Saturday, October 31th 10:30 – 12:00

Session Room: Loft 2

1) Sharlee Cranston-Reimer, McMaster University
The Stakes in a Representation of Queerness at the Border in Contemporary Canadian Literature

In Female Masculinities, Jack Halberstam describes the intensified policing of identity categories that often occurs when people who do not fit dominant norms encounter spaces where national borders are articulated, enacted, and reified. Halberstam’s work suggests that borders are largely naturalized, invisible, and unthreatening so long as one complies with national norms that shape what it means to be an ideal citizen.

In this context, my paper examines four short stories that narrate border crossings from the points of view of the authors who make up the collective, Taste This. These narratives describe white queer and trans* experiences of trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border. One of the collective members, Ivan Coyote, for example, is surprised at the violence of their encounter because of their assumption that “getting back into Canada [is] a somewhat kinder, gentler cavity search” (17). I read these narratives in relation the Identity Screening Regulations regarding identity categories on passports in Canada, which makes clear that decisions about who “looks like” which gender(s) is entirely subjective. This legislation has very high stakes, however, as we can see from the many instances of gender non-conforming people being incarcerated in the wrong prison, for example. That is, if one’s gender and sex are not aligned in the ways that the nation demands, then one will not be recognized or accepted by the state, and the consequences may well be considerably more serious.

Alongside this discrimination, we must also consider Jasbir Puar’s concept, homonationalism, which demonstrates the ways that many (white) queer people in the west comply with dominant ideologies in order to be accepted as “legitimate citizens,” but whose legitimacy is contingent upon the west figuring non-western (racialized) nations as “backwards.” My paper will work through some of these complexities.

2) Maxine Allison Vande Vaarst, University of Wyoming
We Are More Than the Border: American Exclave Communitas and the Novelty of Liminal Space in Point Roberts, Washington

Situated on a British Columbian peninsula, yet south of the demarcating 49th Parallel, the isolated US settlement of Point Roberts has long been perceived chiefly as a “geopolitical oddity,” a locus for rumor and spectacle, and an avatar for broader public concerns surrounding supposed contamination at both states’ points of international egress. Even at those times when the eyes of formal scholarship have fallen on Point Roberts, they too have most often focused on the applied implications of political border theory on commercial development, the allocation of public and private resources, and conceptualized fears of being “locked-in” in the face of post-9/11 crises in global health and security.

In my essay, I attempt to remedy this depersonalization of domestic and communal space through a series of ethnographic interviews with Point Roberts residents, caught as they are, by the famed phrasing of Gloria Anzaldúa, “in the crossfire  between camps,” both celebratory toward and skeptical of idealized notions of “Americaness” and “Canadianess,” proud of their outlier status, yet weary of attempts to reduce their place of residence to a meager trivia question and occasional human interest story for mass media in population centers on either side of the border. In this way, I synchronize the politico-spatial boundary theories of Julian Minghi with a person-centered regionalist framework to craft a fuller picture of these challenges and ecstasies of lives lived both within – and forever apart from – the greater American and Canadian experiences.