Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History
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by edited by Patrizia Gentile & Jane Nicholas
University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2013
446 pp., illus., $34.95 paperback
Some twentieth-century historians used the body as a metaphor to represent connections between people and nation building. “The birth of the nation” and “the fathering of Confederation” are just two examples mentioned by editors Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas in Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History. This collection of essays analyzes the relationship between body and nation while highlighting the ways “bodies embody history.”
For example, Bonnie Reilly Schmidt, a Ph.D. candidate in British Columbia and a former police officer, examines how the female police body disrupted masculinity in the RCMP. She argues that masculinity was a foundation of Canada’s federal police force and that “the female body dismantled, blurred, and contested conceptualizations of masculinity and femininity in the RCMP and the nation.”
A few of the essays are accompanied by photos that serve to illustrate the writers’ arguments. One essay, about gendered citizenship during the Second World War, shows posters aimed at reaffirming traditional gender roles for women, such as one that includes the words, “I’m a woman in a man’s world — but I’m still a woman!”
Academic in its approach, this book offers seventeen critical and vastly different essays that make up the first collection of its kind in Canada.
— Danelle Cloutier (Read bio)
Danelle Cloutier is a Red River College student in Winnipeg and recently completed an internship at Canada's History magazine.