Queer Borders: Figures from the 1930s for U.S.-Canadian Relations

“Canada as a separate but dominated country,” wrote Margaret Atwood during the free trade debates of the late 1980s, “has done about as well under the United States as women worldwide have done under men. About the only position they have ever adopted toward us, country to country, has been the missionary position, and we were not on top. I guess that is why the national wisdom vis-à-vis them has so often taken the form of lying still, keeping your mouth shut and pretending you like it.” ¹ Like many opponents to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (the predecessor to the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]), Atwood expressed her disapproval of the treaty by implicitly comparing its effects to rape. Above all, this depiction of international power relations involved figuring the United States as a man and Canada as a woman. Of course, in Atwood’s passage the metaphor suggests that Canada’s status as female victim will not be rectified until she acts up, opens her mouth, and tells the truth. The assumption is that Canadians, like women, have something to say as a group about efforts to subsume them under a larger, putatively generic category.

Strangely, though, during the free trade debates, this gendered metaphor was also used by the treaty’s proponents; pro-free trade economists wrote pieces with titles such as Canada at the U.S.-Mexico Free-Trade Dance: Wallflower or Partner? and “The Draft Agreement: Cohabitation Worth A Try.” These pieces also figure a feminine Canada, but they suggest that courtship and marriage—or at least “fruitful and mutually invigorating intercourse”—are the most desirable outcomes of a relationship between masculine and feminine entities. ² The assumption for these writers is that having a voice is less important than having a home inside the walls of Fortress America. Despite their alternative goals, though, the economists share with Atwood and generations of Canadian intellectuals before her, the premise that Canada is a smaller, gentler, weaker body bound by contract and affection to an invasive, domineering, and often inconsiderate partner; for persons across the ideological spectrum, the gendered metaphor expresses an important power differential between the United States and Canada.

Even while noting the expressiveness of this metaphor, though, we should recall a few situations in which it also operates as a limit. For instance, several pieces in the semiotext(e) collection canadas draw attention to the fractures and stresses that disrupt the association between gender and nation. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s meditations on “quadrophenia”—the dissonance produced by hearing English, French, masculine and feminine voices simultaneously—show that the United States : Canada :: man : woman metaphor can also be retooled to describe conflicts within Canada, such as the long-standing dispute over the status of Francophone culture; for Lotbinière-Harwood, English Canada is to Québec as man is to woman. Similarly, Marie Ann Hart Baker’s piece “Gotta Be on Top: Why the Missionary Position Fails to Excite Me” recycles Atwood’s metaphor as a description of relations between white and Native writers; for Baker, white women’s efforts to appropriate Native stories can also be read as efforts to enforce the top-bottom hierarchy of the missionary position. ³ This chain, in which a “feminine” Canada becomes “masculine” when the points of reference shift, suggests that the gendered metaphor for national power differentials may have lost some of its descriptive power through proliferation. Because the male-female metaphor is so commonly used to describe relations of unequal power, it may well be that it does not describe any link on the chain precisely. If this is the case, it will be to our advantage to locate descriptive metaphors for U.S.-Canadian relations that not only articulate features of this relationship but also locate that relationship in an extensive and complex field of power and disempowerment.

One suggestion offered in canadas is that we “see Canada not so much as effeminate, but as a kind of ‘queer’ country.” Especially in relation to a hegemonic U.S. popular culture, Canadians are...