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261 fifteen Detained at Customs Jane Rule, Censorship, and the Politics of Crossing the Canada– US Border Susan Billingham Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness … For everyone, foreign by birth or by nature, convention is a mark of fluency. Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart For Canada, the United States remains our significant Other. Reg Whitaker THIS CHAPTER ANALYZES THE OPERATIONS of the Canada–US border as an instrument of “bio-power” in the regulation of citizens’ lives, taking the literal and figurative border crossings in the life and work of Jane Rule as its principal case study. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault identifies two forms of power over life, one focused on the body as machine and the other on the“species body.” Bio-power is Foucault’s term for the diverse techniques employed in the subjugation of bodies and control of populations, power invested throughout life in a series of regulatory interventions (139). National boundaries in general, and the Canada–US border in particular, function as sites where biopower is implemented and where its effects become visible. As an American Canadian who chose to make Canada her permanent intellectual home, Rule occupied an ambivalent insider/outsider status with respect to both nations; this sharpened her observation of the perpetual fluctuation between cultural sameness and difference. My discussion focuses on three linked aspects of Rule’s career: her decision to move from the United States to Canada in 1956; her critique of America’s“discredited institutions” (Young 120) in fictions from the 1970s; and her involvement in the Little Sister’s constitutional challenge to Canada Customs’ seizure of books and magazines imported across the Canada– US border in the 1980s and 1990s. My reading is informed by Gary Kinsman’s extensive analyses of Canada’s “culture of regulation”—specifically, “the deep roots of heterosexism in Canadian state and social formation” and “the antiqueer history which continues to shape our present” (“Canadian Cold War” 262 Susan Billingham 112). Rule rejected the United States’ “super-patriotism” in favour of Canada’s more self-reflexive forms of allegiance; nevertheless, she remained subject to the institutional biases and cultural mechanisms of the Canadian nation-state that served to reinforce heteronormativity. At the same time, Rule consistently resisted the conventions—be they literary, social, or legal—that formed the idiom of daily existence and that sought to censor her person, her work, and her community. Rule occupies a curious place in Canadian literary history, in part because her oeuvre resists easy categorization. Born and raised in the United States but a Canadian citizen by choice, she fails to slot neatly into nationalist canons. Much of her fiction was written and published at a time when the Canadian academy was seeking to legitimate itself and establish a distinctive voice; anti-Americanism played a prominent part in these cultural developments, which may be one factor explaining Rule’s oblique relationship to the canon. Furthermore, Rule simultaneously anticipated feminist and lesbian movements and stood apart from them. When she published Desert of the Heart in 1964, five years before amendments to the Criminal Code that would partly decriminalize homosexual acts,1 she became Canada’s most visible lesbian, a sometimes reluctant role model and spokesperson for her communities. That she nearly lost her teaching position at the University of British Columbia and was often viewed as a sexual deviant rather than reviewed for the quality of her writing are salutary reminders of how recently public attitudes have changed and how fragile these victories remain (see “Labels”). Rule was political by practical example in the early 1970s, as a teacher of nascent Women’s Studies courses, a participant in consciousness-raising groups, and a feminist advocating equal treatment and pay for women working on university campuses . Yet her writing has frequently been castigated as apolitical, or perhaps as not political in the correct ways: her texts have been regarded (variously) as too humanist, too assimilationist, and too realist at a time when (lesbian) literary trends favoured separatism, utopian role models, or postmodern linguistic experimentation. Rule was an out lesbian all her adult life, yet she did not participate actively in the 1950s bar scene or in more recent lesbian subcultures . (She also understood and felt compassion toward individuals who chose to remain closeted.) At the same time, she retained her links to the gay male community during the turbulent period in the late 1970s to early...

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