Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

Armstrong, Pat

Armstrong, Hugh

Daly, Tamara

The Thin Blue Line: Long Term Care as an Indicator of Equity in Welfare States

Musial, Jennifer

VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 183
reappears in battles for social power, 
whether falling within the dialectics 
of anti-colonial against western colo-
nialism or outside of these particular 
power relations. 
Bannerji’s second essay turns to 
the events that unfolded on the 
28th of February, 2002, wherein 
Hindu fundamentalists in political 
and social power in the Indian state 
of Gujarat committed genocide and 
ethnic cleansing against Muslims 
living in the state. It is here that she 
turns to the ways that women, upon 
whose bodies the capacity to physi-
cally reproduce the nation state has 
literally been inscribed, remain the 
central targets in projects of nation 
building and national ‘preservation’. 
The “demographic thrust” of ethnic 
nationalisms relies on the physical 
presence of bodies, actively recon-
stituting the language of ‘majority’ 
and ‘minority’ in corporeal terms. 
The project of population control, 
located in the bodies of women and 
children, is a fundamental compo-
nent of ethnic nationalisms; from 
the struggles in Israel and Palestine, 
to Nazi Germany, and settlement 
projects in the United States and 
Canada, “the general and particular 
nature of the phenomenon of geno-
cide [demonstrates] how in different 
cultural and historical environments 
genocide/ethnocide or ethnic cleans-
ing takes on a particular ideological 
and symbolic constitution.”
In “Cultural Nationalism and 
Woman as the Subject of the Nation,” 
Bannerji asks “who is entitled by social 
relations and location to accord …
recognition,” and as significantly, 
what is being recognized within this 
framing? It is here that Bannerji ex-
plores the dynamic creative processes 
of building hegemony whereby the 
plurality of categories, modalities of 
knowing and experiences are reduced 
to the singular. For example, she dis-
cusses the manufacturing of symbols 
within colonial and liberationist 
projects that reproduce ‘tradition’ 
and ‘modernity’ in the singular as 
distinct homogenized entities. In 
fact, these categories are multifac-
eted, plural, and contradictory. It is 
BABIES WITHOUT 
BORDERS: ADOPTION 
AND MIGRATION 
ACROSS THE AMERICAS 
Karen Dubinsky
Toronto: University of Toronto 
Press, 2010
reviewed by jennifer 
musial
this understanding of the plurality 
of all categories and the potential 
multiplicity of all linguistic concepts 
which saturate the rest of her essays. 
While concepts become ideolog-
ical in the very processes of articu-
lation, it is important to recognize 
how concepts and categories are 
epistemologically deployed in order 
to uncover their potentially inherent 
ideological underpinnings. Bannerji 
eloquently explains: 
Common nouns which are 
marked by the possibility of 
their boundless generality tend 
to lend themselves to ideological 
usage, and more readily so than 
others which signal plurality and 
specificity. Notions such as “na-
tion,” “tradition,” “modernity,” 
“mother tongue,” and religions 
interpreted in terms of essences, 
provide us with ideologies. The 
politics of hindutva (hinduness), 
Zionism, Islam or Christianity 
could readily help us to perform 
ideology and typically help to 
accomplish the praxis of power. 
They can do so because they 
can be rendered into singular 
notions based on generality that 
can occlude lived spaces, times 
and practices of living subjects 
and agents. Similarly generalities 
such as “civilization,” “culture,” 
“science,” “freedom,” or  “de-
mocracy” can do the same.
As she explores in her final chapter, 
there has been an overwhelming 
tendency within western European 
thought to anchor scholarly work 
in generalizations characterized by 
‘essences’. Locating her discussion in 
the tradition of sociology, Bannerji 
demonstrates how the making of the 
‘scholar’ depends on an intimate rela-
tionship between the administrative 
structure of the colonial governments 
and various everyday social contexts. 
Throughout her collection, Bannerji 
presents her reader with a central 
concern that must be attended to: 
what disappears in the processes 
of making and writing categories? 
Practices of employing universal 
categories distort lived social histo-
ry as they are more committed to 
preserving power hierarchies and 
common sense ideologies rather than 
delving into the substance of every-
day living conditions. As Bannerji 
reminds us, “the project of hegemo-
ny always remains incomplete and 
in an ever annexing mode, [seeks] 
to incorporate and neutralize the 
constantly emergent imaginaries of 
the nation’s ‘others’.” For this reason, 
and in recognizing the “colonizing 
modalities of knowledge,” she urges 
her reader to take the first step in a 
decolonizing pedagogy and praxis by 
interrogating their own place within 
systems of knowledge and knowing. 
In such a way, the reader must never 
forget to “read between the lines.” 
Kathryn Travis is a second-year Ph.D. 
student in the Gender, Feminist, and 
Women’s Studies program at York Uni-
versity. Her work examines place and 
identity constructed through various 
textual, visual, and auditory mediums, 
situated within the context of the Paris 
banlieues.
Long before interracial and transna-
tional adoptions became a popular 
culture phenomenon, my white 
parents fostered and later adopted my 
black sister. Like Dubinsky, a queer 
white woman with a Guatemalan 
child, I feel simultaneously blessed 
to have a wonderful sister and critical 
of the conditions of child removal 
and state-sponsored adoption that 
led to her placement with my family. 
CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME184
region in Cuba would illuminate the 
patterns of migration even further. 
The tensions of racialization, 
ethnicity, socio-economic class, and 
region are taken up in Dubinsky’s 
next chapter on “the hybrid baby.” 
Here, Dubinsky examines discourses 
of anti-racist parenting, colour-blind 
liberalism, and colonialism in Ca-
nadian interracial adoption. The 
chapter compares Montreal’s Open 
Door Society, an organization of 
anti-racist white parents who adopted 
black children, to the removal of ab-
original children from their homes, 
and placement within white families. 
Dubinsky’s important contribution 
here is to point out that anti-racist 
parenting of black children was held 
up to demonstrate a progressive Ca-
nadian nation, while the adoption of 
aboriginal children by white families 
represents a national shame that has 
never been adequately addressed. 
Dubinsky could do more to draw out 
the nuances of adoption demography, 
which is buried in the final pages of 
the chapter, but it is a solid comple-
ment to a book that otherwise focuses 
on transnational adoption.
In her final chapter on “the missing 
baby,” Dubinsky once again returns 
to the movement of children across 
national borders. Dubinsky outlines 
what she calls a culture of child “miss-
ingness” as a legacy of civil war. Since 
children went missing through death, 
displacement, and disappearance, it 
is not surprising that Guatemalans 
are suspicious of transnational adop-
tion. Dubinsky closes the chapter by 
arguing that the traumas of war on 
family structure are not yet known 
in Guatemala. However, the Guate-
malan adoptee who sends remittances 
back to his/her/hir birth families and 
the proud Guatemalan birth mother 
who shows off photographs of her 
more-affluent child, complicate the 
kidnap/rescue binary as it seems 
neither wholly “good” nor wholly 
“bad,” but something a bit murkier. 
Dubinsky draws on an array of 
research materials including film, 
interviews, archives, adoption case 
files, and public monuments. Her 
book represents a fascinating look 
Dubinsky shows that these feelings 
are not incommensurate. Despite, or 
possibly due to, her personal invest-
ment in the topic, Dubinsky offers 
a well-crafted, thoughtfully argued 
and researched text on interracial and 
transnational adoption that moves 
beyond the kidnap/rescue binary 
to look at the symbolic nature of 
children.
Dubinsky’s objective is to make 
adoption more complex than kid-
nap or rescue discourses provide. 
Dubinsky says adoptive parents are 
neither imperial kidnappers who 
steal children from the Global South 
nor are they benevolent providers 
of a “better life” for children. These 
tropes do not reflect the reality of 
adoption, which involves personal 
agency, complicated relationships, 
community dynamics, militarist pol-
itics, shifts in immigration law, and 
nation-building strategies that allow 
for the circulation of children from a 
family of origin to an adopting family. 
Her unique contribution, then, is 
to draw out the nuances of gender, 
racialization, family, militarism, and 
nation in her look at adoption by Ca-
nadian and U.S. American parents.
To achieve this, Dubinsky uses 
three symbolic children as chapter 
tropes: the national baby, the hy-
brid baby, and the missing baby. In 
her chapter on “the national baby,” 
Dubinsky discusses the migration of 
Cuban children to the Global North 
in an effort to escape nationalist, 
pro-Castro brainwashing. Prospec-
tive U.S. American parents saw 
themselves as benevolent Christians 
and anti-communists by taking in 
Cuban children. Dubinsky hints to-
wards the interconnections between 
racialization, ethnicity, religion, and 
class in these discursive renderings of 
adoption, but this could be developed 
further. For instance, Dubinsky 
notes that anti-Castro, U.S. created 
propaganda worked primarily on 
middle-class Spanish-Cuban families 
who, in part, feared relocation of their 
children to the countryside populated 
by poor African-Cuban families. 
Therefore, a brief look at racism, 
religion, socio-economic class, and 
GIVING BREASTMILK: 
BODY ETHICS AND 
CONTEMPORARY 
BREASTFEEDING 
PRACTICE 
Rhonda Shaw and Alison Bartlett, 
Eds.
Toronto: Demeter Press, 2010
reviewed by 
carolina crewe
Shaw and Bartlett’s groundbreaking 
compilation adds significant depth to 
contemporary debates sur-rounding 
the characterization of breastfeeding 
and breastmilk as a gift. Shaw and 
Bartlett present breastfeeding as a 
at families and nationalism vis-à-vis 
pronatalism, racialization, milita-
rism, and colonialism. It would be 
a fantastic read in family studies, 
women’s studies, history, sociology, 
children’s studies, or cultural studies 
courses. Beyond wanting more detail 
about the intersections of racializa-
tion, ethnicity, class, and religion, 
part of Dubinsky’s own narrative is 
missing. Queer parents who adopt 
across racial and national lines are 
absent. I suspect this is partially 
due to the timeline of the book, 
but it would be interesting to hear 
more about the migration of queer 
parents to the Global South for the 
purposes of transnational adoption. 
This analysis would serve to enrich 
an already terrific text.
Jennifer Musial completed her Ph.D. 
in Women’s Studies at York University. 
She currently teaches gender studies 
courses at Trent University and Queen’s 
University. Jennifer is working on two 
projects: the first looks at the construc-
tion of fetal citizenship via the “Partial 
Birth” Abortion Ban Act and the 
Unborn Victims of Violence Act in 
the United States, and the second ex-
amines the backlash against Nadya 
Suleman, the “Octomon.”


Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas

McPhail, Deborah

Mennonite Women in Canada: A History

Csamer, M.E.

Rosary

Lamarche, Lucie

Comprendre le présent et imaginer le futur : Un projet féministe en mouvement

Weston, Joanna M.

VOLUME 29, NUMBER 3 181
MARGO SWISS
Maternal Eros
For Jonathan
Before you entered the world
God knew you perfectly;
you were to Him
as though his only one.
Yet loving 
(in His way) unjealously,
He gave you to me
to harbour wholly
unseen.
Bathed in dark,
you grew, in time to pursue
your gallant path to light:
infant, boy, adolescent and
before me now—
        a man
        standing fast
        in God’s footsteps.
           I faint for
        love of
        you!
Margo Swiss’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.
JOANNA M. WESTON 
Looking Forward
this new language
foreign to childhood
teen years   twenties
The language of aging
I have been young
been at play   at work
raised children   farmed
no need to struggle
with the angst of youth
as I accommodate myself
to the vocabulary 
of memory
Joanna Weston’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.
Inanna Publications
Fall 2012
Smart books for people who want to read 
and think about real women’s lives.
www.inanna.ca
inanna.publications@inanna.ca


English

Looking Forward

McKeen, Wendy

Seen But Not Heard: The Construction of “Welfare Mothers” in Canada’s late 1960s/early 1970s “War On Poverty”

Arat-Koç, Sedef

Invisibilized, Individualized, and Culturalized: Paradoxical Invisibility and Hyper-Visibility of Gender in Policy Making and Policy Discourse in Neoliberal Canada

Gaytle, Nadesha

Black Women’s Experiences of Spirituality as a Form of Resistance and Activism

Martonfi, Ilona

96 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
ILONA MARTONFI
The Bus On Jarry Street
“To make the wedding arrangements.”
An argument erupted:
“Leave!” father shouted.
2. 
By bus, I rode across town:
went to my fiancé’s apartment and knocked.
“You didn’t warn me!” he raged.
Left me standing in the stairway. Shut the door.
I waited for the bus on Jarry Street:
I tried to remind myself, tomorrow morning,
I would be sitting at my desk at Bell Telephone.
Wear two girdles to hide my stomach.
Tally figures on an electric adding machine.
Lime-green chrome kitchen table. Unmatched 
chairs.
Flat brown scavengers. Cockroaches scurrying
across the linoleum. Mother set the alarm for 
seven.
Head shrunk tight with rows of bristle rollers.
Saffron tulle kerchief. Cranberry-red lipstick. 
I scooped one teaspoon of dried coffee granules:
poured boiling water. Added two lumps of sugar.
Ilona Martonfi’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.
1.
Stone walls used as wild gardens:
roses, wisteria, fuchsia clematis.
Purple crabapple laden with fruit.
The first Sunday of July,
it was round five-o’clock,
I waited for the bus on Jarry Street:
A girl in blue t-shirt, white skirt.
Short cropped hair. The year was 1965.
Miron Quarry smokestacks. 
Factory sheds. Barbed wire fence.
Field of dandelion snow.
I waited for the bus on Jarry Street.
 
When apart, we had sent each other letters.
April, I became pregnant.
The weight gain, the sore breasts, the lethargy.
Sleeping in a room I shared with my sister.
My parents’ crowded six-room cold flat:
Metal spiral staircase. Gray-painted balconies.
View over the Jean Talon Market.
Copper steeple of the Madonna Della Difesa 
church.
Today at noon, my fidanzato came to speak to 
father:
Flying Under Water 
Poems New and Selected
by Eva Tihanyi 
Anne Michaels calls Eva Tihanyi’s poetry “moving and powerful.” Susan Musgrave calls it 
“very accomplished, beautifully crafted.” Now, almost 30 years after her first book was pub-
lished in 1983 comes Tihanyi’s latest collection, Flying Under Water: Poems New and Select-
ed, which brings together the best of her previous six volumes plus a group of new poems. 
www.inanna.ca
inanna.publications@inanna.ca
fall 2012                                        inanna publications


The Bus on Jarry Street

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