Reclaiming Canadian Bodies: Visual Media and Representation

The central focus of Reclaiming Canadian Bodies is the relationship between visual media, the construction of Canadian national identity, and notions of embodiment. It asks how particular representations of bodies are constructed and performed within the context of visual and discursive mediated content. The book emphasizes the ways individuals destabilize national mainstream visual tropes, which in turn have the potential to destabilize nationalist messages.

Drawing upon rich empirical research and relevant theory, the contributors ask how and why particular bodies (of Estonian immigrants, sports stars, First Nations peoples, self-identified homosexuals, and women) are either promoted and upheld as “Canadian” bodies while others are marginalized in or excluded from media representations. Essays are grouped into three sections: Embodied Ideals, The Embodiment of “Others,” and Embodied Activism and Advocacy. Written in an accessible style for a broad audience of scholars and students, this volume is original within the field of visual media, affect theory, and embodiment due to its emphasis on detailed empirical and, in some cases, ethnographic research within a Canadian context.

Introduction

Karen McGarry and Lynda Mannik

The central focus of this book is the relationship between visual media, the construction of Canadian nationalisms and notions of embodiment. In other words, how are particular representations of bodies constructed and performed within the context of visual and discursive mediated content? Secondarily, it emphasizes the ways individuals produce visual media to destabilize national mainstream visual tropes, which in turn have the potential to destabilize nationalist messages.

Section I: Embodied Ideals

The Media and the Ideal and Fat Body: An Examination of Embodiment and Affect in a Canadian Context

Wendy Mitchinson, History, University of Waterloo

Using popular Canadian magazines (1920-1980), Mitchinson looks at visual discourses about Canadian bodies and underlying assumptions concerning the control of body weight, shape and appearance that are related to gender, age, class, and ethnic ideals. She traces the changing nature of idealized bodies and bodies that did not live up to that idealization. Part of that change occurred through visual technology from the predominant use of drawings to the mixture of drawings and photos.

We’ve Got Beaver!: Women as a National Resources in Canadian Beer Advertisements

Ailsa Craig, Sociology, Memorial University

Craig focuses on the role and use of women’s bodies, as they are depicted in Molson Brewery advertisements, in building a felt affinity of ‘shared’ national identity that constructs the ideal Canadian as always, already male, white, and heterosexual. It provides a unique analysis which focuses on the role and use of women and women’s bodies in building a ‘shared’ national identity.

Ethnographic ‘Frictions’ and the “Ice Scandal”: Affect, Mass Media, and Canadian Nationalism in High Performance Figure Skating

McGarry’s chapter pays attention to ways in which the hyper-visuality of idealized bodies function as markers of mimetic excess, by specifically examining how Canadian male figure skaters are encouraged to emulate and embody past heroic figures within the context of their programs – Hollywood stars, action figures, and other heteronormative ideals. 

Section II: The Embodiment of “Others”

Pride, Shame and Canadian Sporting Identities: Media Depictions of Wayne Gretzky, Ben Johnson and George St. Pierre

Dale Spencer, Information and Media Studies, University of Western and Bryan Hogeveen, Dept. of Sociology, University of Alberta

Dale Spencer and Bryan Hogeveen examine how the circulation of images pertaining to mixed martial arts in popular Canadian media feature fighters’ bodies as objects of pain, fear, anger, and disgust that are not considered worthy of national status or mainstream acceptance. They explain how the circulation of images of MMA bodies in the Canadian popular media has turned fighters’ bodies into objects linked to a range of emotions.

Arrivals by Boat in the Canadian Press: Humanitarian Effort or Crisis 

Lynda Mannik, Anthropology, Memorial University

Lynda Mannik focuses on the affect created through circulations of photographs in a comparison of two print media depictions of arrivals of refugees by boat to Canada. She examines the ways Canadian press photographs pose and frame refugee’s bodies in an oppositional fashion over time to express specific national ideologies, justify state security and also control the types of ethnic others’ that are considered suitable and preferred.

Section III: Embodied Activism and Advocacy

Feeling Our Pain: The Embodied Cinema of Loretta Todd

Jennifer Gauthier, Communication Studies, Randolph College

Jennifer Gauthier examines the documentary films of Métis filmmaker Loretta Todd in order to demonstrate her practice of embodied activism within a Canadian colonial context. She highlights Todd’s attempts to re-write “official” history, in which the personal becomes truly political in order to demonstrate Todd’s filmic practice of embodied activism.  

“On Devrait Tout Détruire”: Photography, Habitus and Symbolic Violence in Clichy-sous-Bois and Regent Park 

Chris Richardson, Information and Media Studies, University of Western

Chris Richardson compares how individual artists in France and Canada use large scale, public, visual representations to destabilize the tropes of marginalized urban spaces that are considered menacing and hostile through a subversion of dominant news media’s images. It aims to establish Canadian marginalized spaces as unique and draw attention to the way spatial narratives are negotiated through embodied knowledge and lived practice. 

Media Legacies: Community, Memory, and Political Territory

Michael Connors Jackman, Anthropology, York University

Michael Connors Jackman considers the role of media in generating affective political responses to state intervention in the lives of gays and lesbians in Canada. In the case of gay and lesbian activism in Toronto, newspapers played a key role in inciting, communicating, and memorializing various clashes between queers and the state. These historical events were part of the emotionally-driven community responses to Pride Toronto's decision to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA), a queer pro-Palestinian group, from marching in its annual pride parade in the spring of 2010.

Conclusions 

Conclusions will highlight this book’s goal to explore the multiple relationships that exist between bodies, visual media and Canadian nationalism. It will emphasize links between race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationalism and how these aspects of identity are simultaneously effected by, and affect, socially accepted ideals. Concluding comments will problematize future areas of analysis with a particular focus on new research methods as well as topics aimed at uncovering acts of political activism that use images of human bodies to challenge national myths.