Bodies of Canada : conceptualizations of Canadian space and the rhetoric of gender

Abstract

While conceiving the original call for papers for the present-’ canadian’-issue of RIAS, the editors’ main focus had been on discourses of space and gender. Our primary reason for this was that within the context of Canadian culture and literature the correlation between these two concepts has been strikingly manifest. In early English-Canadian texts, one often observes a ‘feminization of space’ (Best, 1995: 183) which is, however, characteristic of the literature of colonization in general. The process of taking over and possessing a foreign land implies, as W. H. New asserts, ‘penetration (of continent, of body)’ (1997: 114) which is typically construed as feminine, i.e., unknown, unfamiliar, and potentially hostile(...)