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The Super Unknown: Canadian Women’s Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Circulation of White Feminist Politics, 1896–1941
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- Author / Creator
- Kosman, Marcelle
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This thesis examines the early tradition of Canadian women’s genre fiction, with a specific focus on six fantastical and science fictional texts published between 1896 and 1941. Heretofore, this tradition of early Canadian women’s genre fiction has been unrecognized as a field in and of itself, and with this thesis I aim to open the field to further study. Tracing these genres from what I call Canadian women’s “proto-sf” to weird fiction to what readers today would easily recognize as science fiction, this dissertation provides a partial genealogy of Canadian women’s imaginative literature as well as a material history of the absence of women’s sf (encompassing science fiction, weird fiction, and fantasy) from the English Canadian literary canon.
Throughout this dissertation I use a methodology that I call “paranoid archive.” I conduct symptomatic readings of all six of my primary texts and a wide variety of documents and ephemera, including historical newspapers, dozens of Canadian and American pulp magazines, and government documents like House of Commons Debates, Bills, and Acts, to piece together the scattered publishing conditions and sociopolitical contexts in which these texts were produced. I use an historical materialist approach to show that the erasure of pulp magazines from both the cultural landscape and cultural memory was a desired outcome—not merely an incidental side effect—of the manufacturing of middle-class anglophone Canadian culture. Moreover, I show how the collapse of Canada’s fleeting pulp magazine industry was the logical progression of the very social purity rhetoric that shaped Canadian women’s fantastical genre writing from its outset.
Unlike the anti-racist, intersectional feminism inspiring much contemporary women’s sf, the early texts that make up the core of my study and analysis all share an ideological commitment to racial and social purity. I demonstrate how this white supremacist ideology underwrites the texts’ feminist and nationalist politics and argue that these writers deployed fantastical and scientific imagery to advocate for white women’s racial and sexual management of the state. This same ideology is found in the racialized rhetoric used by Canada’s mid-century members of parliament to condemn and criminalize pulp magazine production, circulation, and consumption. I therefore maintain that English Canadian literature’s dearth of women’s sf is the consequence of the very ideological commitments circulated by the genre’s earliest Canadian women writers. -
- Graduation date
- Fall 2020
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.