apocalypse. As in all of her work, Atwood is silent about race and racialization – which, for some readers, renders her writing not bad so much as unrelatable or even unforgiveable, although Oryx, who is from the Global South, and Rebecca, in The Year of the Flood,666 are ostensibly racialized characters. Atwood does, however, consider social class, which plays a significant role in how women’s lives unfold in the first two novels. Like the young Ren and Amanda Payne, Toby is among the nonaffluent and thus outsider masses who have survived the waterless flood. Before the devastation, Crake (Glenn) and Snowman (Jimmy) belonged to the higher caste of scientists and businesspeople living in luxurious but highly surveilled gated communities and scientific compounds. Recounted in Oryx and Crake, and then in the flashback chapters of The Year of the Flood as well as through Toby’s transmission of personal histories to the Crakers in MaddAddam, wild consumerism, environmental extinction, and unregulated corporations surge and prosper in the preapocalyptic world, at the expense of the Pleebland majority, until Crake unleashes BlyssPluss, a sex pill with worldwide distribution that contains a hidden lethal virus. Atwood’s dystopian women are commoditized, enslaved, objectified, and abused in what is a thoroughly careless world. No social institution exists to represent or protect ordinary citizens, that is to say, anyone not employed by one of the mega ruling corporations – anyone with a “precarious life,” in Butler’s terms, not valued enough to be saved. Atwood has long opposed classifying her work as science fiction, preferring “speculative fiction,” which she claims “invents nothing we

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haven’t already invented or started to invent.”667 She continues this thinking in the acknowledgments of the second novel, where she remarks, “The Year of the Flood is fiction, but the general tendencies and many of the details in it are alarmingly close to fact,” and of the third, where she writes: “Although MaddAddam is a work of fiction, it does not include any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under construction, or are not possible in theory.”668 This invocation of alarming realism can be seen as a metanarrative call for readerly care, in the sense that (at least Western) readers are incited to recognize their late-capitalist, postindustrial world within the otherness of a deeply dystopian fictional future. In both posthuman worlds, a select few prevail and so many marginalized struggle and suffer. In Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, women and girls, like animals and plants, systematically figure as assets for exchange and profit by the corporate capitalist elite, while sexual abuse, rape, and femicide are normalized and even sanctioned. Such practices are banal (to evoke Hannah Arendt), inasmuch as they are widespread and daily in SeksMart’s brothels and in its highbrow franchises like Scales and Tails. Young Ren, from The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, also works there, a situation not unlike Oryx’s from the first novel, who recounts being sold into the child-sex trade and porn industry by her family once their crops failed due to climate change. Just as Offred chronicles Gilead’s terrible history in The Handmaid’s Tale, Toby offers a blend of fact and fiction in her chronical of human and posthuman history. Her stories’ reconstructions and inventions of events are vital to the survival of a postapocalyptic humanity, at least its genetically engineered version in the form of the multicoloured Crakers. First secretly created by the brilliant transgenic scientist Glenn, better known as Crake, in the Paradise Dome of a top scientific compound, the biochemically engineered, humanoid, vegan, and all-recycling Crakers have limited environmental impact and a close to zero need for resources. They are also supposedly free of affective traits such as prejudice, greed, jealousy, spirituality, and abstract or symbolic thinking that can only, according to their maker, lead to pain and warfare. In MaddAddam, storytelling comes to function, for the Crakers, as a form of resistance to the tabula rasa of apocalyptic revelation: “About the events of that evening – the

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events that set human malice loose in the world again – Toby later made two stories. The first story was the one she told out loud, to the Children of Crake; it had a happy outcome, or as happy as she could manage. The second, for herself alone, was not so cheerful.”669 Toby instills storytelling as well as writing among the Crakers, in a legacy that the Craker boy Blackbeard will take over as community scribe to create “new Words … called the Story of Toby”: “‘I am writing the story,’ she [Toby] says. ‘The story of you, and me, and the Pigoons, and everyone … ‘Oh Toby, when you are too tired to do it, next time I will write the story. I will be your helper.’ ‘Thank you,’ says Toby. ‘That is kind.’ Blackbeard smiles like daybreak.”670 Story, ultimately, is an act of care, just as Blackbeard views Toby the storyteller as “kind like Oryx”671 – the Crakers’s quintessential caregiver. Only if Toby tells them their story will the Crakers make sense of their existence, their short past, and the preapocalyptic world of a now-fallen humanity. Only then will they carry these stories into their uncertain future. Toby’s retelling in MaddAddam does not fall in line so much with the feminist deconstruction of a long and carefully monitored past, as in Atwood’s previous feminist novels, these having been mostly concerned with Canada’s colonial and patriarchal history. For “history is over”672 in MaddAddam, and only at this point does Toby’s metafeminist retelling, inventing, and caring for the Crakers begin. The reconstruction of history through a woman’s voice, although an important feature of MaddAddam, quickly gives way to a random telling of different life stories from various viewpoints. Multiple narratives flow through the text, including those of Oryx and Crake; their friend Jimmy, now known as Snowman-the-Jimmy; Zeb, Toby’s endearing, equally wounded, and unreliable lover; his eco-spiritual leader brother Adam; MaddAddam undercover cyber terrorists such as Pilar; Ren and a deeply traumatized Amanda, both brutalized by psychotic former Painballers who have also survived the Flood; and, finally, Blackbeard. As the first historian of the newly crafted Crakers after Crake’s fatal bioterrorism, Snowman begins to present tales about their maker in Oryx and Crake. His initial creation of a mythical worldview is monolithic and starts with the Crakers’ conception within the Egg of the laboratory. In contrast, Toby’s tales are immediately unwieldy, radically subjective, and polyvocal

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when she takes over the Crakers’ historiography in MaddAddam. Postapocalyptic and inevitably posthuman history, as Toby offers it to the Crakers, aims at the construction of their sense of self and interaction with a world of others around them. But it is an ultimately random composition of life stories, rather than a grand narrative of origin and creation like Crake’s, that Toby spins together through the vagaries of the various male and female, human and nonhuman, subjective and animal lives that she narrates and often invents. What becomes of Toby’s tales and journals is “the Book that Toby made when she lived among us,” which Blackbeard continues to recite and to supplement: “these new Words I have made are called the Story of Toby.”673 If the biblical undertone is unmistakable, “the Book that Toby made” is multilayered and brims with a multiplicity of stories and truths and care and protection, thus defying the authoritarianism of monolithic history: And in the book she put the Words of Crake, and the Words of Oryx as well, and of how together they made us, and made also this safe and beautiful World for us to live in. And in the Book too are the Words of Zeb, and of his brother, Adam; and the Words of Zeb Ate A Bear; and how he became our Defender against the bad men who did cruel and hurtful things; and the Words of Zeb’s Helpers, Pilar and Rhino and Katrina WooWoo and March the Snake, and of all the MaddAddamites; and the Words of Snowman-the-Jimmy, who was there in the beginning.674 Toby’s teachings also set out to prevent new forms of biological determinism, hegemony, and human-centred morality from establishing themselves. Along with the surviving humans, the Crakers and the pigoons with their human neocortices constitute MaddAddam’s fragile postapocalyptic community. That community, however, is hardly a utopia of gender parity and equity; on the human side, women take on most of the domestic chores, while mostly men hunt for goods left over from the disaster. Some of the men even prompt the women to not “waste any increasingly rare human DNA” and to procreate with the remaining malignant Painballers.675 Still, over the course of MaddAddam, a realignment of reactionary and normative

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gender roles occurs, a considerable deviation from Crake’s schema of biological determination. Whereas Crake has designed the male Crakers to engage in constant sexual activity, Toby teaches them codes of sexual consent and equal participation – within a world view that remains heteronormative. Meanwhile, Amanda, Ren, and Swift Fox bear hybrid human-Craker offspring by the end of the novel, which they conceive freely and on their own terms. The three women go on to teach the Crakers about difference and mutual care, again undermining Crake’s sexist and specist anti-human zealotry and extreme environmental eugenics: “Toby set down also the Words about Amanda and Ren and Swift Fox, our Beloved Oryx Mothers, who showed us that we and the two-skinned ones are all people and helpers, though we have different gifts, and some of us turn blue and some do not. So Toby said we must be respectful, and always ask first, to see if a woman is really blue or is just smelling blue, when there is a question about blue things.”676 Practices of violent objectification and merchandizing women’s bodies, as so brutally portrayed in The Year of the Flood, are not, after all, far off; nor are the horrible consequences of the relentlessly consumed and marketed natural world and terror-wielding surveillance state of Oryx and Crake. The time after the world of MaddAddam will carry the burden of the time before, just as Atwood’s futuristic dystopia carries the post-9/11 ills of her era. In the final novel of the trilogy, the dualistic worldview of social and hierarchical domination is undone by the eco-ethical understanding that numerous life systems mutually reinforce one another, just as the multiple stories Toby tells reinforce each other to build a new history for the Crakers. Yet this mutuality among organisms can only occur through proper acts of care. The hope for humanity in MaddAddam seems to rest with the transgenetically modified Crakers – and thus Atwood’s speculative imagination. Yet hope also rests with Atwood’s women characters – the “Beloved Three Oryx Mothers” as “set down” in words by Toby – through their ties with human and nonhuman others, including Craker, pigoon, clairvoyant bee, as well as through their “friendship and interspecies co-operation” and relations of care.677 In Braidotti’s terms, this is “a postanthropocentric configuration of knowledge that grants the earth the same role and agency as the human subjects that inhabit it”;678 in this way, the posthuman framework of Atwood’s novel is set in

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the anthropocene. “The global economy is post-anthropocentric,” Braidotti reminds us in The Posthuman, as if to echo Atwood’s speculative fiction even though she would reject its dystopian negativity or seeming “mode of neo-gothic horror.”679 Yet just as Braidotti moves away from the posthuman condition understood exclusively as a predicament, Atwood in her trilogy, as we see through the reparative properties of storytelling and caregiving, also steps away from Gothic fairy tale and horror as a lens through which to view history. Interdependence becomes fundamental to all beings’ survival, making Ren’s idea to “rebuild the human race”680 in The Year of the Flood not as hopeless as it once seemed to her fellow survivors. The MaddAddam Trilogy is steeped in what may seem like typically Atwoodian animal-person imagery, as birds, insects, vultures, and wild animals abound. These creatures offer up what we might call, along with Braidotti, the trilogy’s posthuman worldview, depicting thriving biolife such as liolambs, wolvogs, and pigoons. Created for corporate profit and now roaming the earth, these species are a threatening and integral component of the post-Waterless Flood world. In The Year of the Flood, the Gardeners attribute the oncoming apocalypse to humanity’s break of its covenant with God where “trust with the Animals” is concerned.681 Meanwhile, the cult sees itself as “a plural Noah,” declared to be “the chosen caregiver of the Species.”682 Admittedly, as they take on what is an interspecies care ethics, the intensity of the Gardeners’ devotion skirts the parodic. Their celebration of Saint Eunell Day and his “Natural Knowledge” calls for an anthropomorphic meditation on “the virtues of the wild Onion, of the wild Asparagus, of the wild Garlic, that toil not, neither do they spin, nor do they have pesticides sprayed upon them, if they happily grow far enough away from agribusiness crops,” along with the hymn to the “Holy Weeds.”683 Yet beneath the derisive characteristic of such pronouncements – and despite the fact that most of the Gardeners will be overtaken by the plague – is an ethics of earth care, nonwaste, and interconnection, marked in turn by “Saint Dian’s Day, consecrated to interspecies empathy”: “Saint Dian embodies an ideal we hold dear: loving care for all other Creatures. She believed that these deserve the same tenderness we would show to beloved friends and kinfolk, and in this she is a revered model for us. She is buried among her Gorilla Friends, on the mountain she tried to protect.”684

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And so, if lightly satirized, the Gardeners still embody the planetary care ethic that runs through the second and third installments of the trilogy: “We are all one another’s hands, Adam One used to say.”685 The human-animal connection is also emphasized in MaddAddam, through the character of Zeb, who uses bear skin as camouflage during his preapocalyptic Bearlift days and who ends up killing and eating a bear, incorporating the animal, to survive the Barrens: “Having eaten the heart, could he now speak the language of bears?”; and later, “it gave me to understand that it was living on in me. It wasn’t even pissed with me. It seemed quite friendly.”686 But it is Toby’s knowledge and manipulation of herbs, mushrooms, and insects that invokes most powerfully an ethics of care as a reparative element to the posthuman framework of Atwood’s dystopia. While Crake exterminates a good part of humanity globally, Toby’s training and research under the mentorship of the Gardeners’ healer, Pilar aka Eve Six, are used locally to treat the wounded survivors who end up in her care. A former university student of holistic healing, and then tutored by Pilar, Toby performs an ethics and life-giving agency of care – recalling Fisher and Tronto’s reparative understanding of care ethics as “a species activity.” It is through this emphasis on care that feminist intervention in the social order manifests itself in the last two novels. Not only does Toby stand in stark contrast to the anti-human zealotry that drove Crake to unleash such devastation on the world. The value of solidarity, forgiveness, preservation, as well as precarious lives, runs throughout Atwood’s storylines involving Ren, Toby, and Amanda, contrasting with Crake’s isolation. Each of these women endangers her own life to save another in The Year of the Flood. In Year Twenty-Five, Toby risks her self-sufficient survival to care for Ren, who has barely made it out alive from the sadistic grip of the psychotic Painball Gold Team. Toby and Ren then venture out, again at great risk, to save Amanda, who is still enslaved by the same men, just as the three women will continue to care for one another and for others (specifically the rogue scientists of a former bioresistance cell) in MaddAddam. Again, The Year of the Flood demonstrates the worst perils of environmental destruction and corporatized nature, namely through the horrific sexual violence and mercantile exploitation in the first two novels. However, and like the third, the second novel provides a glimpse of

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what Rachel Stein calls “an environmental feminist praxis that fosters the vital, healthy, inextricable co-flourishing of homo-sapiens and the more-than-human world.”687 Toby transforms mushrooms and poppy into “elixirs and remedies” and cultivates maggots for “their antibiotic properties,” whose benefits she teaches to the Gardeners’ children, which in turn gains her the nickname “Dry Witch”: “At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And earth.”688 She, like Zeb, is becoming an extension of this nonhuman world, which remains both a provider and a recipient of care.

Not So Puny Sorrows (Miriam Toews) As Alaimo and Hekman recall in terms of their understanding of feminist material approaches: “Women have bodies; these bodies have pain as well as pleasure. They also have diseases that are subject to medical interventions that may or may not cure those bodies.”689 Western medicine, and psychiatry in particular, locate the subject of care at the junction of biology and medical technology, and of the material and the discursive, which, Haraway insists, we cannot separate. As a form of technology that intercedes with biology, and in what Toews calls its “pragmatic, scientific” approach to “the task of caring,”690 psychiatry can be considered in a posthuman framework. Through what may appear at first an unlikely contemplation of Haraway’s cyborg theory in the context of the cultural politics of Prozac, Bradley E. Lewis operates in precisely such a framework. “Biology,” Lewis argues by citing Haraway, is “not the body itself but a discourse of the body,” as he makes a further point that Toews’s novel underscores: “Bioscience, while legitimating itself on rhetoric of new scientific progress, is simultaneously bedfellows with many of the old politically regressive power structures of patriarchy, racism, classism, ableism, neocolonialism, and homophobia.”691 Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows (AMPS) and Younsi’s Soigner, aimer tackle mental illness in such a political light. Both narratives function very much in line with Lewis’s cultural reading of biopsychiatry and technomedicine, and of a gloomy and deeply conservative politics:

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Biopsychiatry as a way of talking and organizing human pain minimizes the psychological aspects of depression – personal longings, desires, and unfulfilled dreams – and it thoroughly erases social aspects of depression – injustice, oppression, lack of opportunity, lack of social resources, and systematic denigration. Not only that, biopsychiatry mystifies and naturalizes the scientific (and pharmaceutical) contribution to the discourse on depression leaving alternative opinions increasingly difficult to sustain. Biopsychiatry, like other scientific discourse (and this is perhaps their most insidious hegemonic effect), presents itself as a discourse from nowhere. No one claims to decide that depression should be organized primarily around neurophysiology; it is supposed to just be “the way it is.” Alternative opinions become just that, “opinions,” compared, not to other options, but to “facts.”692 Yolandi’s gestures of care toward her sister Elfrieda in AMPS, like Younsi’s poetic intervention in psychiatric practice in Soigner, aimer, pose a critique, to borrow from Lewis, of the truth politics of “the hegemonic regime of bioscientific (and increasingly administrative) psychiatry and their pharmaceutical supporters.”693 As an affectdriven, often-awkward attempt at comfort, compassion, responsibility, and reparation, care figures as an imperfect, though ethically driven, intervention in these two authors’ works. Care figures as what Lewis again calls “local and alternative forms of knowledge” often submitted to “disqualification and prohibition” by medical knowledge and its supposed omnipotence.694 AMPS specifically opposes dominant medical knowledge to a care ethics, and attempts, in Cvetkovich’s terms, “to think about depression as a cultural and social phenomenon rather than a medical disease.”695 As Yoli narrates: “Nic and I are approaching the task of caring for Elf from two entirely different angles, from a sterile laboratory and from the dark side of the moon. He is pragmatic, scientific, and believes in prescriptions, in doctors’ orders and in their omnipotence.”696 As a medical scientist, Elf ’s husband Nic places his faith in bioscience despite its failure over the years to treat Elf’s severe depression. Meanwhile, during this exchange with Nic, Yoli fantasizes

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about parachuting her sister to a violent combat zone, where Elf would be forced to survive alone and “establis[h] new parameters to living … a new life strategy.”697 Yoli’s fantasy solution is eccentric, to say the least, and indicates her sense of helplessness. After all, as we learn in the same paragraph, their father claimed new strategies of living a few days before his own suicide. However, Yoli’s imagining also does the important work of pointing out the uncertainty in any task of caring. The new parameters to living promoted by Yoli’s fantasy constitute an alternative to scientific means of curing. In other words, Yoli’s take on care posits another, if only imaginary, option to the treatment of depression: that of living with, rather than trying to extinguish, sadness – an affect, when allowed as in Birdie to “linger,”698 that offends neoliberal, as well as, in AMPS, religious scripts of happiness and duty. Like in Toews’s other novels, Mennonite evangelism is a determining aspect of her characters’ upbringing and remains in the background of their adult and otherwise secular lives. Moreover, AMPS’s intersectional aspect draws connections between depression and Mennonite culture and people: “Are Mennonites a depressed people or is it just us? My aunt Tina lost Leni, her daughter, my cousin, to suicide seven years ago, three years after my father killed himself. We’ve been here before.”699 As Yoli observes early in the narrative: “Plautdietsch was the language of shame. Mennonites had learned to remain silent, to shoulder their pain.”700 In fact, she experiences the precepts of Mennonite authority on the same level as she does conventional medicine: as tenets of knowledge and behaviour by which Elf’s care is monitored and extended, and against which Yolandi must constantly fight in her search for an alternative form of care for her sister: “I had no more energy, after taking on psychiatry, cardiology and Mennonite evangelism, for haranguing.”701 To recall Cvetkovich’s work, the Mennonite edict of shouldering one’s pain silently in AMPS is as opposed to depression as a public feeling as is the hegemony of biopsychiatric treatment that erases, to recall Lewis, the psychological and social aspects of depression. Treated as a merely medical and thus curable rather than care-able disease, depression remains devoid, again in Cvetkovich’s terms, of a public (or any other type of ) forum of expression or, as Yoli might say, of a life strategy. Throughout the novel, medical staff like the

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initially sympathetic psych nurse Janice constantly implore Elf to end her suffering “in healthy ways,” meaning with medication.702 Ultimately, and as Elf and her mother Lottie both point out, Elf finds herself subjected to an ineffective “bad” form of care, one that is extended exclusively on the caregiver’s terms: “She’s a human being, my mother whispered … That prison, she said. They do nothing. If she doesn’t take the pills they won’t talk to her. They wait and they badger and they badger and they wait and they badger. She began to cry again, this time quietly. She’s a human being, she said again.”703 The care to which Elf is subject figures as nothing more than a form of medical control with expectations projected onto “a patient in the hospital … expected to co-operate,” as Janice reminds them when Lottie appeals to her daughter’s humanity once more.704 Elf ’s agency is considered irrelevant in the process, a denial of her subjectivity as well as the very relationality of care: “Why? asked my mother. What does co-operation have to do with her getting well? Is co-operation even a symptom of mental health or just something you need from the patients to be able to control every last damn person here with medication and browbeating?”705 It is perhaps no wonder that Elf ’s depression lodges itself in her mind as a “terminal illness”706 and ultimately does not receive care. Its legitimate existence, its possible “lingering,” is disavowed by the discourse of disease and pharmaceutical cure. It is held in contrast to Chateaubriand’s (albeit Romantic) “devotion to sadness” referenced by writer Yolandi as “the noblest achievements of civilization”707 – just as All My Puny Sorrows inherits its title from another Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the acronym AMPS becomes Elf ’s personal signature. AMPS is deeply concerned with affective social scripts, especially that of shame, mirroring the novel’s conjuring of the other social scripts already mentioned – those of happiness, health, and cure – that prevent rather than enable Elf ’s care as they try to overcome rather than address her sadness. What is recognized or socially sanctioned as one of the “noblest achievements of civilization” is Elfreida Von Riesen’s success as a beautiful, wealthy, brilliant, world-renowned pianist. Meanwhile, her sadness in turn frustrates the narrative of happiness, or to borrow from Berlant the cruel optimism, of neoliberal society that her staying alive is called upon to fulfill. It is also conceivable that Elf ’s talent and beauty could

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reduce her likability as a character for some readers. Elf puts her unconditionally devoted loved ones through the extreme pain and sorrow of watching her self-destruct as she remains implacable before those social scripts she could otherwise perform to perfection. Recalling the issues raised earlier around readerly care, some readers’ empathy could be put to the test by Elf ’s immense talent and privilege, and it is conceivable that these readers might find it difficult to relate to her plight or apparently unfounded sadness. Yet perhaps Toews’s narrative consciously moves readers away from identification and empathy to force a deeper, more critical, social, familial, and experiential understanding of her pain, just as Younsi attempts to offer her sister a different kind of care. In great part because of the taboo imposed around the subject by the Mennonite patriarchs, the community fails to correlate Elf ’s troubles to her father’s suicide – self-reflexively buried within AMPS’s semi-autographical narrative with moments of resurfacing throughout. Yoli remains uncertain about whether their father’s suicide has been a “secret kille[r] lurking within” all along.708 On the one hand, its quasi absence from the narrative fails to “enable a psychogeographical understanding of depression,”709 that is to say, as a familial or social rather than merely a medical condition. On the other hand, and more importantly, it is never posited as Elf ’s destiny or pathology – as a too-easy answer to what ails her literally to death. Either way, Elf is never given the opportunity “to learn other ways of living”710 with her depression. Missing in her biopsychiatric treatment is again this very allowance, “one that doesn’t reduce lived experience to a list of symptoms and one that provides a forum for feelings that, despite a widespread therapeutic culture, still haven’t gone public enough.”711 On many fronts, the feminist care ethics theorized above fall apart in Toews’s AMPS. However, there are still glimpses of an alternative form of care that Yolandi provides in her rogue attempts to help her sister. Unlike the cure-oriented objectives of psychiatric treatment, the care that Yoli seeks to give Elf shares with her writing a certain “inevitable failure”: “I stare out of the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one’s imagination and one’s goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.”712 It is an anti-normative view of care (and of writing) on which Yoli reflects here, a release from certainty and omnipotence that may well “save a life,” allowing a person “to be

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happy when they stop trying to be happy.”713 Or perhaps it may have saved a life, since the medical system will have proven too easy to fool. Considered cured once she finally takes the medication prescribed by the hospital, Elf manages to end her life after all. As for Yoli’s aforementioned acts of care toward Elf, they are both prohibited and subversive. Small but bold gestures, such as smuggling food into the hospital room and stashing it, defy the hospital ward’s rules, which Elf must otherwise follow if she wants to eat (by joining the other patients in the dining area). But Yoli’s care extends far beyond a secret lunch. Supplicated by Elf to assist her in ending her life, Yoli reaches a point where she googles how she might get her sister to Switzerland. Euthanasia or assisted suicide becomes the ultimate act of care that Yoli grows prepared to extend, out of bounds of most normative societal, medical, and legal parameters. (Assisted suicide became federally legal in Canada in 2016, two years after AMPS was published, and excludes most mental illnesses.) Swiss law extends euthanasia to “mentally ill people too – it’s called ‘weariness of life,’” Yolandi explains to her best friend Julie: “Twenty-one percent of the patients at the Swiss clinic are patients who aren’t physically terminally ill but who are weary of life.”714 It is only a few pages later that this weariness of life becomes commensurate with being human, this time in Uncle Frank’s words that recall Lottie’s earlier appeals to the hospital staff to recognize Elf ’s humanity: “she [Elf ] told him she was sorry that he had to visit her here. He said no. We don’t apologize for being sick, for being human, for being weary.”715 Alongside human rights and the right to die – the right, in Braidotti’s terms, to claim the nonhuman of humanness (death) – lies the right to be weary: again, as in Birdie, the right “to linger, to explore the feeling of remaining or resting in sadness without insisting that it be transformed or reconceived.”716 As Elf ’s only true and desired caregiver, Yolandi is prepared to “bow down before her suffering with compassion” and to recognize that Elf “could control her life.”717 Although presented earlier as a fantasy, Yoli becomes the psychiatrist of her own imagination, “sitting down with a broken human being saying, I am here for you, I am committed to your care, I want to make you feel better … I am absolutely committed to your care … I know you are suffering. I know you are afraid. I love you.”718

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L’espace du soin (Ouanessa Younsi) Yolandi’s imagining of another form of psychiatry as an actual ethics of care in AMPS is also at the heart of Younsi’s Soigner, aimer. A practicing psychiatrist as well as a writer, Younsi presents a version of care work in subversive as well as critical terms, in contrast with most of the staples of her medical profession. As in AMPS, “cure” and “care” appear as opposites because of the almost-exclusive focus of “psychiatry, a field full of statistics, pills and my biases,” on technoscience.719 Yet Younsi refuses to surrender to this state of her profession. Also a published poet, Younsi, in this nonfiction text, sets out to substantiate an ethics of care in line with Yoli’s alternative caring in AMPS. She does so by positioning herself as both a writer and a practicing psychiatrist, relating her everyday experiences, failures, frustrations, and discoveries along the way. In Soigner, aimer, knowledge appears to rest on the side of medical science, and literature on the side of care: “the university trained me as psychiatrist. Literature trains me as a carer give.”720 However, this binary quickly breaks down in the narrative as well as in the psychiatric practice the author seeks to conceive for herself and to implement for her patients. There is therefore no doubt in the text about the generative nature of literature where empathy and care are concerned, a long-held view within the medical humanities.721 Yet at the heart of Soigner, aimer is more than a simple assumption about literature’s inherent ability to generate care. The practitioner-patient relationship is at the heart of Younsi’s conception of care, which she presents as a Lévinasian ethics of self-other relationality or, to recall Benjamin, “identificatory love.” In Lévinas’s postmetaphysical ethics, the self, in any sense, is preceded by the other – the other’s call, needs, and vulnerability or fragility – in a “face-to-face” encounter that stands as the philosopher’s best-known ethical model. Younsi writes: “to touch the fragile without stumbling, to skim without overtaking, to listen without understanding everything … One can be and not be at the same time. I enter a transitional space.”722 The face-to-face is also the reality of the psychiatric encounter, and Younsi goes to lengths to qualify it as a careful balance between closeness and distance, understanding and its limits, or, in Benjamin’s terms, “sameness and difference,”723 as much for the practitioner’s self-preservation as for

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the patient’s benefit. As identification is tempered by the need for distance, Younsi’s understanding of care avoids the pitfall of false altruism: “To survive in this system, it is necessary to touch without crossing. Otherwise, one receives the injection for real … To be mirror and echo. An invitation to reflections.”724 It is in fact the ideal set out by D.W. Winnicott, quoted in the book’s epigraph, that Soigner, aimer aims to realize: “Cure, meaning treatment, eradication of illness and its cause, tends today to overtake the meaning of care (caring, interest, attention). Practicing physicians are constantly doing battle to prevent the two meanings from losing contact with one another.”725 In order to wage her own battle against the exclusively cure-oriented practice of psychiatry, whose hopeless and dire effects feature in AMPS, Younsi turns to literature and takes us back to Nussbaum’s philosophy on poetics and care. Literature, that is to say reading and writing, allows Younsi to conceive care in delicate, rather than normative or infallible, ethical terms: “Reading, writing develop the capacity to live in a place without occupying it. To be Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov. Reading a literary work helps with awareness, that is say, grasping one’s and others’ feelings. Literature cracks open the space of care.”726 Although Younsi does not reference Poetic Justice, Nussbaum’s thinking could not be more relevant. The relation of self and other, upon which of course an ethics of care is founded, stems, for Younsi, from what a work of literature allows: to reach, to hear, to respond to the other, without being engulfed or engulfing in turn. The very definition that Younsi proposes for literature as formative of the caregiver reinforces this relational ethics of care: “What is literature? To my mind, it represents a psychic space … A land of connection, of relation … Everlasting renewal between the page, the self, and the world … Mirror, echo, apprehension of self by the words of an other. It reveals itself as a port, a ship, a voyage, offering the opportunity to experience lives other than one’s own. It emerges as that which forms the caregiver in me.”727 The conditions of the ethical relationship are still at work in reading and writing as they are in the psychiatric care promoted in Younsi’s text. Unlike Tronto’s reluctance when it comes to associating the work of care with art,728 Younsi does not hesitate to see a fundamental correlation: “To be touched is unique to the poet and the care giver, as long one knows

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the limits”; “writing, which is a way of caring for”; “caring, writing, would be out of love for fragility.”729 But there is more to consider in Soigner, aimer’s venture into the ethics of care. At its core is an understanding of vulnerability that determines the very conception of selfhood in the text. Not unlike Atwood’s and Toews’s novels, inscriptions of place, class, and cultural experience play pivotal roles in how care is conceived. In Soigner, aimer, the place in question is the city of Sept-Îles in northern Quebec, and the cultures that the narrator finds herself facing are Indigenous ones, particularly the Innus’s, with the Uashat reserve situated at the town’s western extremity and Mani-Utenam further east. Confronted with cases of youth addiction, depression, suicide, and extreme poverty, Younsi sees herself as equally confronted with her own shortcomings as a privileged settler and Montreal-born, mixed-race descendant of an Algerian father and a Québécoise mother, unable to understand several of her Innu patients’ language, lives, or worldviews. But the distance she feels diminishes when she refuses to project a narrative of misery on her patients and instead recognizes her shared vulnerability with others: “Misery … Mine if I had been born here and not elsewhere, in poverty and not in the upper middle class that invades Club Meds and Faculties of Medicine. Mine … on the other side of that misery which frightens and attracts me.”730 In the treatment of her Innu patients, Younsi extends the problem of care to the problem of intersectional and structural inequalities – to what Ahmed calls the “racial capitalism [that] is a health system: a drastically unequal distribution of bodily vulnerabilities.”731 Yet under the social fabrics that distance her from her patients is also the shared vulnerability of bodily life, to recall Butler in Precarious Life, which connects and relates self and other. This “primary vulnerability” “precedes” any form of selfhood: “This disposition of ourselves outside ourselves seems to follow from bodily life, from its vulnerability and its exposure … it precedes the formation of ‘I.’”732 Butler’s notion of vulnerability, as Younsi also inscribes it through the language of affect in her text (“m’effraie et m’attire”), recalls Tronto’s notion of care as the “interdependence of all bodies” and the caregiver’s means of differentiated but shared selfhood: “Flaws appeal to the best in me. Plenitude leaves me useless, timid … My refuge, my home, my comfort is illness. My reason for living.”733

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It is no wonder that, despite her Western medical training, Younsi rejects the cerebral, impersonal language of scientific evaluation and medical creeds of clinical distance. If, as Younsi writes, “caring transcends the medical system,”734 then the language in her text transcends medical parler. Depicted in terms of a poetics of care, Younsi narrates psychiatric practice through a constant personal recourse to literature, an openness to personal affect, and the writing self’s own personal vulnerability, as the title of Soigner, aimer evokes. Choosing affective language to generate an ethics of caregiving rather than merely a technoscientific practice of cure finding, Younsi posits “identificatory love” – a vulnerable position to be sure – as a founding ethical principle of caring for those with mental illness. As if answering Toby’s extension of storytelling as community care in MaddAddam, or Yolandi’s call for a more loving form of care in AMPS, Younsi writes: “At this stage of my profession, I rely on the essential: to care is a variation of the verb to love. Patients must be loved.”735 Her vulnerability as a loving caregiver allows Younsi to feel she can reach, as well as put into writing, her Innu patients in order to care for them: “Is it the same flaw that brings me to write and to care? To feel a kinship with the Innus stranded in the emergency, wrack and ocean? I recognize myself in their pupils, where their arteriole drum, their temples extract the noises of a world they are excluded from and part of.”736 It is always back to literature and writing that Younsi turns, “more than scientific articles,” to apprehend the disturbingly high suicide rate among the people in her care, and treat the mental illnesses in Kuujjuaq, Sept-Îles, and Val d’Or: to “better care for others.”737 By combining love, writing, and care, Younsi is able to inscribe caring simultaneously as a medical, ethical, artistic, localized, and material practice: “I develop a love for this city, its inhabitants who reveal my shadow to me. To care for A. or K. is not enough, it is necessary to care for Sept-Îles, to love Sept-Îles, as far as Laure Boulevard. To care: to make this world habitable.”738 I opened this discussion on the ethics of care with a self-positioning to evoke the ubiquity and everyday ordinariness of care itself. There is an attempt at subjectivized essay writing in that introduction, as there is, intermittently, in other passages of this book. This is what I will directly examine now, through my own meta reflection on my writing practice as a feminist researcher.

Envoi (un essai)

One meta concern I have worked through in this book relates to the complexity of feminist scholarship itself, with theory’s readability, and unreadability, very much on my mind. Once I had completed (most of ) my research, (tentatively) selected my primary texts, and (more or less) decided how I would analyze them in connection to the notion of metafeminism, I was ready to start to write. But I wanted to write differently, to distance myself from my usual academic, and admittedly densely technical, research writing. In a forthcoming article on her research experience of the neocolonial contexts of occupied Palestine, Nunavut, and the Syrian refugee crisis, Smaro Kamboureli observes the following about the expectations linked to academic literary criticism: “You see, we are expected to write about the stories other authors write but we are not supposed to tell the story of our writing (or not being able to write) about them. This is the law of the profession, a version of the Derridean law of genre except insofar as academic writing usually denies or conceals its structural interdependence with the writing to which it responds. No excess baggage – just interpret, be original, perform mastery.”739 There are some passages in Cautiously Hopeful that bring in my own excess baggage as a researcher trained in comparative literature and poststructuralist theory, as a white settler scholar, and as a cis, heterosexual woman, in her various relationships of daily and ordinary care. Taking up, intermittently at least, what Kamboureli calls “scholarship without reserve” has meant slowing down my writing process; going back to sentences, terminology, and vocabulary; and revising as incessantly as I always (always) do, but

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with the specific aim to produce comprehensibility, ensure clarity, and result in transparency. I don’t think I have consistently or entirely succeeded in doing these things. I don’t say this to ward off potential criticism; I’ve had my ass spectacularly handed to me by academia on several occasions, and given the issues covered in these pages it could very well be handed to me again. I am aware that the emphasis on the legacies, genealogies, and reverberations of feminist thought and aesthetics has entailed a practice of busy and heavy citation. My academic habit of referencing theorists and critics, from whom I’ve learned so much, and who themselves have learned, consciously or unconsciously, so much from one another, is certainly in full steam throughout this work particularly as it deals with feminism’s meta consciousness and thus its intertexts and genealogies. Perhaps, in the end, I’ve used language that only readers versed in feminist or cultural theory will fully comprehend. Or have I? Maybe I underestimate potential readers who may be able to grasp my meaning, appreciate the radical world-shaping visions of the critical and literary texts I examine, and discern the layered complexities of feminism today. Hopefully, I’ve decelerated enough in my writing to create some moments, to borrow from Louise Warren, of textual “flânerie to be available, attentive, and curious,”740 and as a result have maintained that availability, attentiveness, and curiosity. Perhaps in typical metafeminist fashion, I sort of do, and sort of do not, realize what I set out to accomplish. Maybe I, too, enact the gesture of both encompassing and moving beyond, where traditional academic writing is concerned. In Feminism Is for Everybody, hooks argues that the revolutionary nature of feminist theory is meant to inform masses of people and transform our societies. However, feminist theory hasn’t been made sufficiently accessible to a nonacademic public; it “remains a privileged discourse available to those among us who are highly literate, well-educated, and usually materially privileged.”741 This is more than a fair and accurate point. But unlike Feminism Is for Everybody, my work cannot claim to address anyone other than those already with an interest in, and likely some familiarity with, feminist thought and literature. I cannot claim nor do I want to pretend that Cautiously Hopeful is not a work of academic scholarship that stems from my long-standing theoretical explorations into contemporary

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feminism and literatures in Canada, especially of the late twentieth century and current millennium. Nonetheless, in it I look to resist the monographic tradition of so much academic writing, including my own, as relevant only to other academics. Instead, I’ve tried to speak to an array of possible readers – especially those curious about some of feminism’s uneven trajectories since the so-called second wave. The French essai is a literary genre that comes closest to what I had in mind for this book. The genre goes back to sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne and his 1580 Essais. As Christl Verduyn recalls in an article on Canadian and Québécois women essayists: Montaigne “‘tried’ (essayait) to express his thoughts and feelings on a variety of different subjects. As practiced by Montaigne, the essay offered a more free-form presentation that allowed unconventional connections of facts and speculation and liberation from a linear format and argumentation.”742 On the English side, the essay came about with Francis Bacon’s 1597 Essays, with (and pardon the cliché) a quintessentially English pragmatic difference: “Rather than the personal, Bacon focused on the observable and factual. His essays comprised empirical observations that described with ostensibly scientific accuracy the world around him. They offered advice and guidance to readers in a utilitarian, public and purposeful way.”743 Although the term essai is still very much in use in Frenchlanguage writing today, creative or literary nonfiction is the more common idiom in the Anglophone world and delineates “poetic personal journals, meditations, memoirs, activist personal reportage, autobiography, personal essays on being an outsider, historical and literary travelogues, tributes to a particular person, celebrations of a distinctive place, and explorations of the past.”744 I don’t think that creative or literary nonfiction is apt nomenclature for my work in Cautiously Hopeful. Instead, I want to stay with the French essai, and turn to the Larousse dictionary for more guidance: “Action undertaken in order to produce, to obtain something without being certain of the result; trial/attempt (tentative) … Work that gathers various reflections or treats a subject that it does not claim to exhaust; literary genre composed of this type of works.”745 This definition appeals to me greatly. It not only helps me to understand how I might try to distance my work from the structure and comprehensiveness of the standard academic monograph, but also

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allows me to imagine how a subjectivized – but not, in my case, autobiographical or confessional – academic essay might take shape. Simply put, how might I say “I” in my academic writing? So simply put, that when I told my then-thirteen-year-old daughter S. about this idea, she replied, “It’s not hard, Maman. [Read the italics as tonal emphasis.] We learn that in first grade.” Fair enough. What I had not yet explained to my darling, but have started to now that she’s a bit older and progressively wiser, is that figuring out the use of the first person, as a woman, within the academy, is in fact not simple at all – even from a tenured, fully promoted, and white- and cis-privileged position like my own. Although writing in the first person as a woman does not automatically produce more accessible scholarship, I still (cautiously) hope that this nonexhaustive essai, this attempt, might give rise to a different or differing form of scholarly writing. I want to say “I” in an academic book project. I want to write from a place of intersectional engagement, intellectual feeling, and feminist care. I want to tap into what Lorde describes as a “disciplined attention to the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me.’”746 I want to channel my inner Brené Brown: embrace the vulnerability of being uncertain, of showing up and trying it out, of failing! So many wants, and they have been with me throughout the writing of this book. My own subjectivized essay, like metafeminism, fittingly oscillates between its stylistic wants and the déformation professionnelle (professional socialization) that has led me to it. In many ways, I am affectively driven by the desire to reach out beyond the comfort zone of my academic practice and seek my own cross-border style – alliances that may or may not come to pass. I cannot say enough (but maybe I have!) about how remarkable I find Cvetkovich’s 2012 book Depression: A Public Feeling. Cvetkovich writes in the form of the academic memoir, laying out her personal struggles with depression. Of note is what I have considered all along a metafeminist “rapprochement with legacies of 1970s feminism”747 that Cvetkovich recognizes in her skillful blending of memoir and criticism. As with Braidotti’s theoretical genealogies in The Posthuman, there are multiple sites of influence in Cvetkovich’s work. She acknowledges the legacy of a generation of feminist thinkers, including hooks, Sedgwick, and Jane Gallop, who have developed and perfected personal academic writing from feminist points of

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views. She also invokes the influence of the more marginal feminist confessional girl zine culture of the early 1990s.748 Cvetkovich’s inclusion of the confessional in her critical work on affect ultimately and fittingly widens public consciousness about depression through the expression of personal experience and feeling. I, too, would like to think of my essai as a kind of modest rapprochement to earlier expressions of feminist thought. To recall one last time a context closer to home, those fiction theories (or fictions théoriques) practiced by feminist and queer Québécois writers in the 1970s and by their Anglo-Canadian counterparts in the 1980s (Marlatt, Nourbese Philip, Tostevin, van Herk) have served, discursively and indirectly, as my toile de fond (literary backdrop). I discovered these texts during my undergraduate studies in my early twenties and delved deeper into them in graduate school in the mid1990s. In a sense, these writers have been my feminist superegos, the maternal literary propaedeutic to my understanding of and entry into feminist theory and ethics. I first discovered feminist writing by reading an anthology entry of Théoret’s 1977 fiction theory, Bloody Mary. Her woman narrator’s emotional and theoretical insurgence against oppressive bourgeois and normative gender and identity structures permeates the blended aesthetics of her writing and its feminist critique of filial, psychoanalytical, and literary master narratives. Théoret’s work set me on my own meanderings through psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminist analysis. In my doctoral dissertation, I wrote about alterity and relational ethics in the philosophical work of Lévinas, Ricoeur, and Irigaray. But I truly came to grasp the other’s primacy in the constitution of personhood – the very foundation of relationality – through reading Brossard’s queer aesthetics in the essays in La lettre aérienne one Sunday afternoon (yes! La théorie, un dimanche!749) in my 350-square-foot apartment in Toronto. There it was: writing is a spiralling zone of exchange with an other, “par l’écrit à un autre sujet.”750 With their blend of theoretical critique, personal feeling, creative reflection, and aesthetic experimentation, these authors created an exceptional literary movement in Québécois and Canadian literature, a period I have already referenced on several occasions. Particularly since the 2000s, Canadian and Québécois works of subjectivized feminist criticism have followed with books, articles, and reviews by

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such writers as Brossard, Delvaux, Alicia Elliott (Mohawk), Suzanne Jacob, Scaachi Koul, Maracle, Erín Moure, Andrea Oberhuber, Régine Robin, Betasamosake Simpson, TallBear, Louise Warren, and Wunker.751 Blogs and Twitter threads have also proven to be productive venues for feminist writing: for instance, Sina Queyras’s creation of the online literary journal Lemon Hound from her single-author blog; Catherine Mavrikakis’s collection of blog posts in L’éternité en accéléré; and Room’s online revival. I am no Bersianik, and I am no van Herk, but a girl can dream, especially during a thought experiment. My love of theory and writing emerged as I read these fiction theory authors. It emerged through thinking about their ultimate objective to inscribe a writing subject, a personal “I,” au féminin, meaning in terms of my own (re)definition of woman, desire, and writing. Franco-Ontarian poet and essayist Lola Lemire Tostevin aptly claims the French tradition of the essai when she suggests, in her 1995 book Subject to Criticism, that “the essay is an act of personal witness: at once an inscription of the self and a description of subject and object as they relate to one another.”752 To return to my resistance to monographic exhaustiveness, I want to address the exhaustion that sometimes pervades discussions or debates over theory’s benefits and limitations. Attributing the appeal of personal memoir in criticism to humanities scholarship’s renewed interest in affect, Cvetkovich entertains the idea of personalized academic writing “as a sign of either the exhaustion of theory or its renewed life.”753 Although I find this idea provocative, I am loathe to pigeonhole theory in terms either of exhaustion or of renewal. Theory, as I try to reassure my students with admittedly varied success, is just theory … It is a set of principles and a string of ideas; it is always historical with a material context and, to an attentive reader willing to take a chance and work a little harder, it should be no more daunting than any other narrative. Theory is narrative, it is always (sometimes despite itself ) subjective, and, to recall Betasamosake Simpson’s definition, it can also be thought of as a form of storytelling. With this take in mind, more open forms of theoretical writing might be apt, if not necessary, at this time in feminist work. I am thinking of the longstanding praxis of a feminist poetics of thought in Canada, one that draws from the embodied experience and personal understanding that emerges in works particularly by Brand, Brossard, Fontaine,

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Lai, Lindberg, and Younsi; or the transnational criticism of Ahmed, Anderson, Clark, hooks, Sharpe, and Betasamosake Simpson. I am thinking of a theoretical praxis that adopts jargon-free, intelligible, fathomable, intimate, and literary language. In what is still a profoundly scholarly meditation on the sociocultural aspects of depression, Cvetkovich’s “depression journals” segment is as personal and readable as it is intellectually engaging. It also recalls other recent academic memoirs. Maggie Nelson’s brilliant feminist “autotheory” in The Argonauts traces her relationship with her fluidly gendered partner, her experience of queer pregnancy, and her realization, through a perceptive and intelligible rereading of feminist queer theory, that pregnancy is queer. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s personal essay We Should All Be Feminists, adapted from her eponymous TED talk, is an attempt to free feminism from stereotypical notions that Adichie grew up with in Nigeria and still encounters in American culture. Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life proposes an academic memoir constructed through her widely read philosophical blog feministkilljoys. Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy sets out at the “interstices of critical and literary theory, pop culture, and feminist thinking.”754 Wunker posits her use of the first-person as a personal and intellectual gesture that positions her – textually, professionally, and socially – as a privileged white woman writing about intersectional feminism in Canada today. Koul’s book of essays, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, chronicles her experiences of sexism, racism, and shadism as someone born and raised in Alberta in a Kashmiri family, as well as considered white in India but brown in North America. She blends wicked humour, sharp cultural critique, and memoir to tackle feminism today. To my mind, these works do not exhibit theoretical exhaustion of any sort. They do not necessarily renew theory, but instead let theory do what it does best for feminism: allow several registers of self-expression all at once. These authors are brazen and filled with feminist boldness through their metafeminist pursuit of familiar, open forms of feminist writing. These are forms that feminism, whether intersectional, queer, or oriented around affect studies, has for a long time fully warranted but also at times forgotten. Given the accumulation of its multiple variables and directions, feminism, to hark back to hooks’s argument, “needs to be written in a range

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of styles and formats.”755 Feminist writing should loosen, as do the works mentioned above, the boundaries that separate the academic and the personal, or the scholarly and the accessible. Such alleviation may well address the need for stylistic diversity, enriching both a common readerly experience and a more specialized scholarly one, and fulfilling the need for and necessity of public intellectualism. It is difficult not to notice the early second-wave mantra of “the personal is political” being powerfully and productively invoked by works like Nelson’s or Cvetkovich’s. Hence my argument that my essai is an attempt, my attempt, at what may also be a metafeminist form of academic writing, considering its tensivity with the very genre it incorporates. This essay is an attempt to figure out how my ongoing scholarly learning can breathe life, or let life breathe, into forms of expression beyond standard academic writing. Moreover, and perhaps brazenly: could these subjectivized moments in my writing be considered a form of queering academic norms? Drawing from Nelson’s take, I recall Sedgwick’s controversial, aesthetic notion of queer as a gesture of encompassing various (rather than just same-sex) acts of disruption and subversion. “Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant … relational, and strange,”756 Sedgwick writes, to which Nelson adds: “She wanted the term to be a perpetual excitement, a kind of placeholder – a nominative, like Argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip. That is what reclaimed terms do – they retain, they insist on retaining, a sense of the fugitive.”757 Ahmed suggests a similar extension of queer to “queer work” as that which “can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended.”758 Meanwhile, Sedgwick also acknowledges the danger of dematerializing queerness through this removal of “same-sex sexual expression” from queer’s “definitional center.”759 As Nelson comments: “In other words, she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.”760 Recall C., at the beginning of this book, who wanted feminism both ways: I dig it, but I’m not necessarily gonna talk about it! Writing about feminism today requires a form that is more supple and more metafeminist than what the standard academic monograph allows. It requires a flexible form that is less exhaustive and less exhaustible, that does away with parts and chapters, that is fugitive,

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a little vulnerable, and perhaps even queer. Writing that wants it both ways. Metafeminism points to feminisms in the plural; it designates those shifting parts of sexual, racial, and gender identities and modes of expression beyond the normative categories of a very old and very persistent patriarchal, heteronormative, white humanist, and colonial tradition. Perhaps metafeminism’s breadth, multidirectional texture, and ambivalences – its queerness – are critical mechanisms that resist the monograph, or the detailed, linear, structured, authoritative, legitimized account of a single subject, condition, or time. As an open, blended, unsettled practice with a desire to give academic discipline the slip, and on the cusp of things so much like cautious hopefulness itself, the subjectivized essay pushes back against the exhaustive ambitions and polish of academic rigidity. Perhaps, then, only un essai will do.

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 2–3. Solnit, Mother of All Questions, 1. McKeon, F-Bomb, 34. Pellegrini, “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.” Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 10. Kavka, “Introduction,” xi. Hemmings, Why Stories Matter, 2. Solnit, “Hope Is an Embrace.” See Chiose, “Third-Wave Backlash.” Traister, “Don’t Give Up.” Emphasis original. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 5–6. Saint-Martin, “Métaféminisme,” 1. Zimmerman, “#Intersectionality,” 56. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2. See Peritz, “Canadian Women’s March.” For more on the CanLit storm around this issue, see the initial letter penned and signed by Galloway supporters, “An Open Letter to UBC,” as well as Context for the Galloway Case for subsequent counter-letters requesting that the signatories retract (as did Wayne Johnston and Camilla Gibb, among others) in recognition of the women complainants barely mentioned, or accounted for, in the initial letter of support. For further context and feminist reactions to the controversy, see McGregor, Rak, and Wunker, Refuse. 17 The print editions of Bitch and Ms. were founded in 1995 and 1971, respectively. Bust was founded in 1993, and its website seems to have launched in 2007. Not all Feminist eZine articles are dated, but it has

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Notes to pages 21–8

articles as recent as 2019. GUTS announced its end due to unviable financials in January 2020. See Newman, “Was Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ Too ‘Black’ to Win”; and Vilanova, “Beyoncé’s Grammy Snub.” Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 6. hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, 53. Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once. In Bianco, “We Sold Feminism.” Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once, 254. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xiii, xv. West, “I’ve Left Twitter.” See Hodge, “I Was a Men’s Rights Activist.” Faludi, Terror Dream, 22. Ibid., 26–7. Carraway, “Don’t Hate Sheryl Sandberg.” See Groeneveld, Making Feminist Media; and Murray, Mixed Media. Armstrong, Ascent of Women, 2–3. hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, 27. Sandberg, Lean In, 7. Ibid., 7, 141. hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, 43. Solnit, “Men Explain Things,” 136. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 199. Kavka, “Introduction,” ix. Ibid., xvii. Ibid., xi. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, xx, xi. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xviii. Kavka, “Introduction,” x. hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, 58. Kavka, “Introduction,” xii. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 176. Emphasis original. Kavka, “Introduction,” xxi. Cvetkovich, Depression, 13. Emphasis original. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 7.

Notes to pages 28–34

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

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Jordan, Contemporary French, 38, 135. Saint-Martin, “Métaféminisme,” 165. My translation. Ibid., 164. Henderson, “Can the Third Wave Speak?,” 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1975); and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, vol. 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980). Bogic, “Theory in Perpetual Motion,” 140; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); and Michel Callon, “What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?,” CSI Working Paper Series 005, online. Kavka, “Introduction,” xi. Scott, “Feminist Reverberations,” 11. De Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects,” 116. Ibid., 131, 137. Ibid., 138. Flax, “End of Innocence.” Kavka, “Introduction,” x. Kaplan, “Feminist Futures,” 47. Alaimo and Hekman, “Introduction,” 3. Ibid., 4, 5. Ibid., 6. Scott, “Feminist Reverberations,” 8. Ibid., 19, 20. Ferguson, “Feminism in Time,” 7. Drucker, “Interpret.” Kavka, “Feminism, Ethics, and History,” 36. Ahmed, “Hello Feminist Killjoys!.” Ahmed, “Making Feminist Points.” Ahmed, “It Is Not the Time”; and Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1984). Ibid.

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Notes to pages 34–42

82 Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” 8. 83 Ibid., 22. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by L.S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (London: Virago, 1988); Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); and Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). 84 Ibid., 23. 85 Braidotti, “Becoming-Woman,” 384. 86 Butler, “End of Sexual Difference,” 417. 87 Braidotti, “Becoming-Woman,” 386. 88 Ibid., 389. 89 Ibid., 390. 90 Combahee River Collective, Combahee River Collective Statement. 91 Maillé, “Approche intersectionnelle,” 51. My translation. 92 Ahmed, On Being Included, 181–2. 93 “Words We’re Watching.” 94 Ibid. 95 Rita Dhamoon, “Feminist Approach,” 29. 96 Crenshaw, “On Intersectionality.” 97 Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 3. 98 Ibid., 3. 99 Ibid., 19. 100 Ibid., 10. 101 Ibid., 12. 102 Ibid., 8. 103 Ibid., 47. 104 Ibid., 46. 105 Ibid., 49, 52. 106 Broad, “Social Movement,” 45. 107 Ibid., 45. 108 Ibid. 109 Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 55. 110 Zimmerman also contributes to this critical understanding of whiteness in her consideration of online feminist critiques of white feminism that currently circulate through digital platforms like Twitter and hashtags like Mikki Kendall’s #solidarityisforwhitewomen. Zimmerman posits

Notes to pages 42–5

111 112 113 114

115 116

117 118

119 120 121 122

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fourth-wave feminism as a form of intersectionality, with its potential to articulate feminist solidarity across racial lines. Bilge, “Whitening Intersectionality,” 412. Collins, “Toward a New Vision,” 222; and Collins, “Where Do We Go?,” 234. Zimmerman, “#Intersectionality,” 63. Mason and Watson, “What’s Intersectional,” 4; and Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Intersectionality as Method: A Note,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 1019–30. Maillé, “Approche intersectionnelle,” 57. See the two special journal issues of Nouvelles pratiques sociales. In the 2006 issue edited by Gervais, Harper, and Gravel, intersectional approaches, particularly those of Black and minoritized American feminism since the 1980s, are explicitly used to discuss conjugal violence and the potential interventions of feminist therapy. In the 2014 issue’s introduction, editors Harper and Kurtzman take stock of intersectional research and its various uses and challenges. Pagé, “Sur l’indivisibilité,” 200. Baril observes: “Major French-language journals in feminist and gender studies, political science, social work, and the social sciences and humanities have recently published their first special issues on intersectional analyses (original translations of special issue titles provided): L’Homme et la Société (2011, ‘Feminist Prisms: What Is Intersectionality?’); Politique et Sociétés (2014, ‘Intersectionality: Domination, Exploitation, Resistance, and Emancipation’); Nouvelles pratiques sociales (2014, ‘Intersectionality: Theoretical Reflections and Uses in Feminist Research and Intervention’); Interrogations? Revue pluridisciplinaire de sciences humaines et sociales (2015, ‘Thinking about Intersectionality’); and Recherches Féministes (2015, ‘Intersectionalities’).” Baril, “Intersectionality,” 126. Baril, “Intersectionality,” 125. Ibid., 126. Maillé, “Approche intersectionnelle,” 46–8. Baril, “Intersectionality,” 126. Baril continues: “Inspired by terms like ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘cisnormativity,’ which refer to cissexual/ cisgender (i.e. non-trans people) norms by which trans people are judged (Baril 2015), Anglonormativity is a system of structures, institutions, and beliefs that marks English as the norm. In Anglonormative contexts,

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125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

Notes to pages 45–52

Anglonormativity is the standard by which non-Anglophone people are judged, discriminated against, and excluded.” Ibid., 127. Ibid., 129, 126. Maillé in turn recalls that French materialist and Marxist feminists active in the late 1980s like Colette Guillaumin, Christine Delphy, and Nicole-Claude Mathieu, although they dealt with race and class, failed to analyze the intersection between the various relations of power. Maillé, “Approche intersectionnelle,” 47. Seljack, “Projecting Religious Freedom.” See Durand and Kréfa, “Mariages forcés”; and Karimi, “Hijab and Work.” Valiante, “Quebec’s Bill 21”; and Montpetit, “As Hearings End.” Maillé, “Approche intersectionnelle,” 49. Ibid., 55–6. My translation. Boisclair and Frenette, “Avant-propos,” 17. Huberman, “Pour une critique.” Marilyn Dumont, Really Good Brown Girl, 78. Ibid. Brand, Map to the Door, 64. Robins, “The Work Is Far from Done.” Ibid. Million, “Felt Theory,” 55. Ibid. See “Plain Text Description.” See Driskill et al., “Introduction”; Justice and Cox, “Queering Native Literature”; and Marinucci, Feminism Is Queer. Marinucci, Feminism Is Queer, 108. Driskill et al., “Introduction,” 14. Smith, “Relations of Ruling,” 171. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 56. Ibid. Brand, Map to the Door, 24. Sharpe, In the Wake, 14. Brand, Map to the Door, 19. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 40, 42. Ibid., 93–4. Barrett, Blackening Canada, 27. Brand, Map to the Door, 25

Notes to pages 53–7

154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166

167 168 169 170 171 172

173 174 175 176 177 178

191

Ibid., 35. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 50, 51. Ibid., 37. Sharpe, In the Wake, 70. Ibid., 17, 5, 5. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 19. Brand, Map to the Door, 51. Ibid., 51–2. Ellipsis original. Ibid., 72. See Marieke Walsh, “Singh Urges Ottawa to Start Collecting Race-Based Data,” Globe and Mail, 2 June 2020, A5; and Patrick White, “‘I Want People to Know She’s More Than a Hashtag’: Family Remembers Regis Korchinski-Paquet,” Globe and Mail, 11 June 2020, https://www. theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-i-want-people-to-know-shes-morethan-a-hashtag-family-remembers. Also see Alisha Haridasani Gupta, “Why Aren’t We All Talking about Breonna Taylor,” New York Times, 4 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/us/breonna-taylorblack-lives-matter-women.html. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 37, 27, 27, 48, 37. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 48. Combahee River Collective, Combahee River Collective Statement. Brand, Map to the Door, 40, 40. See also Brand’s epic novel about the African diaspora, At the Full and Change of the Moon; in What We All Long For, her queer women characters, although caught in an underground city world of crime and violence, also stand as tropes of transnational movement and resistance to this ongoing history of captivity. Brand, Map to the Door, 100, 219–20, 220. Joseph, “Wondering,” 86. Ibid. Ibid., 90. Brand, Map to the Door, 48. Ibid., 150, 118.

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179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207

208 209 210 211 212 213 214

Notes to pages 57–64

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 113. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 73. Ibid., 74. Ibid; and Brand, Map to the Door, 42. Brand, Land to Light On, 9. Brand, Map to the Door, 29. Ibid., 6, 51–2. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 22, 22, 18–9. Goldman, “Mapping the Door,” 24. Brand, Map to the Door, 18. Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 245. Brand, Map to the Door, 43. Barrett, Blackening Canada, 33. Ricoeur, La métaphore vive, 383. My translation. Brand, Map to the Door, 224. Ibid., 213. Sharpe, In the Wake, 134. Nickel, “Introduction,” 1. Huhndorf and Suzak, “Indigenous Feminism,” 4. Nickel, “Introduction,” 9. Ibid., 9, 3, 10. Ibid., 15. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism,” 27. Radcliffe, “Geography and Indigeneity,” 221. Ibid. Clark, “Shock and Awe,” 7. Ibid.; and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux and Brian Calliou, Best Practices in Aboriginal Community Development: A Literature Review and Wise Practices Approach (Alberta: The Banff Centre, 2010). Huhndorf and Suzak, “Indigenous Feminism,” 1–2. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 27. Ibid., 29. Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe, Iskewewak Kah’, 49. Dumont, interview by Jónína Kirton, Room, 2016. Clark, “Shock and Awe,” 6. Ibid.; Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings

Notes to pages 64–8

215 216 217

218 219

220 221 222

223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235

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(New York: Penguin Books, 1901); and Sarah Winnemucca, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (Bishop: Sierra Media Inc., 1969). LaRocque, “Preface,” xvii. Ibid. Huhndorf and Suzack, “Indigenous Feminism,” 1. In 2010, the two critics could identify, in addition to their own, only two books that explicitly focused on Indigenous feminism in the Canadian context. Huhndorf and Suzak, “Indigenous Feminism,” 9, 10. See also Huhndorf and Suzack, “Indigenous Feminism,” 9–10; and Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe, Iskewewak Kah’, 51. The latter also refers to Indigenous women authors as “Great-Spirited Indigenous women,” emphasizing the notion of “all my relations,” and of female relations, again with the term Manitoukwe: “all my Spiritual, other than human, and human relations, to whom I ascribe the female gender and pronoun she,” in Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe, Iskewewak Kah’, 4. Million, “Felt Theory,” 56. Fontaine, Kuessipan, 16. See in particular Fiske, “Political Status.” Fiske analyzes the patriarchal nature of the Canadian government’s assimilationist policies toward Indigenous peoples; see also her analysis of the impact of patrilineal criteria of band membership on Indigenous communities, internal governing structures, as well as Indigenous women’s domestic and political organizing, particularly under Law C-31. Million, “Felt Theory,” 56. Ibid., 57, 58. Ibid., 57–8. LaRocque, “My Hometown,” 69. Tsosie, “Native Women,” 34. Huhndorf and Suzack, “Indigenous Feminism,” 3. Green, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 15. Goeman and Denetdale, “Native Feminisms.” See also Smith and Kauanui, “Forum: Native Feminisms Without Apology.” Maracle, Memory Serves, 129. Ibid., 149. Emphasis original. Kanapé-Fontaine, quoted in Collard, “Je dis ‘Je.’” Green, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 1. Nickel, “Introduction,” 2. Kim TallBear, Kim Anderson, and Audra Simpson, “Indigenous Feminism Power Panel,” Station 20 West,

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242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263

Notes to pages 68–75

Saskatoon, 15 March 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnEvaVXoto. Maracle, Memory Serves, 129. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 133, 138–9. Ibid., 152. Million, quoting LaRocque, recalls the difficult reception these authors met from the Canadian literary establishment at the time, with works like Campbell’s considered too “polemic,” “militant,” “bitter,” and “biased.” Million, “Felt Theory,” 62–3; and Emma LaRocque, “Preface or Here Are Our Voices – Who Will Hear?,” in Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada, edited by Jeanne Perreault and Sylvia Vance (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). Dumont, Really Good Brown Girl, 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 29. Ibid. Ibid., 29; and Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe, Iskewewak Kah’, 50. Dumont, Really Good Brown Girl, 31. Ibid. See especially “Half Human/Half Devil (Halfbreed) Muse” and “Squaw Poems.” For a critical analysis of this practice that defies generic boundaries, see Ouellette-Michalska, Autofiction. Bataille and Sands, American Indian Women, 4. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique. Anderson, Recognition of Being, 29. Ibid. Bataille and Sands, American Indian Women, 130. Ibid., 8. Fontaine, Kuessipan, 34–7. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 59, 43. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 55, 66.

Notes to pages 75–80

264 265 266 267 268

269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277

278 279 280 281 282

283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290

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Ibid., 77. Ibid., 78, 78. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 16. According to David Homel’s English translation of the text, the Innu title translates as “‘your move or ‘your turn,’” recalling the lyrics “c’est à ton tour” from the unofficial national anthem of Quebec, “Gens du pays,” written by Gilles Vigneault. Fontaine, Kuessipan, 19. See King, All My Relations, xi. Fontaine, Kuessipan, 71. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 26, 75. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 21. This sense of time in Kuessipan is analogous to the idea of a “resurgent present” in Betasamosake Simpson’s Nishnaabeg thought, in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Mossetto, “Nicole Brossard,” 52. Fontaine, Kuessipan, 11, 35, 82. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 99. I examine this history at length in Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada; the book’s introduction does so particularly in the broader context of experimental, or formalist and concrete, writing in Quebec and English Canada. Huhndorf and Suzack, “Indigenous Feminism,” 2. Ibid. See also Akiwenzie-Damm, interview by Katia Gubrisic. Brand, Map to the Door, 7. Dhamoon, “Feminist Approach,” 30. Byrd, Transit of Empire, 67. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 2. Ibid., 7. On “transfeminist,” see Enke, Transfeminist Perspectives; and Palacios, “Challenging Convictions.” On “cross-border,” see García Zarranz, TransCanadian Feminist Fictions, who employs the term “cross-border”

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292 293 294

295 296 297

298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305

Notes to pages 80–4

to denote national, gender, and ethical crossings in the work of queer women writers in Canada. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 52. Dhamoon in turn argues for a metafeminist revisiting of familiar feminist approaches to transnationalism, intersectionality, and settler colonialism, with the aim of decolonizing “feminist and anti-racist praxis,” in Dhamoon, “Feminist Approach,” 20. Moreover, as Byrd later emphasized in 2011 with the concept of cacophony, and Bonita Lawrence (Mi’kmaq) and Enakshi Dua argued in 2005, any attempt to decolonize anti-racist efforts and establish alliances among feminists requires the recognition that “people of color are settlers. Broad differences exist between those brought as slaves, currently working as migrant laborers, and refugees without legal documentation, or émigrés who have obtained citizenship. Yet people of color live on land that is appropriated and contested, where Aboriginal peoples are denied nationhood and access to their own lands.” Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing,” 134. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 10. Ibid., 24. The increase of recent settler criticism on Zolf ’s collection (to which I add my voice) is interesting to note. See Boyes, “Non-recognition”; Dobson, “A Poetics of Neoliberalism”; Dowling, Translingual Poetics; and Milne, Poetry Matters. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 1–2. Kalbfleisch, “Bordering on Feminism,” 287. The National Inquiry’s Final Report, Reclaiming Power and Place, employs the long acronym 2SLGBTQQIA to recognize Two-Spirited, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual people. I use it from here on. Reclaiming Power and Place. Clark, “Shock and Awe,” 3. Tina Fontaine’s accused killer was acquitted in 2018, despite recordings that, according to the Crown prosecutors, constituted admissions of guilt. See Montpetit, “What’s Next.” See Teillet, “Will There Be Justice for Cindy Gladue?” Kalbfleisch, “Bordering on Feminism,” 280. See Butts, “Robert Pickton”; Stueck, “Former Vancouver Detective.” Canadian Press, “Harper’s Dismissal”; and Clements, Unnatural and Accidental Women.

