Friday, October 30th 3:15 – 4:45

Session Room: Loft 1

1) Stephanie Latella, York University

La Quebecoise Libre: Shifting Sovereignties in Quebec After Reasonable Accommodation

This paper explores how the concept of sovereignty in Quebec has developed. Through the mid-1990s, Québec sovereignty denoted a campaign to establish a sovereign state to represent the Québecois people. More recently, the sovereigntist cause has largely shifted away from separatism and toward the management of cultural difference. The discourse of reasonable accommodation has constructed a crisis moment in which the nation must reassert itself against the anticipated encroachment of foreign cultural practices. Veiled Muslim women are figured as particularly threatening, associated by prominent white Québecois feminists with the historical oppression of sexuality by the Church (Bilge 2012). In this framework, cultural difference comes to be seen as a threat to modernity.

I argue that this logic transfers sovereignty from the level of the state to the level of the citizen. Model citizens secure national belonging by affirming what Sirma Bilge calls sexual nationalism. Dissenters in this debate tend to affirm the sovereignty of veiled women, as evidenced by opinion pieces that challenged the attempted ban of religious symbols in 2013. Using an archive of such pieces from newspapers, social media, and the blogosphere, I trace the persistence of sexual nationalism even where it is putatively disavowed. To dismantle this reasoning, resistance must look beyond sovereign subjectivity. Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of willfulness (2014) – a queer sovereignty that refuses to be contained by the good life – I highlight instances in which sovereignty waivers from its nationalist trajectory. In so doing, my paper complicates the alliance that has been claimed between sexuality and nationalism, and shows the ambivalent relationship between desire and the state. In this ambivalence, I find a new and better resistance to prevailing nationalist logic.

2) Adina Madularea, University of Ottawa
Defining and enacting "good citizenship" amid a restrictive turn in Canadian policy and discourse: a theoretical framework for empirical research

For long time immigrant integration in Canada has been conceived as a “two-way street” process relying on the principle of reciprocity where both newcomers and the host society are responsible for accommodation and adjustment (Winnemore 2005; Biles and Winnemore 2006; Biles, Burstein and Frideres 2008). In this context, Canadian scholarship has traditionally paid more attention to immigrant settlement and the “survival years” immediately after arriving in Canada (e.g. Tolley and Young 2011; Biles et al. 2011; Burstein and Esses 2012). Recently, however, it has become apparent that socio-economic settlement is a necessary but potentially insufficient factor for the development of feelings of belonging, loyalty to the host country, and the adoption of “Canadian” values. Hence, the notion of citizenship has returned onto the public agenda: “strengthening the value of Canadian citizenship” became government priority and officials’ speeches accentuate shared values and immigrants’ “duty to integrate” (Jason Kenney 2009 – 2013). While determinants of citizenship take-up, the openness/restrictiveness of naturalization requirements, the effects of citizenship status on immigrants’ social and economic integration have all been extensively studied, relatively little attention has been paid to the way citizenship is performed, that is, the micro-level of new citizens’ perceptions and experiences of citizenship. In this paper, I intend to present the framework of an empirical study that I plan to conduct, as part of my PhD research project, in order to explore and understand the ways in which new citizens define “good citizenship” in Canadian context and whether/how they enact this definition in their daily life. I am thus, aiming to present the research context and the theoretical framework guiding my approach, hoping that discussions with other participants will help me optimize the actual research.

3 & 4) Kim Hong Nguyen and Gerald Voorhees, University of Waterloo
Race, Desire, and Decolonializing the Concept of Identification

This paper excavates the cultural presumptions undergirding Kenneth Burke’s concept of identification, a core concept foundational to methods of analysis prevalent in the fields of literary criticism, rhetoric, and critical/cultural studies. We trace a genealogy of identification through the works of Kenneth Burke, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Sigmund Freud and, ultimately, argue that identification is grounded in the cultural logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy.

This critique of Burke’s concept of identification is developed by revisiting Malinowski and Freud, whose observations, theories and hermeneutics are premised upon racial and sexual differentiation, respectively. Though Burke’s tries to bypass Freud’s linking of identification and sexual desire, his reliance on Malinowski, whose posthumously published diaries are rife with the eroticization of the Other, centers this linkage. Taking a cue from Stuart Hall’s observation of the “deep ambivalence of identification and desire,” we endeavor to not only critique but also displace the concept of identification with the notion of difference that mobilizes both identification and desire.