In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context ed. by Terry Goldie (review)

humanities 465 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 sport to be nominated for a Governor-General=s Award, and it is a most deserving nomination. Robidoux makes an important empirical contribution to his academic field, and his analysis of >men at play= may even help to improve labour practices in professional hockey. (PETER DONNELLY) Terry Goldie, editor. In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context Arsenal Pulp Press. x, 314. $23.95 Despite a richly diverse range of queer cultural practice across Canada, Canadian academe often turns to the standard enclave of Euro-American theorists to fuel gay and lesbian studies. Observing that such scholastic trends often fail to represent fully the life experiences of Canadians, Terry Goldie, in 1996, organized a conference exploring a gay and lesbian approach to Canadian studies entitled >Queer Nation?=. Out of the papers delivered there was born a new collection of fifteen essays, In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context. Although Goldie wants to avoid the trappings of textual method/literary analysis and >abtruse poststructuralist methods of queer inquiry= in this collection, the anthology=s overarching tone is nonetheless academic. The essays cover an enormously diverse range of topics, from studies of the spectacular, such as bj wray=s >The Elephant, the Mouse, and the Lesbian National Park Rangers,= to intense explorations of the everyday, such as Michelle K. Owen=s >@Family@ as a Site of Contestation: Queering the Normal or Normalizing the Queer?= Noting the scarcity of published gay and lesbian histories in Canada, Goldie writes that his compilation, through its diversity, >tests a possible Canadian homosexual tradition.= Goldie=s interview with filmmaker Lynn Fernie in >Talking Forbidden Love= is one of the highlights of In a Queer Country. This interview brings out Fernie=s loving, behind-the-scenes analysis of her documentary, Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives. As Goldie acknowledges in his introduction, this interview also stands as the only time a theorist-artist speaks directly (instead of being analysed) in this anthology. The role of film in contributing to or contesting a queer sense of Canadian identity is also discussed at length by James Allan in >Imagining an Intercultural Nation: A Moment in Canadian Queer Cinema= and Thomas Waugh in >Fairy Tales of Two Cities: or Queer Nation(s) B National Cinema(s).= Allan analyses three films from the early 1990s to argue that, although there is no singular queer Canadian identity, a sense of queer Canadian nationalism is essential for coping with ever-present legal, social, and sexual challenges. Waugh, conversely, creates a complex geo-temporal, politico-cultural grid to analyse four films set, variously, in Montreal and Toronto and pre- and post-1969 ultimately to dismiss >the national= in 466 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 favour of the distinctive cinematic canvas of the city-space. Catherine Nash, in >Siting Lesbians: Urban Spaces and Sexuality,= also focuses on the urban, but works from the field of urban geography. Nash explores lesbian city-spaces in Canadian cities, setting her own first-hand urban planning research against a gay maleBcentric sociological tradition. She portrays a community where issues of class and gender outweigh the politicized spectacle and hyper-sexuality of dominantly gay urban centres. An essay from Gordon Brent Ingram complements Nash=s piece. In >Redesigning Wreck: Beach Meets Forest as Location of Male Homoerotic Culture and Placemaking in Pacific Canada,= Ingram focuses on gay cultural landscapes. Ingram=s interlacing of the local, national, and international potential of such a place comes closer to positing a queer Canadian utopia than any other in this collection. Goldie initiates conversation between the pieces on film, space, spectacle, and other topics in his introduction, even as he labours to avoid imposing any authoritative order on this collection. What Goldie gains in his careful weaving, however, he sacrifices in representation. It is surprising that the borders of this queer country do not include any essays that focus on First Nations communities, and only one essay B >Buller Men and Bwatty Boys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities...