Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History

by Patrizia Gentile
Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History
Author: Patrizia Gentile
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2013-12-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442663162
GET BOOK

From fur coats to nude paintings, and from sports to beauty contests, the body has been central to the literal and figurative fashioning of ourselves as individuals and as a nation. In this first collection on the history of the body in Canada, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the multiple ways the body has served as a site of contestation in Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Showcasing a variety of methodological approaches, Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History includes essays on many themes that engage with the larger historical relationship between the body and nation: medicine and health, fashion and consumer culture, citizenship and work, and more. The contributors reflect on the intersections of bodies with the concept of nationhood, as well as how understandings of the body are historically contingent. The volume is capped off with a critical introductory chapter by the editors on the history of bodies and the development of the body as a category of analysis.

Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History

by Patrizia Gentile
Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History
Author: Patrizia Gentile
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442613874
GET BOOK

In this first collection on the history of the body in Canada, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the multiple ways the body has served as a site of contestation in Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Queen of the Maple Leaf

by Patrizia Gentile
Queen of the Maple Leaf
Author: Patrizia Gentile
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2020-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 077486415X
GET BOOK

As modern versions of the settler nation took root in twentieth-century Canada, beauty emerged as a business. But beauty pageants were more than just frivolous spectacles. Queen of the Maple Leaf deftly uncovers how colonial power operated within the pageant circuit. Patrizia Gentile examines the interplay between local or community-based pageants and provincial or national ones. Contests such as Miss War Worker and Miss Civil Service often functioned as stepping stones to larger competitions. At all levels, pageants exemplified codes of femininity, class, sexuality, and race that shaped the narratives of the settler nation. A union-organized pageant such as Queen of the Dressmakers, for example, might uplift working-class women, but immigrant women need not apply. Queen of the Maple Leaf demonstrates how these contests connected female bodies to respectable, wholesome, middle-class femininity, locating their longevity squarely within their capacity to reassert the white heteropatriarchy at the heart of settler societies.

Sex and the Married Girl

by Heather Stanley
Sex and the Married Girl
Author: Heather Stanley
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487512686
GET BOOK

Sex – who was having it, who shouldn’t have it, and who was supposed to be having it but wasn’t – was a major concern to social authorities in the immediate postwar era. Though they are often remembered with nostalgia as a sexually simpler time, the 1950s and early 1960s were incredibly sexually productive years. Sex and the Married Girl examines how two interrelated and dominant groups in Canada – medical professionals and church leaders – used married heterosexual female sexuality as a lever to rebuild the Canadian family and the state itself. Using embodied historical methodologies, the book examines not only discourses around sex but also how those discourses could influence the actual experience of sex for married women. Heather Stanley draws upon extensive oral life histories of women who lived, married, and had sex during this liminal social period to demonstrate that this was a time of simultaneous sexual and gender quiescence and change.

Moving Together

by Allana C. Lindgren
Moving Together
Author: Allana C. Lindgren
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1771124849
GET BOOK

Moving Together: Dance and Pluralism in Canada explores how dance intersects with the shifting concerns of pluralism in a variety of racial and ethnic communities across Canada. Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contributors examine a broad range of dance styles used to promote diversity and intercultural collaborations. Examples include Fijian dance in Vancouver; Japanese dance in Lethbridge; Danish, Chinese, Kathak, and Flamenco dance in Toronto; African and European contemporary dance styles in Montréal; and Ukrainian dance in Cape Breton. Interviews with Indigenous and Middle Eastern dance artists along with an artist statement by a Bharata Natyam and contemporary dance choreographer provide valuable artist perspectives. Contributors offer strategies to decolonize dance education and also challenge longstanding critiques of multiculturalism. Moving Together demonstrates that dance is at the cutting edge of rethinking the contours of race and ethnicity in Canada and is necessary reading for scholars, students, dance artists and audiences, and everyone interested in thinking about the future of racial and ethnic pluralism in Canada.

Power, Politics, and Principles

by Taylor Hollander
Power, Politics, and Principles
Author: Taylor Hollander
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2018-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487515146
GET BOOK

Set against the backdrop of the U.S. experience, Power, Politics, and Principles uses a transnational perspective to understand the passage and long-term implications of a pivotal labour law in Canada. Utilizing a wide array of primary materials and secondary sources, Hollander gets to the root of the policy-making process, revealing how the making of P.C. 1003 in 1944, a wartime order that forced employers to the collective bargaining table, involved real people with conflicting personalities and competing agendas. Each chapter of Power, Politics, and Principles begins with a quasi-fictional vignette to help the reader visualize historical context. Hollander pays particular attention to the central role that Mackenzie King played in the creation of P.C. 1003. Although most scholars describe the Prime Minister’s approach to policy decisions as calculating and opportunistic, Power, Politics, and Principles argues that Mackenzie King’s adherence to moderate principles resulted in a less hostile legal environment in Canada for workers and their unions in the long run, than a more far-reaching collective bargaining law in the United States.

Censoring Art

by Roisin Kennedy
Censoring Art
Author: Roisin Kennedy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1838608109
GET BOOK

Art is continuously subjected to insidious forms of censorship. This may be by the Church to guard against moral degeneration, by the State to promote a specific political agenda or by the art market, to elevate one artist above another. Now, and in the last century, artwork that touches on ethnic, religious, sexual, national or institutional sensitivities is liable to be destroyed or hidden away, ignored or side-lined. Drawing from new research into historical and contemporary case-studies, Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork provides diverse ways of understanding the purpose and mechanisms of art censorship across distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts from Iran, Japan, and Uzbekistan to Britain, Ireland, Canada, Macedonia, Soviet Russia, and Cyprus. Its contributions uncover the impact of this silent control of the production and exhibition of art and consider how censorship has affected art practice and public perceptions of artworks.

Pleasure and Panic

by Dan Malleck
Pleasure and Panic
Author: Dan Malleck
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 077486754X
GET BOOK

Booze, dope, smokes, and weed. Mind-altering, mood-changing substances have been part of human society for millennia. And the history of drugs and alcohol is infused with what we understand as their proper and improper use. Pleasure and Panic reveals how cultural fears and social, political, and economic disparities have always been deeply embedded in attitudes about drugs and alcohol. Long before John Lennon testified at Canada’s Le Dain Commission in favour of marijuana decriminalization, social movements existed to challenge the view that consumption of mind-altering substances, especially by young people, posed a danger to society. The contributors to this collection explore how drugs and alcohol intersect with diverse histories, including gender, medicine, popular culture, and business. Pleasure and Panic brings a dispassionate voice to current debates about liberalizing drug and alcohol laws and challenges existing ideas about how to deal with the so-called problems of drug and alcohol use.

Before Official Multiculturalism

by Franca Iacovetta
Before Official Multiculturalism
Author: Franca Iacovetta
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487545657
GET BOOK

For almost two decades before Canada officially adopted multiculturalism in 1971, a large network of women and their allies in Toronto were promoting pluralism as a city- and nation-building project. Before Official Multiculturalism assesses women as liberal pluralist advocates and activists, critically examining the key roles they played as community organizers, frontline social workers, and promoters of ethnic festivals. The book explores women’s community-based activism in support of a liberal pluralist vision of multiculturalism through an analysis of the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto, a postwar agency that sought to integrate newcomers into the mainstream and promote cultural diversity. Drawing on the rich records of the Institute, as well as the massive International Institutes collection in Minnesota, the book situates Toronto within its Canadian and North American contexts and addresses the flawed mandate to integrate immigrants and refugees into an increasingly diverse city. Before Official Multiculturalism engages with national and international debates to provide a critical analysis of women’s pluralism in Canada.