TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics by Libe García Zarranz

Abstract

Reviewed by: TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics by Libe García Zarranz Nancy Kang Libe García Zarranz. TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics. McGill-Queen's up, 2017.180 pp. $85.00. With her choice of title for this timely monograph, namely the kinetic prefix "TransCanadian," literary scholar Libe García Zarranz sparks questions: will the work detail how transgender fiction writers create space and place in Canada or interrogate how these feminist artists forge imaginative and activist ties within and across the country through migratory fictions? Neither hits the mark. The study does much more: it discusses fiction (namely novels and short-story collections), but also long poems, memoir, and in the final "coda" chapter, a poetry collection in concert with an iconic 1977 sci-fi horror film. All the analyses transpire against a breathtaking medley of cultural theory, particularly drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and a select cadre of thinkers from multiple disciplines and schools (especial material feminist theory) who scrutinize border-crossings and materialities across human, nonhuman, and more-than-human subjects. "TransCanadian" defines the three main, award-winning Canadian feminist writers under consideration: Dionne Brand, Hiromi Goto, and Emma Donoghue. All were born outside of Canada (in Trinidad and Tobago, Japan, and Ireland, respectively) and identify as lesbians. The border-crossings discerned in their work, described as "malleable, porous, [End Page 188] and viscous," far supersede the realm of the national, bringing to light corporeal, biopolitical, and affective concerns "in a time of global crises" (47, 126). Indeed, these three themes comprise the three main sections of the book, with three chapters (devoted to each of the three writers) contained within each section. As suggested above, García Zarranz's study evocatively discerns "vulnerable subjectivity and embodiment" in a time of "uneasy" and "uneven" globalization (150–2). The post–9/11 era ushered in a prolonged period of fear triggered by "the systematic reconfiguration of corporeal, biopolitical, and affective borders with long-lasting ethical repercussions" (22). Galvanized by that U.S. tragedy and the ensuing implementation of anti-terror regimes and regulating state apparatus, the text interrogates various forms of corporeality in the context of intense historical, technological, biological, and cultural flux. This backdrop is a veritable collage of catalytic experiences: the Syrian civil war and global refugee crisis; contested military action in such locations as Iraq and Afghanistan; economic crises and the worldwide Occupy movement; the Egyptian revolution of 2011, the Arab Spring, and other liberationist uprisings; ongoing territorial disputes in the Middle East and elsewhere; even the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. This last instance underscores how the ethico-political dimensions of environmental degradation are also within the democratic purview of the text. From start to finish, TransCanadian Feminist Fictions labours to critique the ethical contingencies of global transformation, what the critic cleverly terms a "cross-border ethic." Whether applied to racialized or gendered bodies, the hegemonic power of (usually European-descended) male authority prompts readers to become acutely sensitive to how "circuits of power, knowledge, and capital" give rise to "an archive of instrumentalization and biocapitalization" for so-called second-class populations, including women (78). Using generically diverse literary texts like Brand's long poem Ossuaries and memoir A Map to the Door of No Return, Donoghue's novel Room and short story collection Astray, and Goto's young adult novels The Water of Possibility, Darkest Light, and Half World, García Zarraz's slender volume (re)defines relationalities between bodies of so-called "deviant populations—that is, queer, racialized, poor, migrant"—with the goal of delineating dissident forms of agency and resistance (47). By the end of the hard-hitting monograph, the scholar compels readers to journey beyond human borderlands, envisioning the imaginative possibilities of the posthuman world through an "ethic of dissent." Doing so, she contends, reconstitutes "bodies, materialities, and spaces that [have been] rendered [End Page 189] unrepresentable according to patriarchal, racist, and other hegemonic power structures and ideologies" (142). The diverse, sometimes dizzying, arsenal of terms, paradigms, and catchphrases deployed by García Zarranz attests to the highly interdisciplinary nature of her inquiry. TransCanadian Feminist Fictions stands at the nexus of...