Cautiously Hopeful
Metafeminist Practices in Canada
Exploring writing by women and feminism's complicated genealogies and future-oriented commitments.
Description
If feminism has always been characterized by its divisions, it is metafeminism, a term coined by Lori Saint-Martin, that defines and embraces that disorder. As a carefully devised reading practice, metafeminism understands contemporary feminist literature and theory as both recalling and extending the tropes and politics of the past. In Cautiously Hopeful Marie Carrière brings together seemingly disparate writing by Anglo-Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois women authors under the banner of metafeminism.
Familiarizing readers with major streams of feminist thought, including intersectionality, affect theory, and care ethics, Carrière shows how literary works by such authors as Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Naomi Fontaine, Larissa Lai, Tracey Lindberg, and Rachel Zolf, among others, tackle the entanglement of gender with race, settler-invader colonialism, heteronormativity, positionality, language, and the posthuman condition. Meanwhile tenable alliances among Indigenous women, women of colour, and settler feminist practitioners emerge. Carrière's tone is personal and accessible throughout - in itself a metafeminist gesture that both encompasses and surpasses a familiar feminist form of writing.
Despite the growing anti-feminist backlash across media platforms and in various spheres of political and social life, a hopefulness animates this timely work that, like metafeminism, stands alert to the challenges that feminism faces in its capacity to effect social change in the twenty-first century.
Reviews
"Cautiously Hopeful is a genuine pleasure to read and offers an original and timely contribution to feminist literary scholarship in Canada. Carriere moves deftly between Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois texts with sensitivity and awareness, demonstrating her nuanced understanding and expertise." Heather Milne, University of Winnipeg and author of Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics