Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Before Showtime, Amy Kaler

The Goose

In this piece of creative nonfiction, I reflect on the experience of having time on my hands in peri-urban spaces that are characterized by transience, liminality, and contingency, while waiting for performance time at youth cheerleading competitions. I describe walking around these places, specifically Las Vegas and Abbotsford (BC). I connect my experience to other accounts of aimless wandering, such as the "derive" of psychogeography, and note the ways in which the exercises of power and potential world-ending catastrophe are present, but latent, in these landscapes. In particular, I consider the historic cold-war threat of a nuclear bomb as well …

“This Is A Book About Relations”: Pollution Is Colonialism By Max Liboiron, Thomas Letcher-Nicholls

The Goose

Book Review of Pollution is Colonialism (2021) by Max Liboiron.

Falling Into Action, Kent Hoffman

The Goose

Kent Hoffman explores human movement, his own mobility, and how it influences the way he moves on land. This personal essay, told through the lens of disability and accessibility, outlines his experience of living with Becker muscular dystrophy. Hoffman's approach to walking and mobility is heavily influenced by a fear of falling. As his mobility is changing, he's adapting and seeking out new ways to move on land. Different modes of mobility determine the way we experience personal movement, but accessibility determines who is welcome in spaces in the first place. Accessibility in the form of providing equal access is …

When A Saunter Starts To Taunt Her: Exploring The Outdoors With Disabilities, Jessica Cory

The Goose

This first-person creative nonfiction piece examines engaging with the outdoors, primarily through walking and hiking, while struggling with diagnoses of Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos (hEDS) and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS). The author also considers how growing up with a parent whose disabilities made it more difficult to enjoy hikes impacted her own perception of the ableism inherent in the design, architecture, and infrastructure of many state and local parks. The author discusses the importance and struggle of teaching environmental literature through the lens of Disability Studies and advocates both for visibility as well as concrete changes to make hiking and sauntering …

The Middle Of The Middle: Purgatory, Pilgrimage, And Human And Plant Mobility In A Time Of Climate Crisis, Stephen S. Collis

The Goose

This paper, adapted from a talk given for the Institute of the Humanities at Simon Fraser University on April 26 2023, explores intersecting issues taken up by an in-progress long poem I am currently writing. That long poem, “The Middle,” explores questions of climate displacement, migration, and refuge via a writing-though of Dante’s Purgatorio—itself a poem of pilgrimage. A further context for both the poem and the paper about the poem is an ongoing project of walking in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, and immigration detainees that the author has been involved with since 2015. In seeking to “override …

Inclement, Susan Wismer

The Goose

"Inclement," by Susan Wismer, is from Hageography:

Hagios, a Greek word for holy.

Hag, an old woman. Hag, an overhang at the edge of a cliff

Rough notes. Foot notes. Choreographies of happenstance.

Long Before Gps, Leanne Shirtliffe

The Goose

Poetry by Leanne Shirtlife.

I Am Still Your Negro: An Homage To James Baldwin By Valerie Mason-John, Gillian Harding-Russell

The Goose

Review of Valerie Mason-John's I Am Still Your Negro: An Homage to James Baldwin

Faire Comme Les Castors : Un Idéal D’Organisation Du Travail En Nouvelle-France Dans Les Écrits De Nicolas Denys, Éric Debacq

The Goose

Nicolas Denys (1603?-1688), commerçant français, publie en 1672 deux livres, la Description geographique et historique des costes de l’Amerique septentrionale et l’Histoire naturelle des peuples, des animaux, des arbres & plantes de l’Amerique septentrionale & de ses divers climats. Dans ces livres, il témoigne de ses tentatives de colonisation en Acadie pendant près de quarante ans et énumère les possibilités économiques de ce territoire, notamment liées à la pêche à la morue. Denys, dans cette œuvre, fait aussi l’éloge du castor, qu’il compare à l’homme. Ceci est à double tranchant : l’animal, dont on célèbre l’intelligence, devient alors …

For The Wild: Ritual And Commitment In Radical Eco-Activism By Sarah M. Pike, Alda Balthrop-Lewis

The Goose

Review of Sarah M. Pike's For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism

The Weather, Rob B. Budde

The Goose

Poetry by Rob Budde.

Ecological Crisis, Or “Intersex Panic,” As Answer Of The Real?, Stephanie Hsu

The Goose

Drawing upon Cal’s eventual metamorphosis into “The [white] Man” in Middlesex, and an examination of the Real of ecological crisis, Hsu explores the intersection of environmental racism, climate change denial, and intersex discrimination in order to advocate for a renewed awareness of ecological interdependency and the need for self-determination of people of colour in ecological and environmental justice discourses.

