Queer outburst: A literary and social analysis of the Vancouver node (1995--1996) in English Canadian queer women's literature

Queer Outbursts' investigation of the Vancouver publication concentration (node) contributes to the fields of Canadian literature, queer and lesbian literature, Asian Canadian literature, and women's literature through three interwoven tasks. The first two tasks develop and combine node theory and node methodology to produce an original approach to materializing micro-histories minoritarian literatures. The third task demonstrates the nodal approach by materializing a node in Canadian queer women's writing centred in the relational geography of Vancouver in the mid-1990s.;Secondary close readings of three other node novels reveal a common ethical interest in community and difference that is expressed through a literary strategy that I have named "literary thirdspace." Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms At Night, Persimmon Blackbridge's Sunnybrook, and Daphne Marlatt's Taken each opens to a site of possible literary thirdspace that explores the qualities necessary to live difference productively within community: hybridity, instability, kindness, witnessing, safety, and radical acceptance.;The queer aesthetics of the novels under consideration are inseparable from the queer bodies and the material contexts that produce them; literary works are not discrete, static creations springing spontaneously from the mind of an inspired isolated writer. Node work reflects this understanding as it oscillates between material, social, and literary analyses and archival fieldwork. The literary and political context of the Vancouver publication node is historicized through a close reading of the 1988 conference, Telling It, which convened authors from First Nations, Asian, and Lesbian communities in the first public and explicit linking of the issues of racialization and sexuality. Social analysis of the node relies on both actor-network theory and Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of cultural production. Literary analysis is focussed on Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand as the primary representative text, and the social analysis is primarily based on the material circumstances of Fox's production and distribution. Close reading of Lai's novel demonstrates how the political concerns of the enabling communities are taken up literarily. It also demonstrates an inter-nodal connection, through Lai's literary strategies that engage the work of Nicole Brossard, which represents another node of Canadian queer women's writing circa 1980 and centred in Montreal.