"Going to Canada": The Politics and Poetics of Northern Exodus

This article argues that the tendency of political rhetoric in the U.S. to condemn Vietnam-era draft dodgers has obscured a more complex understanding of their place in North American culture of the 1960s. In an effort to understand the affective registers of draft resistance, it looks to literary representations of the draft dodger produced between the late 1960s and the present by both U.S. and Canadian authors. A consistent theme running through these representations that they use the politics of romance and sexuality to work through the politics of draft resistance and the act of "going to Canada."