Trans-Pacific Imaginaries And Queer Intimacies In The Ruins Of Middlesex, Dai Kojima

The Goose

Taking up Roland Barthes’s concept of the “third meaning,” Kojima analyzes the character of Julie Kikuchi, the Japanese American love interest of the grown-up Cal. Taking Julie seriously as a character beyond mere plot contrivance and cultural reference, Kojima invites us to consider the intertwined histories of economic rise and fall, trans-Pacific wars, and other intimacies that Middlesex remains entangled in yet fails to fully acknowledge.

“This Is The Way I Was”: Urban Ethics, Temporal Logics, And The Politics Of Cure, David R. Anderson

The Goose

This article employs Eli Clare's concept of the "politics of cure" in order to discuss issues of disability, temporality, and ethical relations to rehabilitation, restoration, and cure in the Sex and the (Motor) City: Ecologies of Middlesex special cluster.

Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini

The Goose

Citing the pronounced lack of academic engagement with Middlesex since its publication and riffing on the novel’s recounting of the demise of the auto industry in Detroit, Mazzolini examines how cycles of obsolescence and currency work within academic discourse and ultimately advocates for the novel’s potential for examining the material and affective nature of relevance itself.

On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard

The Goose

Blanchard argues for an intimate attention to the ruin in Middlesex and Detroit as a means of exploring the geo-bio-politics of decay as a problem of our socio-ecological present.

From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo

The Goose

Alaimo critiques the “rusty” understanding of genetics, gender, and sex in Middlesex, advocating instead for queer ecological futurism.

Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity.

Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber

The Goose

Kerber traces the ways in which water liberates and transforms various characters in Middlesex in order to critique and complicate water’s taken-for-granted liberatory powers. Kerber invites us to consider the majority of those for whom water is as deadly as it is (possibly) emancipating, especially those most vulnerable to climate change and other ecological and violent upheavals.

Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh

The Goose

Singh draws our attention to the “mute objects” of Middlesex, particularly The Obscure Object’s silent Black maid, Beulah, who quietly supports the unfolding romance between Cal and The Object. Through careful attention to histories of people silenced by slavery, dehumanization, and violence, Singh demands that we consider where and through what means some get to be fully human while others are made and sustained as objects for their comfort and play.

Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins

The Goose

Collins approaches the ethical nuances of Cal’s intersex narrative in Middlesex, drawing comparisons with current debates in North Carolina concerning gender-normative bathroom use and trans rights, in order to advocate for more ethical practices of relation and responsibility outside of mere knowledge creation and policy.

Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour

The Goose

Highlighting the architecture of the Middlesex house of Eugenides’ novel as a major technology of modernity, Seymour argues for the biopolitical understanding of such modernist architecture and for the ways in which it often works against the exploitative effects of automation and sexology, yet constitutes a complex and even contradictory force in processes of modernization, and in the novel itself.

Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and …

Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu

The Goose

Breu critiques the limits of the intersex narrative of Middlesex and advocates for a non-reductive, materialist, and “muddled” approach to understanding sex and gender.

A Field Guide For Weathering: Embodied Tactics For Collectives Of Two Or More Humans, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Astrida Neimanis

The Goose

In our inherited meteorological practices and frameworks, weather conditions are managed for us in a range of ways (for example, through architecture, technology, commodity culture, infrastructure, economic rationale). This field guide brings the weather back to the body. A traditional field guide provides tools for the individual sovereign human subject to observe and document nature “over there”. In contrast, through a range of different activities, our field guide not only invites investigation and cataloguing of the field that we also comprise, but also challenges what counts as a noteworthy observation regarding the weather and also climate.

Returning The Radiant Gaze: Visual Art And Embodiment In A World Of Subjects, Beth Carruthers

The Goose

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no …

Sea Squad, Liam Geary Baulch

The Goose

The Sea Squad is a band of cheerleaders against climate change. Taking action as a team in formation, they gather momentum, inviting all people to cheer with them, mimicking the infinitely expandable nature of the seas' molecular structure. The work was developed and performed as a bilingual project at Est-Nord-Est in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec, Canada, and has since been performed and exhibited internationally. The following poems are some of the chants that Sea Squad use to get a crowd cheering together against climate change.

Poems From The Arctic Circle, Diana Woodcock

The Goose

Poetry by Diana Woodcock.

Four Poems, Tanis Macdonald

The Goose

Poetry by Tanis MacDonald.

Yardwork: A Biography Of An Urban Place By Daniel Coleman, Vivian M. Hansen

The Goose

Review of Daniel Coleman's Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place.