| Located at the critical junction of cultural geography, spatial theory, aesthetic theories, and close analyses of literary texts, this dissertation explores the relationship between spatial and sexual orientation within contemporary Canadian queer literary texts (1988-2006). How, this project asks, is space imagined, represented, and / or (re)orientated in contemporary queer Canadian literature, and how do today's Canadian queer authors use literature to revision space? To answer these questions, "Taking Up Space" investigates four literary works that call attention in different ways to the heteropatriarchal production of Canada's rural, urban, suburban, and regional spaces: Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic, Gail Scott's Main Brides, Shane Rhodes's The Wireless Room, and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For. Treating these literary texts as examples of what Henri Lefebvre has labeled "representational space"---aesthetic spaces that allow for new ways of looking at space---and guided in part by Michel de Certeau's writings on the practice of everyday life, my dissertation explores how these four authors and their queer characters "take up space," both physically and aesthetically.;Keywords: 20th and 21st century Canadian literature, gay / lesbian literature, literary criticism, space and place in gay / lesbian literature, cultural geography, spatial theory, urban geography, regionalism in Canadian literature, the production of space, the practice of everyday life, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Daphne Marlatt, Gail Scott, Shane Rhodes, Dionne Brand iv;This study demonstrates that these particular (nascent) queer characters mitigate the discipline of the heteropatriarchal order not only through improvisatory consumptions of space, but also in and through the space of literature and other forms of artistic production. In fact, each of the literary works examined features a queer artist whose aesthetic practice mirrors that of its author in its revisioning of space. These characters turn to various forms of artistic production to express and to mitigate their spatial disorientation and to reorientate (as do their authors) how their different audiences view their surroundings. In essence, then, this dissertation examines how these four literary works at once thematize the heteronormative social production of space by depicting characters who struggle to navigate space in their everyday lives and intervene in this production through a series of strategic mobilizations of literary genre, form, tropes, and traditions that serve to revision different spaces. I propose that by offering a different "slant" on space, one that emphasizes its heterosexual orientation, these literary texts have the capacity to reorientate popular conceptions of space. |
