Full Description
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.
Contents
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Contesting Bodies, Nation, and Canadian History - Jane Nicholas (Lakehead University) and Patrizia Gentile (Carleton University)
Part I: Contested Meaning(s) of Bodies and Nations
Exploring the Writing of the History of the Body
1. Epiphany in the Archives - Kathryn Harvey
2. Following the North Star: Black Canadians, I.Q. Testing and Biopolitics in the Work of H.A. Tanser, 1939-2008 - Barrington Walker (Queen's University)
Defining 'Canadian' Bodies: Race and Colonialism
3. Embodying Nation: Indigenous Sports in Victorian Montreal, 1860-1885 - Gillian Poulter (Acadia University)
4. The Boer War, Masculinity, and Citizenship in Canada, 1899-1907 - Amy Shaw (University of Lethbridge)
Part II: (Re)fashioning the Body
Fashion, Clothing, and Bodies
5. Packing and Unpacking: Newcomer and Aboriginal Women Negotiate Fashion in Colonial Encounters during the Twentieth-Century - Myra Rutherdale (York University)
6. The Domesticated Body and the Industrialized Imitation Fur Coat in Canada, 1919-1939 - George Colpitts (University of Calgary)
Contesting Representations of the Body/Sexuality
7. An Excess of Prudery? Lilias Torrance Newton's Nude and the Censorship of Interwar Canadian Painting - Pandora Syperek (University College London)
8. The National Ballet of Canada's Normative Bodies: Legitimizing and Popularizing Dance in Canada during the 1950s - Allana Lindgren (University of Victoria)
9. Gender, Spirits and Beer: Representing Female and Male Bodies in Canadian Alcohol Ads, 1930s-1970s - Cheryl Krasnick Warsh (Vancouver Island University) and Greg Marquis (University of New Brunswick)
Bodies in Contests
10. Nudity as Embodied Citizenship and Spectacle: Pageants at Canada's Nudist Clubs, 1949-1975 - Mary-Ann Shantz (Carleton University)
11. Modelling the UN's Mission in Semi-Formal Wear: Edmonton's Miss United Nations Pageants of the 1960s - Tarah Brookfield (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Part III: Regulating Bodies
Transformations, Medicalization, and the Healthy Body
12. Obesity in Children: A Medical Perception, 1920-1980 - Wendy Mitchinson (University of Waterloo)
13. Public Body, Private Health: Mediscope, the Transparent Woman and Medical Authority, 1959 - Valerie Minnett (Carleton University)
14. Trans/Forming the Citizen Body in Wartime: National and Local Public Discourse on Women's Bodies and 'Body Work' for Women during World War Two - Helen Smith (Lakehead University) and Pamela Wakewich (Lakehead University)
Re/Producing Productive Bodies
15. 'Flesh, bone, and blood': Working-Class Bodies and the Canadian Communist Press, 1922-1956 - Anne Frances Toews
16. "Better Teachers, Biologically Speaking": The Authority of the 'Marrying-Kind' of Teacher in Schools, 1945-1960 - Kristina Llewellyn (University of Waterloo)
17. Contesting a Canadian Icon: Female Police Bodies and the Challenge to the Masculine Foundations of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the 1970s - Bonnie Reilly Schmidt (Simon Fraser University)
Bibliography