Notes to pages 84–9

306 307 308 309

310

311

312

313

314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323

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See Gloria Galloway, “Inquiry into Missing and Murdered.” See Simons, “Pig Girl.” Saunders, “Why I Disapprove.” See “Rebecca Belmore.” The exhibit was shown initially at the University of British Columbia’s Belkin Art Gallery in 2002 and went on tour to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 2003, the Kamloops Art Gallery at the Confederation Art Centre in Charlottetown in 2004, and the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton in 2006. Connelly, “Come Cold River (an Interview),” Toronto Quarterly, 24 November 2013. http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.ca/2013/11/karenconnelly-come-cold-river-interview.html. See the “Anishinabek Nation Statement on Canada 150.” See also CayleyDaoust, “Community, Education and Decolonization”; Council of Canadians has used the celebrations to reframe a colonial understanding of Canadian history in relation to Indigenous history and ongoing struggles for self-determination. See Akiwenzie-Damm, “Cultural Appropriation Debate”; and Longman, “Indigenous Literature’s Fearless Aunties.” This came in the wake of the massively ill-conceived editorial by former Write magazine editor Hal Niedzviecki that called for a cultural appropriation prize, which sparked social media furor and a series of commentaries from Indigenous women authors. In the wake of the summer 2018 cancellation of Betty Bonifassi and Robert Lepage’s Slav by the Montreal International Jazz Festival over outcries of white appropriation of Black history, Lepage’s show Kanata, an examination of Canadian history through the depiction of white and Indigenous relations without any Indigenous performers, was also cancelled. See Zolf, Janey’s Arcadia (film). Milne, “Writing the Body Politic,” 47. Derrida, “Différance.” Zolf, Janey’s Arcadia, 118. Zolf, email message to author, 29 January 2020. Zolf, Janey’s Arcadia, 117. Ibid. Zolf, email message to author, 29 January 2020. Zolf, Janey’s Arcadia, 36. Ibid., 32.

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351 352 353 354 355

Notes to pages 89–96

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 57, 63, 117, 62. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 116. Zolf, email message to author, 29 January 2020. Zolf, Janey’s Arcadia, 50. Ibid., 56. Ibid. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 121. Connelly, “Come Cold River (an Interview).” Emberley, “Breaking the Framework,” 71. Stueck, “Former Vancouver Detective.” Clements, Unnatural and Accidental Women, vignettes 53, 54, 57, 58. Ibid., vignettes 14, 47. See Johnston, Seeking Aboriginal Mothers. Connelly, Come Cold River, 52. Emberley, “Breaking the Framework,” 67. Connelly, Come Cold River, 56. Emberley, “Breaking the Framework,” 72. Ibid., 71. She continues: “Pickton and the women he murdered were pieces of a similar economy of biocapital, one that includes the labour of animal dismemberment or human consumption and the dismemberment of ‘unproductive’ female bodies due to their connection to alcoholism, drug addiction, and prostitution for consumption by the media.” Emberley, “Breaking the Framework,” 72. Ibid., 66. Connelly, Come Cold River, 17; Griffin, Review; and Connelly, Come Cold River, 52. Connelly, Come Cold River, 78. Ibid., 11. Connelly, Grace & Poison, 5.

Notes to pages 96–104

356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384

199

Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 224, 225. Connelly, Grace & Poison, 7. Connelly, “Come Cold River (an Interview).” Connelly, Come Cold River, 50. Ibid., 50, 54. Ibid., 23–4. Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces,” 36. Connelly, Come Cold River, 104. Ibid., 105. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 20. Mawhinney, “Giving up the Ghost,” 17. Emberley, “Breaking the Framework,” 77. Belmore, Vigil. Connelly, Come Cold River, 58. Emberley, “Breaking the Framework,” 80. See Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces.” Ibid., 38. Connelly, “The Same War.” Butler, Precarious Life, 26. Hirsh, “Presidential Forum.” Ibid. Braidotti, Posthuman, 111. Connelly, Come Cold River, 104. Connelly, email to author, 30 January 2020. Berlant and Stewart, The Hundreds, 82. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, ix. Ahäll, “Affect as Methodology,” 38. Ibid., 41. See Ahmed, Cultural Politics; Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Brennan, Transmission of Affect; Clough and Halley, Affective Turn; Cvetkovich, Depression; Fischer, “Feminist Philosophy”; Gorton, Theorizing Desire; Gunew, “Subaltern Empathy”; Hemmings, “Invoking Affect”; Koivunen, “Affective Turn?”; Liljeström and Paasonen, “Introduction”; Lorde, Sister Outsider; Love, Feeling Backward; Million, “Felt Theory”; Munt, Queer Attachments; Ngai, Ugly Feelings; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought; Probyn, Blush; Tyler, “Methodological Fatigue”; and Wilson, Psychosomatic. 385 Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” 22.

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391 392 393 394 395

396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403

Notes to pages 104–7

Garcia-Rojas, “(Un)Disciplined Futures,” 6. Ibid. Ibid. Fischer, “Feminist Philosophy,” 816. Ibid., 815. As Lennon also observes: “Problematically for feminists, the opposition between mind and body has also been correlated with an opposition between male and female, with the female regarded as enmeshed in her bodily existence in a way that makes attainment of rationality questionable. ‘Women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men’ (Grosz 1994, 14). Such enmeshment in corporeality was also attributed to colonised bodies and those attributed to the lower classes (McClintock 1995, Alcoff 2006, 103). Challenging such assumptions required feminists to confront corporeality in order to elucidate and confront constructions of sexed difference.” Lennon, “Feminist Perspectives,” emphasis original. On Grosz, see Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 21; on Moraga, see Moraga, Bridge Called My Back, 23. Fischer, “Feminist Philosophy,” 816. Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” 23. Garcia-Rojas, “(Un)Disciplined Futures,” 259. Just as García Zarranz makes the distinction in TransCanadian Feminist Fictions, by materialism here I, too, mean the connections between living bodies, ecosystems, and a critique of science and its view of the material world, and therefore the corporeal, environmental, and especially posthuman feminism of such theorists as Alaimo and Hekman, Barad, Braidotti, and Haraway – rather than the class-focused, Marxist/ materialist perspectives associated with Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Rosemary Hennessy, and Dorothy Smith. Liljeström, “Affect,” 25. Stewart, “In the World,” 194; and Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). Ahmed and Stacey, “Introduction,” 1. See Gatens, Imaginary Bodies; and Johnson, Feminism as Radical Humanism. In Million, “Felt Theory,” 71. Fee, “Becoming Human.” See Chanter, Ethics of Eros; and Grosz, Sexual Subversions. Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame,” 1.

Notes to pages 107–11

404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414

415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438

Clough, “Affective Turn,” 206. Ibid., 206–7. Hardt, “Foreword,” ix. Liljeström and Paasonen, “Introduction,” 1. Fischer, “Feminist Philosophy,” 812. Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” 18. Haraway, “Otherwordly Conversations,” 158. Ibid., 159. Alaimo and Hekman, “Introduction,” 4. Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 7. See Alaimo and Heckman, Material Feminisms; Barad, Meeting the Universe; Braidotti, Posthuman and Transpositions; Coole and Frost, New Materialisms; Grosz, Incorporeal and Volatile Bodies; HamesGarcía, “How Real Is Race?”; and Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto.” Alaimo and Hekman, “Introduction,” 1. Ibid., 3. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 23. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 94–5. Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” 11. See Guattari, Trois écologies. Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” 9. Massumi, Parables, 28. Ibid. Probyn, Blush; and Grossberg, “Affect’s Future,” 316. Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 5–6. Massumi, Parables, 35. Ahmed, “Out of Sorts.” Fischer, “Feminist Philosophy,” 818. Ahmed, “Afterword,” 210. Emphasis original. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 30. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 11, 17n10. Cvetkovitch, Depression, 4. Emphasis original. Ibid., 10. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 159. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8. Emphasis original. Berlant, “Two Girls,” 74. Fee, “Becoming Human.”

201

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Notes to pages 112–16

Million, “Felt Theory,” 54, 61. Ibid., 59. Emphasis original. Ibid., 58. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 8. Ibid., 4. Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 2. Ibid., 3. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 10. Braidotti, Posthuman, 61. Braidotti, Transpositions, 164. Ibid., 201–2. Brossard, email message to author, 1 February 2020. Brossard, Horizon du fragment, 109. English translations of this text as well as Ardeur are my own. Kaplan, “Feminist Futures,” 47. Both Scott and Kaplan wrote their essays in the relentless aftermath of 9/11. In her 2004 piece, Scott confronts the discursive constructions of otherness in an era of fear and aggressive US patriotism, which elevated to new heights and, as Faludi in turn observes in Terror Dream, “to new legitimacy the ventings of longtime conservative antifeminists, who were accorded a far greater media presence after the attacks.” She demonstrates the extent to which curious though pervasive, anti-feminist, and crudely misogynist rants emerged with the declared domestic war on terror. Aimed at America’s “susceptibilities as a ‘feminized society’ unmanned by feminist dictates,” such commentaries included breathless, if not cartoonish, indictments of feminism on both sides of the border. Faludi, Terror Dream, 22, 12. On a lyrical turn in Brossard’s recent writing, see Gagnon, “Circulation lyrique”; and on poetic intimacy in contemporary Québécois poetry, see Dolce, Porosité du monde. Dorion, Sous l’arche, 38. My translation, emphasis original. Brossard, L’amèr, 43. My translation. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 97. Brossard, Horizon du fragment, 11. Brossard, Fences in Breathing, 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 58, 67. Ibid., 13. Ibid.

Notes to pages 116–20

463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484

485 486 487

203

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 24, 56. Brossard, Ardeur, 29, 93, 39. Ibid., 27. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 50. Butler, Precarious Life, xii. Brossard, Horizon du fragment, 90. Brossard, Ardeur, 16, 56. Ibid., 13, 31, 57, 109. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 7. See Carrière, Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada, 189–206. Brossard, Horizon du fragment, 131. Brossard, Ardeur, 35. Brossard, Fences in Breathing, 106. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 7, 114. Brossard, Ardeur, 58, 60, 69. Ibid., 68; and Brossard, Horizon du fragment, 112. Lai and Wong, sybil unrest, 124. Lai, interview by Kristina Hopp and Savanna Spurrell, Open Book Toronto, 16 July 2014. http://m.openbooktoronto.com/kateburgess/blog/ great_canadian_writers_craft_interview_larissa_lai. Braidotti, Posthuman, 166. Ibid., 84. Alongside other thinkers including like Gabe Cavallaro, Steffen Will, Bruno Latour, and Christine J. Cuomo, Braidotti defines our contemporary epoch in terms of the anthropocene: our current geological time when human activity now drives and shapes the earth’s physical structure, substance, and history. Corresponding to what she considers the posthuman predicament, the anthropocene is “the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet,” in Braidotti, Posthuman, 5; from climate change, to biogenetics, to technological warfare. According to Latour, the anthropocene forces us to think about human agency and about anthropocentrism (the centrality and domination of “‘man”’ to all

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Notes to pages 121–4

things), their effects, and their damages on nature and the environment, moving us toward a necessary “politics of geology,” in Latour, “Agency at the Time,” 1. Within anthropocentric logic, the connection between the nonhuman and the human is literal and physical, and not just symbolic. However, like Haraway in Staying with the Trouble, Cuomo eschews anthropocene thinking as a potentially deterministic and therefore disabling discourse on the present. Braidotti, Posthuman, 5. Ibid., 91. In The Posthuman, Braidotti’s philosophy works toward an affective, material, “expanded, relational self that functions in a nature-culture continuum and is technologically mediated,” a self, the self of affect, that unfolds onto the world and enfolds it within. Her posthumanism theorizes the nature-culture continuum of human and nonhuman life, by-passing the duality between the material and the cultural that Grosz also bemoans. Braidotti locates her posthuman subject within a “brand of vital materialism.” Subjects are always “embodied and embedded entities” in their “becoming-animal, becoming-earth, and becomingmachine.” Herein lie a posthuman ethics and an affirmative politics as a “transcendence of negativity” with “efforts geared to creating possible futures.” Such effort for Braidotti, to return to earlier principles around affect as neither exclusively inward or outward, are based on “the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self.” Braidotti, Posthuman, 61, 66, 191, 193. Lai, Automaton Biographies, 91. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 58, 70. Ibid., 104, 120. Lai, interview by Hopp and Spurrell. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 149. Lai, Automaton Biographies, 11. Ibid.; and Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 149–81. Braidotti, Posthuman, 94. Lai, Automaton Biographies, 16. Ibid., 13, 16. Ibid., 16, 37. Ibid., 17–18. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 94.

Notes to pages 125–30

505 506 507 508 509 510 511 512 513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520

521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535 536 537

538

Lai, Automaton Biographies, 30, 31, 35. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 151. Ibid.; and Lai, Automaton Biographies, 16. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 154. Lai, Automaton Biographies, 41. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 119. Ibid. Braidotti, Posthuman, 90. Lai, Automaton Biographies, 28. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Ibid. Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 7. See also TallBear, “Standing with and Speaking as Faith,” on the relationship between the language of scholarship and that of community. Million, “Felt Theory,” 54. Ibid. Fee, “Becoming Human.” Million, “Felt Theory,” 61. Emphasis original. Whyte and Cuomo, “Ethics of Caring,” 238. Cvetkovich, Depression, 14; and Lindberg, Birdie, 18. Lindberg, Birdie, 17. Ibid., 50, 25. Ibid., 39. Cvetkovich, Depression, 2. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 12, 14. Lindberg, Birdie, 66. Clark, “Shock and Awe,” 3. Million, “Felt Theory,” 56; and Clark, “Shock and Awe,” 1. Lindberg, Birdie, 1. See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, and Pederson, “Speak, Trauma,” on critiques of Caruth’s theory of trauma as nonverbal except through literature. Anderson, On Recognition, 29.

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Notes to pages 130–6

539 Clark, “Shock and Awe,” 7; and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux and Brian Calliou, Best Practices in Aboriginal Community Development: A Literature Review and Wise Practices Approach (Alberta: The Banff Centre, 2010). 540 Clark, “Shock and Awe,” 8. 541 Ibid., 4. 542 Lindberg, Birdie, 22, 22, 60, 89. 543 In Alex, “Canada Reads.” 544 Ngai, Ugly Feelings. 545 Lindberg, Birdie, 49. 546 Ibid., 1. 547 Ibid., 66. 548 Ibid.; and Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 9. 549 Lindberg, Birdie, 5. Ellipsis original. 550 Ibid., 75, 6. 551 Ibid., 52. 552 Ibid., 63. 553 Ibid., 23, 38. 554 Anderson, On Recognition, 147. 555 Ibid., 149. 556 Lindberg, Birdie, 127. 557 Ibid., 30. 558 Ibid. 559 Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 8. 560 Anderson, On Recognition, 32. 561 Hamington, Embodied Care, 7. 562 Maracle, Memory Serves, 144. 563 Ibid., 146, 145, 146. 564 Ibid., 147. 565 Lindberg, Birdie, 183. 566 Ibid., 256. 567 Ibid., 245. 568 Ibid., 197. 569 Wahpimaskwasis, “Learning Self-Determination,” 44. 570 Ibid., 44. 571 Lindberg, Birdie, 243. 572 Anderson, On Being, 50. 573 Ibid., 13.

Notes to pages 136–46

574 575 576 577 578 579 580 581 582 583 584 585 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598 599 600 601 602 603 604 605 606

207

Lindberg, Birdie, 250. Fee, “Becoming Human.” Lindberg, Birdie, 231. Anderson, On Recognition, 50. Bowden, Caring, 8. Younsi, Soigner, aimer, 131. English translations of this text are my own. Stewart, Post-crisis Poetics. See De Falco, Imagining Care; Hétu, “Models of Care”; and Carrière, “Ailing Bodies,” “Éthique du care,” and “Mémoires du care.” Gilligan, Different Voice, 2. Ibid., 19. Paperman, “Voix différente,” 81. My translation. Gilligan, Different Voice, 19. Ibid., 2. Gilligan, “Hearing the Difference,” 125. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 3. Ibid., 177. Tronto, Caring Democracy, 18; and Thomas More, Utopia, translated by P. Turner (New York: Penguin, 1965). Tronto, Monde vulnérable, 11. My translation. Ibid., 12. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 176. DeFalco, Imagining Care, 26. Dorlin, “‘Dark Care’: De la servitude à la sollicitude.” Hamington, Embodied Care, 7. Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 9–10. Miller, “Need, Care and Obligation,” 145. Kittay and Feder, “Introduction,” 3. Ibid. DeFalco, Imagining Care, 16. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 19. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 12. See Bourgault and Perreault, Care; Deschênes, “Ressources du récit”; Laugier, Tous vulnérables?; Mahon and Robinson, Feminist Ethics; Snauwaert and Hétu, Poétiques et imaginaires; Stevenson, Life beside Itself; and Whyte and Cuomo, “Ethics of Caring.”

