| This dissertation documents and analyzes the varied ways film works by Canadian women of Italian heritage contribute to discussions about the challenges that feminism, cultural representation and identity politics pose to us. Intersectionality as a feminist theory recognizes that inequality is often the result of numerous social and cultural categories of difference, such as ethnicity, gender, race, class, and sexual orientation et cetera, operating in an interrelated system of oppression that results in an "intersection" of multiple forms of discrimination and complex identities. Cultural studies, instead, provide the notion of hybridity that attempts to assess the double-ness of diasporic experience whereby the presence/absence (in this case of Italy) exists at the same time. Categories of difference for hybridity are never fixed, and though they do interconnect, they also often blur into third spaces that are always shifting. While this dissertation explores anti-Italian and gendered discrimination, it also goes beyond these to explore the double-ness of Italian diasporic experience and Italian Canadian women's space and identity.;Through a feminist intersectional approach, this study demonstrates that films by Italian Canadian women do not merely function as "films by Italians," "films by women," or "films by Canadians." Rather they are hybrid texts that interrogate and integrate ethnicity, gender, and national space. The hybridity of the films reflects the hybridity of the artists' identities. In today's globalized world, Canada continues to struggle with questions of its own heritage of immigration inclusions and exclusions, both past and present. This research has tried to value and listen to a previously ignored, silenced, and marginalized group of Canadians. Italian Canadian women as creators of films and videos speak from and create distinct spaces where identity and culture mingle and mix in a sometimes playful yet potent choir of voices that are far from stereotypical. The imagination for both artist and spectator has become the staging ground for action and agency. Moving from exclusion to inclusion is an important step. Through the study of these film and video productions, new traces have been uncovered which illuminate further the evolving construction, negotiation, and contestation of identity and the continuing reinvention of the Canadian nation. |
