Body, Power, Desire: Mapping Canadian Body History

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2007 by Helps, Lisa

Taking into consideration the theoretical literature on the body generated in various disciplines and recent approaches to the body in Canadian historical writing, this essay argues that attention to the power of the body as defined by Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Gilles Deleuze can offer new possibilities for historical praxis. An exploration of works on women's bodies and medicine, children's bodies, the bodies of First Nations peoples, and the treatment of dead bodies, as well as a discussion of the author's work on vagrancy, homelessness, and city building on Canada's west coast, demonstrates that doing history through the body does not simply mean doing body history. Conceiving the body as a site of historical investigation can flesh out and shed new light on many seemingly disembodied historical processes, such as relationships between children and parents, colonization, community development, and city building.

En tenant compte de la littérature théorique sur le corps provenant de plusieurs disciplines ainsi que des perceptions récentes du corps dans les récits historiques canadiens, le présent article avance que l'attention mise sur le pouvoir du corps, tel que défini par Spinoza, Nietzsche et Gilles Deleuze, peut offrir de nouvelles possibilités en matière de praxie historique. Une étude des oeuvres sur le corps des femmes et la médecine, le corps des enfants, le corps des membres des Premières nations et le traitement des cadavres ainsi qu'une discussion de l'oeuvre de l'auteure sur le vagabondage, le sans-abrisme et la construction urbaine sur la côte ouest du Canada démontrent qu'étudier l'histoire en mettant l'accent sur le corps ne signifie pas étudier l'histoire du corps. En utilisant le corps comme un lieu d'enquête historique, il est possible d'expliquer et de détailler plusieurs processus historiques qui semblent sans contexte, comme les rapports entre les enfants et les parents, la colonisation, le développement communautaire et la construction urbaine.

In 1995, Caroline Bynum published an article in Critical Inquiry entitled, "Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective." We can see Bynum's 1995 intervention both as a rear-view mirror and as a crystal ball. It is difficult to cite a cause or beginning point for "all the fuss." The feminist struggle of the 1960s and 1970s for legal access to abortion and women's control over their own bodies brought the body, reproduction, and life itself irreversibly into the domain of public scrutiny and debate. In this same period, people of colour fought for the inclusion of their bodies into exclusionary spaces, and lesbians and gay men battled to protect both their bodies and their sexual practices from the reach of the state. In the academy in 1984, sociologist Bryan Turner called for "renewed attention to the body" in The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, which provoked a range of responses and a ripple effect in the humanities and social sciences (Fraser and Greco 2005, 1). The translation into English of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality provided scholars with new ways of thinking about how bodies are made and how they are made productive. Taken together, these and other factors contributed to the increasing prominence of the body as a site of scholarly inquiry, creating, by 1995, a fuss indeed. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a proliferation of publications and conference presentations on the body, so much so that it is possible to assert that the humanities and social sciences have taken a corporeal turn.1 My interest, as a Canadian historian immersed in the theoretical and historical literatures dealing with the body, is how Canadian historians have approached the body, and, more specifically, the degree to which they have been engaged in and influenced by the recent turn to the body. I also want to consider how theoretical insights generated outside the discipline of history can offer a useful way into body history. A focus on the body, I argue, can allow historians to ask new questions of their sources and subjects; or, put another way, bodies can offer new ways into seemingly old problems.

Some historians might argue that there is nothing new about studying the body. Since the emergence of the "new" social history in the 1970s, the body has indeed surfaced, to varying degrees, in histories of medicine, sexuality, gender, children, violence, sports, immigration, labour, religion, war, and colonialism. Such efforts of historians have led, in a sense, to a corporealizing of Canadian history, a recovering of a vast array of bodies: female bodies in early-nineteenth-century Montreal censured for cross-dressing and loitering in the streets and green spaces (Poutanen 2002; see also Valverde 1991; Strange 1995; Iacovetta 1999); turn-of-the-twentieth-century male bodies connecting through holes in lavatory walls (Maynard 1994; see also Kinsman 1996); children's bodies in negotiation with their parents (Gleason 1999; see also Barman 2004; Bates 1985); women's bodies violated and abused (Lepp 2007; Walker 2004; Dubinsky 1993); male bodies in the boxing ring (Wamsley and Whitson 1998), on the lacrosse field (Bouchier 1994), and engaged in dueling matches (Morgan 1995); increasingly robust bodies of turn-of-the-twentieth-century female athletes (Smith 1988; see also Lenskyj 1986; Vertinsky 1900);2 "dangerous" bodies of "foreign men" during the Cold War (lacovetta 2000); labouring bodies and bodies as machines (Forestall 2005; Comacchio 1998; Steedman 1997; Iacovetta 1992; Radforth 1987); bodies healed by faith (Opp 2002; Jasen 1998); bodies of soldiers suffering from battle exhaustion (Duffin 1996; Copp and McAndrew 1990); and First Nations bodies colonized (Kelm 2001; Lux 2001; Carter 1999; Van Kirk 1980).