Contextualizing Canadian feminist literary collaboration

Canadian lesbian feminists Erin Moure, Daphne Marlatt, and Betsy Warland use experimental language strategies to evoke new realities, disrupting and displacing dominant systems that marginalize them. Their poetry deploys a Canadian blend of American language-centered writing and French feminist ecriture feminine to both deconstruct and re-construct conventional gender, class, and sexuality assumptions. The Quebecoise and Canadian strategy of fiction/theory allows feminist literary creation to remain open and multiple, calling for the collaboration of women writers in an exploration and mapping of possibilities. This collaborative element of fiction/theory has become increasingly pluralized, resulting in a subversive strategy that extends the possibilities beyond the author+author approach. Collaboration now involves the intertextually invoked voices of many; the interweaving of language elements, genres, and social identity positions; and finally, the engagement of the reader as an active participant in the reader/writer/text continuum.