208

Notes to pages 146–51

607 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 18. 608 Laugier, Tous vulnérables?; Lovel et al., Face aux désastres; and Nurock, Carol Gilligan. 609 Bourgault and Perreault, Care, 10. My translation. 610 Ibid., 16. My translation. 611 Lovell et al., Face aux désastres. My translation. 612 Lovell, “Introduction,” 15. 613 Braidotti, Posthuman, 2. 614 See Grusin, Anthropocene Feminism. 615 Braidotti, Posthuman, 111. 616 Ibid. 617 Wolfe, “What Is Posthumanism?,” xii. 618 Ibid., xv. 619 Braidotti, Posthuman, 7. 620 Ibid., 9. 621 Ibid., 59. 622 Ibid., 110. 623 Ibid., 3, 60. 624 Ibid., 131, 133. 625 Ibid., 3. 626 Ibid., 60. “Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor.” Ibid., 132. 627 Ibid., 49–50. 628 Ibid., 66. 629 Ibid., 158. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 630 Braidotti, Posthuman, 159. 631 Ibid., 16. 632 Ibid., 38. 633 Ibid., 51, 52, 52. 634 Ibid., 104; Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 5, no. 2 (1985): 65–107; Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); and

Notes to pages 151–6

635 636 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645 646 647 648 649 650 651 652 653 654 655 656 657 658 659 660 661

662

209

Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). Braidotti, Posthuman, 110, 115; and Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux. Braidotti, Posthuman, 110. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 122. Laugier, Tous vulnérables?, 11. My translation. Ibid. Fisher and Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory,” 40. Emphasis original. Hamington, Embodied Care, 5. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 6. Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 16. Ibid., 2, 3, 4. Whyte and Cuomo, “Ethics of Caring,” 1. Maracle, Memory Serves, 152. Hamington, Embodied Care, 125. Ibid., 125. See Ahmed, Cultural Politics; and Berlant, “Introduction.” hooks, “Eating the Other,” 161. Jurecic, “Empathy,” 19. Ibid., 24. Davis, “White Book Clubs,” 160. Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 48. McRobie, “Martha Nussbaum.” DeFalco, Imagining Care, 14. Hamington, Embodied Care, 35. Abrams, Glossary, 328. Atwood also published the speculative-fiction Positron series through Byliner Fiction, which she later reworked into the 2015 novel The Heart Goes Last, a foray into dystopia and the disturbing politics of modern-day security and surveillance. Sutherland and Swan argue that Oryx and Crake “is a truly Canadian comment on an exaggerated and dystopian America, showing the worst excesses of Canadian fears regarding the American response to 9/11.” Sutherland and Swan, “Margaret Atwood’s,” 220. The very real threats of bioterrorism, environmental collapse, and the end of individual

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Notes to pages 156–65

freedoms reach their worst and full conclusion in the speculative trilogy. Moreover, Atwood’s “Letter to America” explicitly denounces the US Patriot Act, referenced as well by Brossard in Fences in Breathing, whose character Laure Ravin becomes obsessed with critiquing the document word by word. The act’s sanctioning of limited freedoms and the rhetoric of state security reach their nightmarish conclusion in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood, MaddAddam, 373. Atwood, “George Orwell,” 337. Atwood, Year of the Flood, 20. Ibid., 8. Atwood, “Writing Oryx,” 330. Atwood, Year of the Flood, 433; and Atwood, MaddAddam, 393. Atwood, MaddAddam, 9. Ibid., 387, 374–5. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 385, 387. Ibid., 385–6. Ibid., 369. Ibid., 386. Ibid., 373. Braidotti, Posthuman, 160. Ibid., 63, 64. Atwood, Year of the Flood, 389. Ibid., 91. Ibid. Ibid., 125, 126, 127. Ibid., 311, 312. Ibid., 216. Atwood, MaddAddam, 81, 331. Stein, “Sex, Population, and Environmental Eugenics,” 198–9. Atwood, Year of the Flood, 100, 160, 170, 101. Alaimo and Hekman, “Introduction,” 4. Toews, AMPS, 95. Lewis, “Prozac,” 55. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 59.

Notes to pages 165–72

695 696 697 698 699 700 701 702 703 704 705 706 707 708 709 710 711 712 713 714 715 716 717 718 719 720 721 722 723 724 725

726 727 728 729 730 731

211

Cvetkovich, Depression, 1. Toews, AMPS, 95. Ibid., 96. Cvetkovich, Depression, 14. Toews, AMPS, 135. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 214. Ibid. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 74. Cvetkovich, Depression, 25. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 15. Toews, AMPS, 107. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 232, 233. Ibid., 239. Braidotti, Posthuman, 111–13; and Cvetkovich, Depression, 14. Toews, AMPS, 246. Ibid., 176. Younsi, Soigner, aimer, 76. Ibid., 123. Jurecic, “Empathy,” 10–11. Younsi, Soigner, aimer, 123. Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 48. Younsi, Soigner, aimer, 21. Winnicott, quoted in Younsi, Soigner, aimer; and D.W. Winnicott, Conversations ordinaires, translated by Brigitte Bost (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). Younsi, Soigner, aimer, 123. Ibid., 126. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 103. Younsi, Soigner, aimer, 127, 129, 100. Ibid., 27–8. Ahmed, “Self-Care.”

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750 751

752 753 754 755 756 757 758 759 760

Notes to pages 172–82

Bulter, Precarious Life, 26, 25. Mozère, Avant-propos, 7; and Younsi, Soigner, aimer, 80. Younsi, Soigner, aimer, 9. Ibid. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 57, 79. Ibid., 74. Kamboureli, “Maladies of the Soul.” Warren, Bleu, 105. hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, 5. Verduyn, “Giving.” Ibid. Van Luven, “Introduction,” ii. Larousse, s.v. “essai.” Lorde, Sister, Outsider, 37. Cvetkovich, Depression, 10. See Peipmeier, Girl Zines. Collectively authored in 1988, La théorie, un dimanche, translated into English as Theory, A Sunday in 2013, is a collection of texts that stemmed from a Sunday theory group that Brossard organized in 1983. See Lisa Robertston’s introduction to the English translation for a vivid description. The original French text was republished in 2018 with a preface by Martine Delvaux. Brossard, Lettre aérienne, 23. Verduyn in turn chronicles some of these works in the aforementioned article, not forgetting Canadian women writers who primarily author nonfiction, such as Naomi Klein, Linda McQuaig, Irshad Manji, Lise Bissonnette, Lysiane Gagnon, and Nathalie Petrowski. She also takes heed of earlier women essayists, including Pauline Johnson, Edith Eaton (aka Sui Sin Far), and Emily Carr. Tostevin, Subject to Criticism, 9. Cvetkovich, Depression, 3. Wunker, Notes, 10. hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, 22. Sedgwick, quoted in Nelson, Argonauts, 29. Nelson, Argonauts, 29. Ahmed, “Open lecture.” Sedgwick, quoted in Nelson, Argonauts, 29. Nelson, Argonauts, 29.

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Index

Abrams, Murray, 155 acimowin (Cree storytelling), 128 Acker, Kathy, 88 Acoose-Miswonigeesikokwe, Janice, 63–4, 65, 71, 133, 193n219 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 181 affect theories, 102–37; Ahmed on, 34, 110, 112, 154; and bodies, 103–11; Braidotti on, 35; Brossard on, 103; connection to intersectionality, care, and feminist allyship, 6–7, 11, 13–15, 31–3, 146; Cvetkovich on, 179– 80; definition of affect, 109; and feminism, 6–7, 13, 17–18, 30, 34–5, 102–9, 181; inward sisters (Larissa Lai), 119–26; Lindberg on, 63; and materialism, 103, 106–7; and material studies, 105; and posthumanism, 119–20, 125; Sedgwick on, 107–9; sensepowers (Lindberg), 126– 37; unpredictable tenderness (Brossard), 113–19. See also empathy; vulnerability agencement (assemblage), 29, 43 agential realism (Barad), 150 Ahäll, Linda, 103

Ahmed, Sara, 32, 108, 180–1; and affect theories, 34, 110, 112, 154; on feminism, 27, 143; feminist killjoy, 33–4, 58, 117; and intersectionality, 37; Living a Feminist Life, 33, 181; on metafeminism, 27; on queerness, 182; on racial capitalism, 172; Thinking through the Skin (with Stacey), 105 Ain’t I a Woman (hooks), 41 Alaimo, Stacy, 30–1, 108, 164, 200n395 Alias Grace (Atwood), 155 Allen, Paula Gunn, 65 alliances. See feminist allyship All My Puny Sorrows (Toews), 139, 164–9 all my relations, 76, 193n219 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Hull, Scott, and Smith), 44 Alonzo, Anne-Marie, 44 Amantes (Brossard), 115 L’amèr (Brossard), 115 Anderson, Kim, 49, 73, 130–3, 136, 180–1 Anglonormativity, 45, 189n22

238

Index

anthropocene, 120, 121, 148, 152, 162, 203–4n487 anthropocentrism/antianthropocentricism, 30, 35, 148–50, 152–3, 203–4n487. See also post-anthropocentrism anti-colonialism, 63, 86, 135. See also colonialism anti-feminism, 4, 21, 23, 202n452. See also feminism anti-globalization/globalization, 12, 27, 39–40, 114, 121 anti-racism, 12, 27, 38, 42, 86, 117. See also racialization anti-Semitism, 8 Anzaldua, Gloria, 41 April Raintree (Culleton), 70 Arab Spring, 19 Ardeur (Ardour, Brossard), 113, 115, 117–19 “The Argonauts” (Nelson), 181 Armitage, Peter, 106 Armstrong, Jeannette, 65 Armstrong, Sally, 7, 9–10, 24 Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), 197n309 Ascent of Women (Armstrong), 7, 9 As We Have Always Done (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson), 195n277 Atlantis (journal), 28, 42, 49 Atwood, Margaret, 18, 114, 137, 149, 153, 154, 155–64; Alias Grace, 155; The Blind Assassin, 155; The Handmaid’s Tale, 156; The Heart Goes Last, 209n661; The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 155; “Letter to America,” 209n662; MaddAddam, 156–63, 173; MaddAddam Trilogy, 139, 156, 158–63, 164, 209n662;

Oryx and Crake, 156–61; and racialized characters, 157; Surfacing, 155; The Year of the Flood, 156–63 Australia, 14 autofiction, 72 Automaton Biographies (Lai), 119–26, 132 backlash to feminist gains, 3–4, 22, 23, 25 Bacon, Francis, 177 Bacon, Joséphine, 47–8, 64 Bannerji, Himani, 48, 49 Barad, Karen, 108, 150, 200n395 Baril, Alexandre, 44, 45, 189n118, 189n122 Barrett, Paul, 52 Bataille, Gretchen, 72–3, 127 Beauvoir, Simone de, 105 “Becoming-Woman” (Braidotti), 30 Belkin Art Gallery (BC), 197n309 Belmore, Rebecca, 85–6, 197n309 Bening, Annette, 7–8 Benjamin, Jessica, 35, 155, 170–1 Bergson, Henri, 104 Berlant, Lauren, 25, 28, 103, 111, 115, 124, 154 Bersianik, Louky, 11, 44 Beyoncé, 21 Bilge, Sirma, 42 Bill C-31, Canada, 193n222 Bill C-531, Canada, 66 Bills 62 (2015) and 21 (2019), Quebec, 45–6 Birdie (Lindberg), 48, 62, 65, 112–13, 126–37, 153, 169 Bissonnette, Lise, 212n751 Bissoondath, Neil, 48 Bitch, 20, 185n17

Index

Black, Jaime, 86 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy), 54 Black bodies, 52–7, 59. See also bodies Black feminism, 21, 36, 63–4, 69, 108 Black Lives Matter, 3, 28, 39, 42 Black living in the Black diaspora (Brand), 51–60 Black resistance, 54, 57–8, 191n172 Blade Runner (Dick; Ridley Scott), 120, 121, 123 Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve), 124 “Blanches” (David and Delvaux), 47 Blind Assassin, The (Atwood), 155 Blood and Guts (Acker), 88 Bloody Mary (Théoret), 179 bodies: and affect theories, 103– 11; agency of, 100–2; in Birdie (Lindberg), 127–8, 131, 136; Black, 52–7, 59, 104; and care, 152, 172; colonization effect on, 65, 91–2, 94–5, 97, 129; and gender, 50–1, 87; inhabiting lived experience, 31, 103, 164; and intersectional feminism, 16, 36, 41; safety of, 82. See also dualisms; vulnerability Bodies That Matter (Butler), 104 Bogic, Anna, 29 Bonifassi, Betty, 86, 197n313 Bourgault, Sophie, 147 Bowden, Peta, 137 Braidotti, Rosi, 29, 32, 102, 200n395; on affect theory, 35, 112–13; on nonhumans, 123, 169; post-anthropocentrism, 120–1, 161; on posthumanism,

239

120–1, 125–6, 148–52, 162, 178, 203n487, 204n490; on poststructuralism, 107; “Becoming-Woman,” 30; The Posthuman, 120, 162, 178–9, 203n487 Brand, Dionne: 44, 50, 69, 71, 79, 101, 180–1; Land to Light On, 58; A Map to the Door of No Return, 16, 48, 51–60; What We All Long For, 191n172 Brandt, Di, 11 Break, The (Vermette), 48, 64–5 Brennan, Teresa, 107, 110, 112 Broad, K.L., 41 Brossard, Nicole, 35, 44, 87, 113– 19, 121, 128, 155–6, 180–1; on affect theories, 18, 103; Amantes, 115; Ardeur (Ardour), 113, 115, 117–19; La capture du sombre (Fences in Breathing), 113, 115–16, 118, 209n662; Le désert mauve, 79, 115–16; L’horizon du fragment, 113, 115–16; La lettre aérienne, 179; L’amèr, 115; post-9/11 work, 11–12, 127; as Québécoise feminist writer, 114–15 Brown, Brené, 178 Buckner, Vanessa Lee, 94 Burke, Tarana, 20 Bush, George W., 116 Bust, 20, 185n17 Butler, Judith, 33, 35, 104, 146, 157; on feminism, 26, 102; Precarious Life, 101, 117, 172 Byrd, Jodi, 79, 196n291 C. (daughter of Carrière), 5, 182 cacophony (Byrd), 79–80, 196n291 Campbell, Maria, 50, 65, 71, 85

240

Index

Canada: assimilationist policies, 65–6, 193n222; care in, 144–6; Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 45; Confederation, 86, 197n311; Francophone feminism, 13, 37, 43–5, 72, 146–7; Indian Act, 49–50, 66; intersectionality in English, 48–51; intersectionality in French, 43–8; legislation, 45–6, 66, 193n222; problems in, 122, 145–6; Quebec, feminist writing in, 10–11, 27–8, 45–6, 114–15, 179–80 Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, 49–50 Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA)/Femmes canadiennes dans les arts littéraires (FCAL), 21 “Can the Third Wave Speak?” (Henderson), 28 Canthius, 21 capitalism, 22, 89, 120–2, 149, 172 capture du sombre, La (Fences in Breathing, Brossard), 113, 115–17, 118–19, 209n662 care, 137–74; in Birdie (Lindberg), 113, 129, 132–7; connection to intersectionality, feminist allyship, and affect theory, 6–7, 11, 13–15, 31–3, 146; ethical care, 139–48; ethics of, 9–10, 13–14, 18, 78, 134–5; in Francophone feminism, 146–7; l’espace du soin (Younsi), 170–3; as mediator of feminisms, 26; not so puny sorrows (Toews), 164–9; now that history is over (Atwood), 155–64; and posthumanism, 18, 143, 147–53; readerly care, 153–5

Caring Democracy (Tronto), 142 Carr, Emily, 212n751 Carrière, Marie: about, 106; C. (daughter), 5, 182; on care theory, 138–9, 147; on definition of feeling, 111; essai, 18–19, 175–83; on feminism, 10, 14–15; positionality of, 61–2, 81–2, 137, 175; S. (daughter), 178; Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada, 78, 195n282 Caruth, Cathy, 130 Cavallaro, Gabe, 203n487 Charlottesville, Virginia: rightwing rally (2017), 55 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 45 Chinese head tax, 145 Cho, Sumi, 42 cisnormativity, 45, 189n22 Cixous, Hélène, 103, 106, 151 Clark, Natalie, 62–3, 64, 129, 130, 180–1 Clements, Marie, 84, 85, 93–4 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 104, 107 CNN, 120 Coalition Avenir Québec, 45 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 167 Collins, Patricia Hill, 41, 42 colonialism, 51, 52, 56, 79, 81, 86, 134. See also anti-colonialism; oppression, systems of; settler colonialism colonization, 65, 133. See also decolonization Combahee River Collective Statement, 36, 56, 64, 105 Come Cold River (Connelly), 85, 92, 95–6, 100–1 Common Differences (Joseph and Lewis), 41 Confederation, celebration of, 86, 197n311

