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  • Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History ed. by Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas
  • Jennifer Susan Marotta
Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History. patrizia gentile and jane nicholas, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 428, $75.00 cloth, $34.95 paper

The body has a long history as a metaphor for the state. “Birth of a nation,” “founding fathers,” “lady liberty” – these are tropes that implicitly situate a new nation in relation to a body that is youthful, exuberant, able-bodied, heterosexual, and typically white. Editors Jane Nicholas and Patrizia Gentile acknowledge that “bodies figure nation” yet rightly suggest that neither is a static entity. Their aim with this unique collection is to “‘re-figure’ both categories as contested” (3), allowing the body to act as a new lens of analysis in our understanding of Canadian history. The collection is divided into three major [End Page 473] sections – Contested Meaning(s) of Bodies and Nation, (Re)fashioning the Body, and Regulating Bodies – though many offerings flow freely between these thematic sections.

Readers are offered a series of thoughtful and well-researched essays, ranging from the empirical to the poststructural, which cover a variety of methodologies, including textual, visual, and oral. Gentile and Nicholas’s comprehensive yet thankfully concise literature review and summation of theoretical powerhouses like Judith Butler, Roy Porter, Kathleen Canning, and Michel Foucault make their introduction immensely valuable. One can easily see this chapter and many of the other contributions becoming staples of undergraduate courses, as students gain instant purchase on complex constructs.

While theoretical underpinnings are liberally borrowed from an array of international scholars, there is nothing derivative about this collection. Instead it pushes forward the scholarship of the body (Wendy Mitchinson’s strong research on childhood obesity being one pioneering example) and is a welcome addition to Canadian historiography. This is more than a loosely bound collection of conference papers. There is a refreshing coherence here, an active attempt by all authors, no doubt at the pointed request of the editors, to create intersections between their topics and methodologies.

Among the most lively, accessible, and engaging articles are those that revolve around clothed (and unclothed) bodies, from Mary-Ann Shantz’s look at nudity as embodied citizenship within pageants at Canada’s nudist clubs to Tarah Brookfield’s much more refined and scholarly entrants in the 1960s Miss United Nations Pageants. Myra Rutherdale offers a particularly compelling look at gender performativity and racialization in “Packing and Unpacking: Northern Women Negotiate Fashion in Colonial Encounters during the Twentieth Century.” As Rutherdale argues, “Euro-Canadians used northern Aboriginal’ clothing, and northerners adapted southern clothing in complex ways” (119), tightly weaving together notions of hygiene, fashion, respectability, modernity, and race. Formal and informal uniforms and their place in defining and performing national identities are also a crucial aspect of Gillian Poulter’s excellent study of how Indigenous sports like snowshoeing and its costuming played a role in developing a distinct hybrid of disciplined masculinity and Canadian identity. In a similar vein is Amy Shaw’s reflective look at the “swagger” of Canadian masculinity and patriotism during the Boer War, while Bonnie Reilly Schmidt’s eye-opening comparison of the 1970s rcmp’s male and female red-serge uniform, in all its heightened mythology, offers ways to unpack clothing and decipher cultural meaning. [End Page 474]

A compelling theme throughout is that of tense bodies – bodies that struggle between “social ideals and social anxieties” (219). This is skilfully demonstrated by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Greg Marquis in their analysis of alcohol ads. They show a gradual shift from a lack of representation of the body, when the “purity” of the product needed to take centre stage, to the body being avidly displayed in sporting scenes of homosocial bonding and, later, in ads playing on the permissive sexuality of the “Mustang generation.” Kristina Llewellyn deftly draws the fine line that teachers walked in terms of what school boards considered acceptable bodies. Embraced were the “marrying-kind,” which made “spinsters” increasingly monstrous and incapable of fulfilling their crucial role as “moral guardians of the democratic state and liable for normative femininity” (350). Tensions arose, too, in...

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