Michele Byers

Deterritorializing collective biography

This paper proposes a new move in the methodological practice of collective biography, by provoking a shift beyond any remnant attachment to the speaking/ writing subject towards her dispersal and displacement via textual interventions that stress multivocality. These include the use of photographs, drama, and various genres of writing. Using a story selected from a collective biography workshop on sexuality and schooling, we document how we work across and among texts, thereby widening and shifting interpretive and subjective spaces of inquiry. We also consider how Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of territorialization/deterritorialization and the nomadic subject might be useful in theorizing such methodological moves in collective biography and our own investments in them.

Material Bodies and Performative Identities: Mona, Neil, and the Promised Land

This article contrasts the articulation of Jewishness and ethnicity/race found in Goodbye, Columbus with that of Gish Jens Mona in the Promised Land. The ambivalence of locating the self and others within a spectrum of racialized possibilities of Jewish identity is central to this article.

“Fats,” futurity, and the contemporary young adult novel

ABSTRACT Fat characters in young adult novels were once cautionary tales. Today, fat embodied characters are not restricted to these old narratives, and alternative avenues through which to imagine futures long denied them are opened up. What possible futures are imaginable within the diegetic constraints of young adult fiction today? A reading of a small sample of recent publications shows that contemporary young adult literature creates new spaces for, and discursive formations through which, fat bodies can be known, even as it remains tethered to a present that is not fully emancipatory.

The Stuff of Legend: T/Selling the Story of Reena Virk

This essay looks at texts that tell stories that claim to be “true,” “based on,” or “indebted to” the murder of Reena Virk. Girls in these stories are value-laden symbols that frame and reframe the story of girlhood identity within the Canadian nation in particular ways. I argue that these framings often obliterate the particularity of girlhood identities through which the nation might be understood as mired in histories of racialized and sexualized violence, through the creation of universal girl subjects whose identities better meet the needs of the publishing industry and its desired audiences. The texts in question—the play The Shape of a Girl (2001) by Joan MacLeod, the teen novel The Beckoners (2004) by Carrie Mac, and Under the Bridge (2005), a true crime novel by Rebecca Godfrey—explicitly reference Virk but their key characters are primarily white, Anglo girls. The stories are written in such a way that the experiences of second-generation immigrant youth in Canada are displaced onto universal girl subjects, disconnecting the murder from colonial oppression, misogyny, and white supremacy. Cet essai porte sur des rapports d’histoires qui prétendent être «vraies», «basées sur» ou «rede-vables» au meurtre de Reena Virk. Les jeunes filles de ces histoires sont des symboles à fortes connotations qui cadrent et recadrent l’histoire de l’identité féminine adolescente de façon particulière au sein de la nation canadienne. Je soutiens que les cadrages de ces identités effacent souvent leurs particularités chez les jeunes filles, alors que c’est par celles-ci que l’on peut comprendre la nation, telle que reflétée dans des histoires de violence racialisée et sexualisée, et ce, par la création d’exemplaires de l’adolescente universelle dont les identités répondent mieux aux besoins de l’industrie de la publicité et des audiences visées. Les textes en question – la pièce de théâtre The Shape of a Girl (2001) de Joan MacLeod, le roman pour adolescentsThe Beckoners (2004) de Carrie Mac et Under the Bridge (2005), l’histoire d’un vrai crime par Rebecca Godfrey – font explicitement référence à Virk, mais leurs personnages clés sont avant tout des Anglo-saxonnes blanches. Ces histoires sont écrites de manière à transférer les expériences de jeunes immigrant(e)s de deuxième génération à des personnages de jeune fille universelle, en déconnectant le meurtre de l’oppression coloniale, de la misogynie et de la suprématie blanche.