Index

Congress of Black Women, 49 Connelly, Karen, 17, 87, 92–102; Come Cold River, 85, 92, 94–102; “Enough,” 85, 88, 94–5, 96, 98–9; Grace and Poison, 96; as a settler ally, 81–6 Council of Canadians, 86, 197n311 COVID-19 crisis, 32, 138, 142 Cree Nation, 103, 127, 130–1, 132, 135–6 Cree storytelling (acimowin), 128 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 38–42, 45, 64 Crittenden, Danielle, 23 cross-border: approaches, 78–83, 84, 96, 98, 178, 196n290; poetics, 78–83 Cruel Optimism (Berlant), 28 Culleton, Beatrice, 65, 70 cultural appropriation, 86, 197n312, 197n313 Cuomo, Christine J., 128, 153, 203n487 Cvetkovich, Ann, 28, 110–11, 128–9, 165–6, 178–81 CWILA Count, 21 “Cyborg Manifesto, A” (Haraway), 122–3 Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson), 48 Das, Veena, 147 David, Carole, 47 Davis, Angela, 41, 56 Davis, Kimberly Chabot, 154–5 decolonization, 12, 17, 27, 40, 63, 196n291. See also colonization “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (Tuck and Yang), 80 deeper feminism, a (Naomi Fontaine), 72–8 DeFalco, Amelia, 143, 145, 155

241

de Lauretis, Teresa, 29, 35, 109 Deleuze, Gilles, 29, 31, 35, 104, 151 Delphy, Christine, 190n124, 200n395 Delvaux, Martine, 47, 180 Denetdale, Jennifer Nez, 67 depression, 110–11, 128–9, 166, 168 Depression (Cvetkovich), 178 Derrida, Jacques, 87–8 désert mauve, Le (Brossard), 115–16 Dhamoon, Rita, 38, 196n291 diaspora, 27, 51–60, 191n172 Dick, Phillip K., 120, 121, 124 différance (Derrida), 87–9, 92 Disabled Women’s Network, 49 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), 120 Dobson, Kit, 50 Donoghue, Emma, 9–10 Dorion, Hélène, 115 Dorlin, Elsa, 143–4 Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, BC, 83, 85–6, 93, 98, 134 dream or vision sequences (pawatamowin), 128 Driskill, Quo-Li, 51 Drucker, Johanna, 33 Dua, Enakshi, 49, 196n291 dualisms: binary and hierarchical, 31–2; mind and body, 102, 104– 6, 110, 130–1, 200n390; nature and culture, 105–8, 111–13, 124, 148–53, 204n490; public and private, 107 Dumont, Marilyn, 17, 48, 64, 69, 70–1 Dupré, Louise, 79 “Eating the Other” (hooks), 154 Eaton, Edith (Sui Sin Far), 212n751

242

Index

ecofeminism, 149 écriture au féminin, 10–11, 14, 102–3 Elliott, Alicia, 180 Emberley, Julia, 94–5, 198n350 embodiment theories, 103, 105, 108, 150 empathy, 154–5, 162, 168, 170 End of Men, The (Rosin), 21 “Enough” (Connelly), 85, 94–5, 96, 98–9 Envoi (un essai), 175–83 Escomel, Gloria, 44 espace du soin, l’ (Younsi), 170–3 essai, 15, 18–19, 175–83 Essais (Montaigne), 177 Essays (Bacon), 177 Establishment, 20–1 éternité en accéléré, L’ (Mavrikakis), 180 ethical care, 139–48. See also care Evans, James, 88, 91 Every. Now. Then (AGO), 54 Facebook, 20 Faludi, Susan, 23, 113, 202n452 Fanning, Elle, 8 F-Bomb (McKeon), 4 Fédération des femmes du Québec, 43, 45, 46 Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 49 Fee, Margery, 111–12, 127 Fehr, Amanda, 61–2 felt theory (Million), 63, 103, 111–12, 127 Femen (feminist activist group), 19 feminism: and affect theories, 6–7, 13, 17–18, 30, 34–5, 102–9, 181; Ahmed on, 27, 143; backlash to, 3–4, 22, 23, 25; Black feminism,

21, 36, 63–4, 69, 108; in Canada, 43–51, 190n124; Carrière on, 10, 14–15; commodified, 22; cryptofeminism, 28–9; current status of, 6, 14, 15–16; ecofeminism, 149; feminist consequences, 25–7; feminist expansion, 30–2; feminist reverberation, 27–30; fourth wave, 10–12, 188n110; Francophone, 13, 37, 43–5, 72, 146–7; French, 12, 14–15, 18, 28, 44–5, 106, 146–7; fuzzy, 11, 28–9; Indigenous feminisms, 11, 16–17, 61–9, 72–3, 79, 82, 108; Maracle on, 76, 134; material feminisms, 17–18, 30–1, 107–8, 110–12, 138–40, 148, 150; and materialism, 105, 108–9, 164, 190n124, 200n395; and materiality, 13, 32, 92, 103–5; as messy/incohesive/ambivalent, 15, 26, 35–6; modes of, 5; and posthumanism, 13, 30, 32, 103, 105, 200n395; radical, 5, 12, 14, 24, 40, 118; revival of, 11; second wave, 5–6, 8, 23–4, 105, 114, 140, 182; third wave, 7, 12, 38, 146; in time, 33–6; Western, 7, 24, 36, 39, 42, 79. See also affect theories; bodies; care; feminist allyship; intersectionality; queerness; 2SLGBTQQIA Feminism Is for Everybody (hooks), 22, 24, 176 Feminism without Borders (Mohanty), 3, 39 feminist allyship: about, 6–7, 11, 17, 81; Brand on, 57; connection to intersectionality, care, and affect theory, 6–7, 11,

Index

13–15, 31–3, 146; cross-border approaches, 17, 78–83; Janey’s Arcadia (Zolf ), 87–92; missing and murdered, 83–6; need for, 9; A Way to Stand (Connelly), 92–102. See also Black feminism; feminism; Indigenous peoples; intersectionality feminist consequences, 25–7 Feminist Consequences (Kavka), 25–6 feminist expansion, 30–2 Feminist eZine, 20, 185n17 feminist fiction theories (fictions théoriques), 147 Feministing, 21 feministkilljoys, 181 Feminist Reverberation, 27–30 Femmes désirantes, 47 Fences in Breathing (La capture du sombre, Brossard), 113, 115–16, 118, 209n662 Ferguson, Margaret, 32 films, 7–8, 120, 121, 123, 124 Firestone, Shulamith, 33 Fischer, Clara, 104–5, 110 Fiske, Jo-Anne, 193n222 Floyd, George, 32, 55 Fontaine, Naomi: a deeper feminism, 72–8; Kuessipan, 17, 47–8, 63, 65, 72–8, 92, 195n268, 195n277 Fontaine, Natasha Kanapé, 48, 68–9, 85 Fontaine, Tina, 83, 196n300 Foucault, Michel, 31, 148, 151 Francophone feminism, 13, 37, 43–5, 72, 146–7. See also French feminism; Quebec, feminist writing in Frank, Adam, 107, 108

243

Frankenberg, Ruth, 41 Freeman, Mini Aodla, 85 French feminism, 12, 14–15, 18, 28, 44–5, 106, 146–7. See also Francophone feminism; Quebec, feminist writing in Frontiers (Philip), 49 Gagnon, Lysiane, 212n751 Gagnon, Madeleine, 11 Gallop, Jane, 178 Galloway, Steven, 20 Gamergaters, 4 Garcia-Rojas, Claudia, 104 García Zarranz, Libe, 50, 200n395 Garneau, David, 98 Gatti, Maurizio, 47 Geek Feminism Blog, 20 gender issues, 21, 36, 38–9, 67–8. See also 2SLGBTQQIA Generation X, 3 “Gens du pays” (Vigneault), 195n268 Gerwig, Greta, 8 Ghomeshi, Jian, 20 Gilligan, Carol, 13, 18, 139–44, 146, 155 Gilroy, Paul, 54 Gladue, Cindy, 83 globalization/anti-globalization, 12, 27, 39–40, 114, 121 Global South, 157 Godard, Barbara, 79 Goeman, Mishuana, 67 Goldman, Marlene, 50 In Good Relation (Nickel and Fehr), 61–2, 65 Gordon, Jessica, 19 Goto, Hiromi, 50 Grace and Poison (Connelly), 96 Grande, Sandy, 63

244

Index

Great Depression, 8 great-spirited Indigenous women, 193n219 Green, Joyce, 67–8 Gregory, Verna Deborah, 94 Grossberg, Lawrence, 109 Grosz, Elizabeth, 29, 104, 106, 108, 204n490 Guattari, Félix, 29, 35, 104, 149, 151 Guillaumin, Colette, 190n124, 200n395 Gunew, Sneja, 127 GUTS Magazine, 21, 185n17 Hairpin, 20 Halfbreed (Campbell), 65, 70 Halfe, Bernice, 65 Hall, Stuart, 59 Halley, Jean, 107 Hamington, Maurice, 144, 152–3, 155 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood), 156, 158 Haraway, Donna, 17, 31, 55, 151, 200n395; “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 122–3; both material and discursive approaches, 107–8, 164; on posthumanism, 125; Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 122–3; Staying with the Trouble, 203n487 Hardt, Michael, 104, 107 Harris, Claire, 50 headcoverings, 45 Heart Goes Last, The (Atwood), 209n661 Hekman, Susan, 30–1, 108, 164, 200n395 Held, Virigina, 146 Hemmings, Clare, 5, 7, 14

Henderson, Jennifer, 11, 28–9 Hennessy, Rosemary, 200n395 heteronormativity, 14, 18, 80, 161, 183, 189n22. See also oppression, systems of heteropatriarchy, 51, 133 Heti, Sheila, 141 Hétu, Dominique, 147 Highway of Tears, BC, 83 Hirsh, Marianne, 101 Holmes, Rose Doreen, 94 Holmes, Valerie Nancy, 94 “Home for Good” (Connelly), 85 Homel, David, 195n268 hooks, bell, 178–9, 180–1; Ain’t I a Woman, 41; on Black women, 63–4; “Eating the Other,” 154; on feminism, 21–2, 24, 27, 181–2; Feminism Is for Everybody, 22, 24, 176; Talking Back, 63–4 horizon du fragment, L’ (Brossard), 113, 115–16, 118, 119 How to Be a Woman (Moran), 20 Huhndorf, Shari, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 79 humanism, 101 Hutcheon, Linda, 48, 106 I Am a Body of Land (WebbCampbell), 85 identities, 31, 44 Idle No More, 3, 19 In a Different Voice (Gilligan), 139–40, 146 incel terrorists, 4 Indian Act (Canada), 49–50, 66 Indian Rights for Indian Women, 50 Indigenous feminisms, 11, 16–17, 61–9, 72–3, 79, 82, 108 Indigenous peoples: all my

Index

relations, 76, 193n219; assimilation policies by Canadian government, 65–6, 193n222; Innu life, 72–8, 172; internal power structures, 66, 67, 69, 193n222; missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirited people, 17, 83–6, 88, 91–2, 97, 146; Red Intersectionality, 62–3, 69, 130; residential schools, 74, 89, 112, 134, 145; resistance, 61; selfdetermination, 69; Sixties Scoop, 145; traditional knowledge, 128, 130, 132, 135–6, 138. See also Indigenous feminisms; Indigenous women; kinship Indigenous studies, 50 Indigenous women: great-spirited Indigenous women, 193n219; invisibility of, 70, 97, 101, 102; silencing of, 64–8, 111–12, 193n217. See also Indigenous peoples “Indigenous Women and Power” (Maracle), 67–8 individual versus community life, 73, 130, 145 Innu life, 72–8, 172 intersectionality, 36–43; about, 16–17, 36; Ahmed on, 37; Brand on, 53; and care theory, 146; connection to care, feminist allyship, and affect theory, 6–7, 11, 13–15, 31–3, 146; current status of, in feminism, 36–43; elements of, 41; in English and French Canada, 43–51; expansion of, 42; failures of, 42; and feminism, 80, 196n291; and fourth-wave feminism,

245

189n110; need for analysis, 9; Red Intersectionality, 62–3, 69, 130; and third-wave feminism, 12; Tronto on, 146. See also Black feminism; Indigenous feminisms; Indigenous peoples In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Sharpe), 52 inward sisters (Lai), 119–26 Irigaray, Lucy, 103–5, 106, 108, 151, 179 Isla Vista killings, 20 Israeli/Palestinian conflict, 32 “It Crosses My Mind” (Dumont), 48 It Hurts to Be Alive and Obsolete (Moss), 9 iyiniw pahminsowin, 135 Jacob, Suzanne, 180 Jamieson, Kathleen, 66 Janey’s Arcadia (Zolf ), 81, 85, 87–92 Japanese Canadian internment, 146 Jewish immigrant exclusion, 145 Jezebel, 20 Johnson, Pauline, 212n751 Jones, Mavis Gertrude, 94 Jordan, Shirley, 11, 28 Joseph, Maia, 56–7 Journals of Susanna Moodie, The (Atwood), 155 Jurecic, Ann, 154 Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari), 29 Kalbfleisch, Elizabeth, 82 Kamboureli, Smaro, 48, 50, 175 Kamloops Art Gallery (PEI), 197n309 Kanata (Lepage), 86, 197n313

246

Index

Kapesh, An Antane, 85 Kaplan, Ann, 11, 113, 114 Kavka, Misha, 5, 25–7, 33 Kendall, Mikki, 188n110 kinship, 51, 62, 76–7, 127–8, 132, 138, 173 Klein, Naomi, 212n751 Kogawa, Joy, 50 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 140 Koivunen, Anu, 34–5, 104, 105, 109 kokhom, 131–2 Korchinski-Paquet, Regis, 55 Koul, Scaachi, 180, 181 Kristeva, Julia, 35, 106 Kuessipan (Naomi Fontaine), 65, 72–8, 92, 195n268, 195n277 Kuomintang (China), 120 Lac Seul Nation (Anishinaabe), 85 Lai, Larissa, 18, 35, 50, 103, 119–26, 132, 180–1 Land to Light On (Brand), 58 LaRocque, Emma, 64, 65, 67 Latour, Bruno, 203n487 Laugier, Sandra, 147, 152 Lawrence, Bonita, 49, 196n291 Lean In (Sandberg), 21 Lee, Sky, 50 Legal Education Action Fund (LEAF), 49–50 legislation, 45–6, 66, 193n222 Lejeune, Philippe, 73 Lemonade (Beyoncé), 21 Lemon Hound, 180 Lennon, Kathleen, 200n390 Lepage, Robert, 86, 197n313 “Letter to America” (Atwood), 209n662 lettre aérienne, La (Brossard), 179 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 138, 170, 179

Lewis, Bradley E., 164–5 Lewis, Jill, 41 LGBT. See queerness; 2SLGBTQQIA Lindberg, Tracey, 35, 64–5, 144, 180–1; on affect theories, 18, 63; Birdie (Lindberg), 48, 62, 65, 112–13, 126–37, 153, 169; Cree epistemologies, 103; sensepowers, 126–37 lived experiences, 31, 63, 127 lived materiality, 111–12 Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed), 33, 181 Lorde, Audre, 33–4, 41, 104 Lovell, Anne, 147–8, 152 MacDonald, Tanis, 50 MacKinnon, Catharine, 42–3 MaddAddam (Atwood), 156–64, 173 MaddAddam Trilogy (Atwood), 139, 149, 156–8, 162, 209n662 Maillé, Chantal, 37, 43, 45, 47, 190n124 Manitoukwe, 63, 133, 193n219 Mani-Utenam, 172 Manji, Irshad, 212n751 mansplaining (pénisplication), 20 Map to the Door of No Return, A (Brand), 16, 48, 51–60, 79, 191n172 Maracle, Lee, 49, 65–9, 76, 85, 133, 134, 180 Marche mondiale des femmes (World march of women), 43 Marchessault, Jovette, 11, 79 Marlatt, Daphne, 11, 79, 103 Martin, Stephanie, 49 Martin, Trayvon, 28 Marxism, 50, 106, 120, 190n124 Mason, Corinne, 42, 49

Index

Massumi, Brian, 109–10 material feminisms, 17–18, 30–1, 107–8, 110–12, 138–40, 148, 150 Material Feminisms (Alaimo and Hekman), 30–1 materialism: and affect theories, 103, 106–7, 112; and feminism, 105, 108–9, 164, 190n124, 200n395; post-cyber, 151 materiality: and feminism, 13, 32, 92, 103–5; and human/ nonhuman experience, 119–23, 143, 149–51, 204n490 Mathieu, Nicole-Claude, 190n124 Mavrikakis, Catherine, 180 McAdam, Sylvia, 19 McCall, Lesley, 42 McKeon, Lauren, 4, 25 McLean, Sheela, 19 McMaster Museum of Art, 197n309 McQuaig, Linda, 212n751 McRobie, Heather, 155 “Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl” (Dumont), 70–1 Memory Serves and Other Essays (Maracle), 49, 68 “Men Explain Things to Me” (Solnit), 20 Mennonite issues, 165, 168 mental illness, 139, 164–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 108 Mestokosho, Rita, 48 metafeminism: and affect theories, 17–18, 103, 105, 109–11; allyship, 79, 81, 85, 196n291; ecofeminism, 149; essai, 19, 173, 175, 176, 178, 181–3; history of use, 27–8; Indigenous feminisms, 17, 61–2, 65, 69, 153; and intersectional work,

