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27 The beaver (Castor canadensis Kuhl) was of dominant importance in the beginning of the Canadian fur trade. Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 3 The Beaver renamed … to end porn mix-up.1 Headline, Agence France Presse, 12 January 2010 FUR HAS HAD A LONG AND complex relationship with Canada, shaping the country’s economic, political, and even sexual identity. Concurrently, fur remains an important part of the North American and indeed global fashion industry, symbolizing luxury and warmth. Julia Emberley reveals some of the intricacies of fur’s cultural significance within the fashion industry, noting that the fur coat in the twentieth century operates primarily as a “feminine fashion commodity worn by women to display the twin signs of wealth and prestige” (16). But as Emberley argues in her persuasive study, The Cultural Politics of Fur, the fur coat also operates as a sign of “female sexuality and its libidinal profits of exchange” (16). And while Canada has been a crucial source for fur pelts, it remains a traditionally marginalized (and symbolically feminized) nation with respect to fashion innovation. Yet Canada was the birthplace and home of Fashion Television, a half-hour television fashion show hosted by Torontobased journalist Jeanne Beker that ran for a remarkable twenty-seven years. First broadcast in 1985, FT was the longest continually running program of its kind. The show became internationally acclaimed and extremely popular with viewers around the globe; its final episode aired on 22 April 2012. Reruns of the show remain central to the programming schedule of FashionTelevisionChannel , a Canadian-based subscription channel devoted exclusively to fashion, art, and design, which was launched in 2001 and strategically renamed Fashion Television in the summer of 2012; this name change attests to the sustained popularity of the original FT and its potential to attract new subscribers.When two Queer(y)ing Fur Reading Fashion Television’s Border Crossings Jennifer Andrews 28 Jennifer Andrews asked in 2010 about what makes Fashion Television unique, Beker stated that the show’s strength lay in the fact that “Canadians have always made for great observers” and that FT “tell[s] [compelling] fashion stories” from a uniquely Canadian perspective (personal interview 3). If, as John Hartley argues in Television Truths, “nations themselves are the outcome of ‘narrative accrual,’ and citizenship is bound up with story” (75), what do explorations of Canada and Canadian identity through fur on a program like Fashion Television convey about the nation and its identity, especially in relation to its traditional colonial allies and trading partners—the United States and Britain? How might (re)fashioning or (re)thinking fur’s myriad connotations in the context of FT—a show that itself crossed multiple borders, literally and figuratively—enable a different understanding of Canada on the world stage, particularly in terms of sexuality? Fur trading—particularly of the much-coveted beaver pelt—was pivotal to Canada’s pre-Confederation development. The fur trade also fundamentally shaped Canada’s interactions with Britain, Europe, and the United States and its birth as a postcolonial nation with its own history of internal oppression and exploitation of Native peoples (many of whom were fur trappers).2 The recent renaming of The Beaver—the second-oldest magazine in Canada, “launched in 1920 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Hudson’s Bay Co. and the fur trade that led to the early exploration of Canada”—serves as a pointed reminder of the sexual connotations of fur in the contemporary world (“Canada’s The Beaver”). According to publisher Deborah Morrison,“there was only one interpretation for the word [beaver]” when the magazine began. The fact that “in modern times” the term has become“slang for women’s genitalia” made it very difficult for The Beaver to circulate online without having its readers plagued by spam filters or unable to access the magazine at all. This crudely sexualized rendering of the beaver when paired with Canada’s colonial history provides a provocative context for examining fur’s border crossings. This chapter couples close readings of Canada’s nineteenth-century depictions of itself as a youthful and resolutely feminized source of New World natural resources, especially as represented by fur, with Jeanne Beker’s efforts to complicate this clichéd vision of the nation through her work as a fashion journalist and long-standing host of Fashion Television. Not only did she reposition Canada (and specifically Toronto) in relation to the world of fashion, but she also...

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