Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History ed. by Patrizia Gentile, Jane Nicholas (review)

Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History is an expansive collection that attempts, in the editors’ words, to “position the contested body as another category of analysis towards understanding both Canadian history and the nation.” (3) Assembled between the covers are not only some of the leading Canadian historians in the area, but also some of the most novel explorations of bodies, nation, and Canadian history recently published. Collectively, these articles push scholars toward materializing histories of nation and nationalism in ways that contribute both to Canadian history and to theories of the body and embodiment.

Contesting Bodies is divided into three parts, which explore, respectively, the making of bodily and embodied knowledge, bodily representation, and the regulation and containment of variously othered bodies. Within each part is an array of articles that take on the topic within a variety of historical periods and often through differing scholarly perspectives – some authors “stick to the history,” while others illustrate their historical accounts by utilizing, for example, Foucaultian theories of discursive production or Butler’s theory of performativity. Despite their differing approaches and historical periods, running through each of the chapters is a recognition of the body not as a natural object but as a dynamic, contested text, the meaning of which shifts according to the time and place in which it materializes.

In Part I, authors explore how bodily knowledge is produced not only by discourses of race (Barrington Walker, Gillian Poulter) and masculinity (Amy Shaw), but also, as illustrated by Kathryn Harvey, by the practice of history, itself. Harvey’s chapter recounts the ways in which the body, both her own and that of the David Ross McCord, the subject of her archival analysis, asserted itself into the research project through somatic sensations. One of the stand-outs of the collection, Harvey’s piece poses critical methodological questions about how to do an embodied history that does not, ultimately, (pretend to) leave the body outside the archive’s door.

In Part II, authors turn to exploring representations of the body, looking in particular at fashion (Myra Rutherdale, George Colpitts), art (Pandora Syperek), advertisements (Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Greg Marquis), dance (Allana Lindgren), and beauty pageants (Mary-Ann Shantz, Tarah Brookfield). Shantz’s contribution, focusing on nudist pageants in the postwar era, is of particular interest here. Highlighting the book’s larger theme of the body as contested, Shantz demonstrates how the body can signify both the “normal” and the “abnormal” Canadian, as nudist pageants at once produced white, middle-class respectability via discourses of nudists as “family oriented” and “natural,” and, at the same time, iterated the nude body and, by extension nudists, as resistant in that nudism transcended codes of decency and morality prevalent in Canada at the time.

The book closes with a focus on bodily regulation in Part III, historicizing the containment of a range of othered bodies including “obese” children (Wendy Mitchinson), working women (Helen Smith and Pamela Wakewich), women generally (Kristina Llewellyn, Bonnie Reilly Schmidt) and the working class/communist (Anne Frances Toews). Smith and Wakewich’s piece on the regulation of working women’s bodies during World War II is a an important juggernaut to this section, and indeed to the book as a whole, bringing together a number of complex themes woven throughout the book to explore the ways in which women’s war work physically constructed women’s bodies. Drawing on archival sources as well as qualitative interviews with women war workers, the authors demonstrate how national needs caused some women to take on types of physical labour which conditioned their bodies to be fit and muscular: a type of embodiment that was highly contested even as it was patriotic, as it spilled beyond the boundaries of femininity. This new physicality elicited some panic, the authors show, particularly in the popular press, in which humourists worried that women’s new-found physicality signaled the abandonment of their “natural” roles in the...