247

36–7, 40, 41, 43, 50; Kavka on, 25–6; versus postfeminism, 32; and posthumanism, 31, 35, 108, 120, 150–1; process of, 29–30; understanding of, 3–10, 4–8, 11–13, 14–16, 23–30, 33–6. See also Brand, Dionne; Brossard, Nicole; care; feminism; Fontaine, Naomi; Kavka, Misha; Lai, Larissa; Lindberg, Tracey; MaddAddam Trilogy (Atwood); Zolf, Rachel metaphor, bright (métaphore vive), 60 metareactions in the mainstream, 19–25 Métis Nation, 65, 138 #MeToo movement, 3, 20 Mezei, Kathy, 79 Middle Passage, 51–2 Midnight Love (music video show), 53 Mille plateaux (Deleuze and Guattari), 29 Miller, Bruce, 156 Miller, Sarah, 144 Million, Dian, 49, 63–5, 106, 111–12, 127, 129, 194n241 Mills, Mike, 7–8, 9–10 Milne, Heather, 87 missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirited people, 17, 83–6, 88, 91–3, 97, 146, 196n297. See also Connelly, Karen; Zolf, Rachel Missing Women Commission of Inquiry (BC), 93 Modern Language Quarterly, 33 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 3–4, 10–11, 21, 39, 41, 80–1, 96 Moi, Toril, 11

248

Index

Monsanto (now Bayer), 120 Montaigne, Michel de, 177 Montreal International Jazz Festival, 86, 197n313 Moore, Brenda A., 94 Moraga, Cherríe, 41, 105 Moral Boundaries (Tronto), 141–3, 146 Moran, Caitlin, 20, 25 Moss, Zoe, 9 Mossetto, Paola, 77 Mother Earth Water Walk, 19 Mother of All Questions, The (Solnit), 3–4 Moure, Erín, 180 Ms., 20, 185n17 Mukherjee, Arun, 49 Murphy, Colleen, 84 Murphy, Emily (aka Janey Canuck), 88, 90–1 N. (friend of Carrière), 32 Name and the Unnamed, The (Belmore), 85, 197n309 Nason, Dory, 63 National Action Committee on the Status of Women (US), 49 National Indian Brotherhood, 66 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 83, 84, 93, 196n297 nationalism, 63 Native Women’s Association of Canada, 49, 83–4, 88 nature versus culture, 105–8, 111–13, 124, 148–53, 204n490 nehiyaw pimatisiwin, 135 Neither Indian Princesses nor Easy Squaws (AcooseMiswonigeesikokwe), 63 Nelson, Maggie, 181, 182

neocolonialism, 47, 73–4, 75, 76, 164, 175. See also oppression, systems of neoliberalism, 167; Brand on, 55; Butler on, 101; and care, 138, 144–5; culture of, 129, 132, 139, 166–7; current status, 15, 50–1, 122; and feminism, 12, 22, 25; as term, 27. See also oppression, systems of Ngai, Sianne, 124 Nickel, Sarah, 61–2 Niedzviecki, Hal, 86, 197n312 Nightingale, Florence, 9 Nikuss, 77, 78 Nishnaabeg story, 127, 133 Noddings, Nel, 146 nonhumans: in Automaton Biographies (Lai), 121–2, 124–5; in Birdie (Lindberg), 135, 137; in “Enough” (Connelly), 95; and feminism, 13, 147; with humans, 30–1, 103, 107, 130, 138–9, 148, 151–3; in MaddAddam, 160–1, 164; and posthumanism, 119, 203n487, 204n490 Norway House, Manitoba, 88 Notes from a Feminist Killjoy (Wunker), 50, 181 not so puny sorrows (Toews), 164–9 nouvelle barre du jour, La (1977–90), 114 Nouvelles pratiques sociales, 189n116 now that history is over (Margaret Atwood), 155–64 Nurock, Vanessa, 140 Nussbaum, Martha, 109, 153–5; Poetic Justice, 171 Nutshimit, 74

Index

Oberhuber, Andrea, 180 One Billion Rising, 19 One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter (Koul), 181 oppression, systems of, 38, 44, 56, 64–6, 86, 101, 130, 164 optical character recognition (OCR), 89 oral histories, 63 Oryx and Crake (Atwood), 156–61, 209n662 Other Solitudes (Hutcheon and Richmond), 48 Our Bodies Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Collective), 9 Pagé, Geneviève, 44 pandemic (COVID-19 crisis), 32, 138, 142 Pandolfo, Stefania, 147 Paperman, Patricia, 140 Papillon, Joëlle, 47 patriarchy, 38–9, 56, 63, 66–8, 80, 143. See also oppression, systems of Paukiuutit, 49 pawatamowin (dream or vision sequences), 128, 135–6 Pearce, Maryanne, 88 Perreault, Julie, 140, 147 Pésémapéo Bordeleau, Virginia, 64 Petrowski, Nathalie, 212n751 Philip, Marlene Nourbese, 11, 49, 103 Pig Girl (Murphy), 84–5 Pirbhai, Camal, 54, 56 Pizan, Christine de, 9 Poetic Justice (Nussbaum), 171 police, 83–4, 93

249

post-anthropocentrism, 120, 162– 3. See also anthropocentrism/ anti-anthropocentricism postcolonialism, 12, 14, 27, 37–47, 50, 63, 80 postfeminism, 11, 29 Posthuman, The (Braidotti), 120, 121, 161–2 posthumanism, 148–53; and affect theories, 119–20, 125; in Automaton Biographies (Lai), 121–6, 132; in Birdie (Lindberg), 128; and care, 18, 143, 147–8; definition of, 148–9; and feminism, 13, 30, 32, 103, 105, 200n395; and fourthwave feminism, 12; Haraway on, 125; MaddAddam Trilogy (Atwood), 139, 156, 158–63; and metafeminism, 35, 108, 151; and nonhumans, 119, 203n487, 204n490; and psychiatry, 164; in The Posthuman (Braidotti), 120–1, 126, 162, 178, 203n487, 204n490 postmodernism, 12, 27, 31, 106, 114, 143 post-9/11 era, 23, 32, 113, 114, 116–17, 202n452, 209n662 poststructuralism, 31, 106–7, 148 power, structures of, 51–2 “Power Shift: The Longest Revolution” (Armstrong), 9 Precarious Life (Butler), 101, 117, 172 Probyn, Elspeth, 109 protocapitalist feminism, 21–2 psychiatry/psychoanalysis, 34–6, 106–9, 111, 138–9, 164–5, 170, 179

250

Index

Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, 5, 144, 153 Pussy Riot, 19 Quebec, feminist writing in, 10– 11, 27–8, 45–6, 114–15, 179–80. See also Francophone feminism; French feminism Queer Indigenous Studies (Driskill), 51 queerness: and feminism, 29–30, 104, 109, 114, 181; queer theory, 31, 44, 50–1, 66, 107, 117–18, 181–2; queer women writers, 47, 50, 80, 179, 196n290. See also 2SLGBTQQIA Queyras, Sina, 180 rachel. See Automaton Biographies (Lai) racialization, 49. See also antiracism; feminist allyship; intersectionality; oppression, systems of Radcliffe, Sarah, 62 radical feminism, 5, 12, 14, 24, 40, 118 RCMP, 83, 84 readerly care, 153–5 realism, 150, 154, 158 Really Good Brown Girl, A (Dumont), 48, 64, 69, 70–1 Recherches féministes, 47 Reclaiming Power and Place (National Inquiry), 196n297 Red Intersectionality, 62–3, 69, 130 relationality: and affect theories, 112, 125; and care, 134–5, 138, 143–5, 167; Carrière on, 179; and feminism, 13, 31;

Indigenous women, 63, 73, 77–8, 102, 131–2; and self, 170 religious symbolism, 45–6 reproductive rights, 12, 24 residential schools, 74, 89, 112, 134, 145 Retribution (Tagaq), 21 Returning the Gaze (Bannerji), 49 Rich, Adrienne, 33 Richmond, Marion, 48 Ricoeur, Paul, 60, 179 Roberton, Angela, 49 Robin, Régine, 180 Robins, Wendy, 49 Robinson, Eden, 50 Room (magazine), 21 Rorty, Amélie, 109 Rosin, Hannah, 21 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 49 S. (daughter of Carrière), 178 Saint-Martin, Lori, 10–11, 18, 27–8, 32, 115 Sandberg, Sheryl, 21, 24, 25 Sands, Kathleen Mullen, 72–3, 127 Saunders, Delilha, 85 Saunders, Loretta, 83 Scott, Gail, 11, 79 Scott, Joan, 29, 32, 113, 115, 142, 202n452 Scott, Ridley, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126 Scratching the Surface (Dua and Roberton), 49 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 110, 111, 151, 178; on affect theories, 104, 107–9; on metafeminism, 4; on queerness, 182 Seljak, David, 46 sensepowers (Lindberg), 126–37

Index

Sept-Îles, Quebec, 73, 172–3 settler colonialism: ongoing issue, 62; patriarchy as consequence of, 66–7; people of colour, 79–80, 196n291; trauma as consequence, 130. See also colonialism; Indigenous peoples; oppression, systems of sexism. See oppression, systems of Shameless, 21 shapeshifting, 131, 137 Sharpe, Christina, 52, 54, 180–1 Shenher, Lori, 93 Shraya, Vivek, 50, 84 Shrill (West), 22–3 Signs, 42, 43 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 65 Silvera, Makeda, 49 Silverman, Kaja, 35 Simians, Cyborgs and Women (Haraway), 122–3 Simpson, Audra, 66, 68 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 126–7, 133, 180–1, 195n277; Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, 48 Sister Outsider (Lorde), 41 Sister Vision Press, 49 Sixties Scoop, 145 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 21, 24 Slav (Bonifassi and Lepage), 86, 197n313 SlutWalks, 19 Smith, Barbara, 108 Smith, Carrie, 16 Smith, Dorothy, 51, 200n395 social media, 23 Soigner, aimer (Younsi), 139, 164–5, 170–3 #solidarityisforwhitewomen, 188n110 Solnit, Rebecca, 3–4, 7, 20, 25

251

South Asia, 14 Spelman, Elizabeth, 41 Spence, Theresa, 19 Spinoza, Baruch, 104, 109 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 39, 106 Split Tooth (Tagaq), 21 Stacey, Jackie, 105 St-Amand, Isabelle, 47 standards of whiteness (Dumont), 70–1 Staying with the Trouble (Haraway), 203n487 Stehle, Maria, 16 Stern, Rachel, 164 Stewart, Christine, 138 Stewart, Kathleen, 103, 105, 111 storytelling, 127–8, 139, 158, 162, 180 Subject to Criticism (Tostevin), 180 suicide, 74, 139, 166–9, 172–3 Sûreté du Québec police, 83 Surfacing (Atwood), 155 Sutherland, Sharon, 156, 209n662 Suzack, Cheryl, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 79 Swan, Sarah, 156, 209n662 Switzerland, 169 sybil unrest (Lai and Wong), 119 Tagaq, Tanya, 21 Takuaikan Uashat mak ManiUtenam, 73–8 Talking Back (hooks), 63–4 TallBear, Kim, 68, 180 Terror Dream, The (Faludi), 23, 202n452 Tessera, 79 Théoret, France, 11, 179 théorie, un dimanche, La (Theory, A Sunday), 179, 212n749

252

Index

Thinking Through (Bannerji), 49 Thinking through the Skin (Ahmed and Stacey), 105 Third World, 39–41, 80 Thom, Kai Cheng, 50 Three Ecologies (Guattari), 149 time, sense of, 33–6, 77, 128, 195n277 Toast, 20 Todd, Zoe, 149 Toews, Miriam, 18, 137, 154, 155, 172; All My Puny Sorrows (AMPS), 139, 164–9 Tomkins, Sylvan, 104, 109 Toonder, Jeanette den, 47 Tostevin, Lola Lemire, 11, 180 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick), 151 Tous vulnérables (Laugier), 147 Traditional Knowledge, 128, 130, 132, 135–6, 138 Traister, Rebecca, 8 transatlantic slave trade, 51–2, 54, 145 TransCanadian Feminist Fictions (García Zarranz), 200n395 transgender issues: and Anglophone contexts, 50, 189n122; experiences of, 144; and feminism, 4, 6, 38; and Francophone feminist critique, 44; and heterosexuality, 26; rights, 5, 12. See also 2SLGBTQQIA Transnational Canadas (Dobson), 50 transnationalism, 12, 14, 27, 50, 196n291 Tronto, Joan, 18, 26, 140–3, 146, 152, 171–2 Truth and Reconciliation Report, 134. See also residential schools Tsosie, Rebecca, 67

Tuck, Eve, 63, 80 Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Feminism and Time, 33 Turner, Camille, 54, 56 20th Century Women (Mills), 7–8, 9 Twist, Arielle, 50 Twitter, 12, 20, 22–3, 42, 188n110 2SLGBTQQIA: within feminist circles, 26, 38, 41–2, 144; gay and lesbian lifestyles, 23; lesbian feminism, 44, 57, 114, 116; missing and murdered women, 83, 93, 196n297; Two-Spirited people, 51, 62, 146. See also queerness; transgender issues Uashat reserve, 73–8, 172 Ugly Feelings (Ngai), 124 “Under Western Eyes” (Mohanty), 39 “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” (Mohanty), 39 United States: construction of terror, 113–14, 115–16, 202n452; imperialism, 44; Patriot Act (2001), 116, 209n662; politics of, 32; postcolonial thought in, 14; post-9/11, 209n662; problems with, 145; second invasion of Iraq, 122 Unity Principles (Women’s March), 8 Unnatural and Accidental Women, The (Clements), 93–4 unpredictable tenderness (Brossard), 113–19 Verduyn, Christl, 177, 180, 212n751 Vermette, Katherena, 48, 64–5, 85

Index

Vernon, Karina, 50 VIDA: Women in Literary Arts in the United States, 21 Vigneault, Gilles, 195n268 Villeneuve, Denis, 124 vitalism, 35 Volatile Bodies (Grosz), 106, 108 vulnerability: Ahmed and Butler on, 172; of Black women and women of colour, 39; Braidotti on, 152; Carrière on, 178, 183; of elderly people, 145; of Indigenous (missing) women (Connelly), 86, 93, 97, 100–2; of nonhumans, 147, 152; post-9/11 era, 23, 114; as shared condition, 17, 101, 148; Younsi on, 171–3 Wahpimaskwasis, Janice Alison Makokis, 135 Walcott, Derek, 58 “Wanted” (Pirbhai and Turner), 54–5 Warren, Louise, 176, 180 Watson, Amanda, 42, 49 Ways, Penny Florence, 94 Way to Stand, A (Connelly), 92–102 Webb-Campbell, Shannon, 85 “We Should All Be Feminists” (Adichie), 181 West, Lindy, 22–3 Western feminism, 7, 24, 36, 39, 42, 79 “What Is Intersectional about Intersectionality Now” (Mason and Watson), 42 “What Said Author Says of the Canadian North-Wasp [SIC]” (Zolf ), 89 What We All Long For (Brand), 191n172

253

What Women Say of the Canadian Northwest (Zolf ), 91 whiteness, 41, 51, 188n110 white supremacy, 55, 71 Who Took My Sister? (WebbCampbell), 85 Why Stories Matter (Hemmings), 5 Whyte, Kyle (Potawatomi), 128, 153 Wiles, Marilyn, 94 Will, Steffen, 203n487 Williams, Shirley, 136 Wilson, Nina, 19 Winnemucca, Sarah, 64 Winnicott, D.W., 171 Wolfe, Cary, 148 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 9 Women, Race, and Class (Davis), 41 Women against Feminism campaign, 4 Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots (1983), 49, 79 Women’s March on Washington, DC (January 2017), 8, 9 Women’s Press, 49 “Women Still Can’t Have It All” (Slaughter), 21 Wonder, The (Donoghue), 9 Wong, Rita, 84, 119 Woodsworth, J.S., 88 Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada (Carrière), 78, 195n282 Writing thru Race Conference (1994), 49 Wunker, Erin, 50, 180, 181 Yang, Wayne, 63, 79 Year of the Flood, The (Atwood), 156–63 #YesAllWomen, 20

254

Younsi, Ouanessa, 18, 154–5, 168, 180–1; on care, 137; l’espace du soin, 170–3; on mental illness, 139; Soigner, aimer, 139, 164–5 Zeisler, Andi, 22 Zimmerman, Tegan, 12, 42, 188n110 Zitkala-Sa, 64

Index

zoe, 149, 150, 151 Zolf, Rachel, 17, 102, 196n294; cross-border alliances, 81–6, 99; focked-up arcadia, 87–92; Janey’s Arcadia, 81, 85, 87–92; “What Said Author Says of the Canadian North-Wasp [SIC],” 89; What Women Say of the Canadian Northwest, 91