Body, Power, Desire: Mapping Canadian Body History

Taking into consideration the theoretical literature on the body generated in various disciplines and recent approaches to the body in Canadian historical writing, this essay argues that attention to the power of the body as defined by Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Gilles Deleuze can offer new possibilities for historical praxis. An exploration of works on women’s bodies and medicine, children’s bodies, the bodies of First Nations peoples, and the treatment of dead bodies, as well as a discussion of the author’s work on vagrancy, homelessness, and city building on Canada’s west coast, demonstrates that doing history through the body does not simply mean doing body history. Conceiving the body as a site of historical investigation can flesh out and shed new light on many seemingly disembodied historical processes, such as relationships between children and parents, colonization, community development, and city building.