Wither Canada? PQ Election 2012...

I heard an excellent interview on CBC with a senior person in the Parti Québécois (the PQ) while I was driving this morning about whether they are still planning a sovereigntist agenda (for my non-Canadian friends, that means forming a country out of the province of Québec and destroying Canada). The answer is a resounding yes, whether a referendum is likely to be held or not, that remains their goal. In the interview, he confirmed many of the things I was thinking. Specifically that the PQ feels it came back from the grave specifically because the federal government (the "Harper government" in specific was mentioned several times) has run roughshod over the legitimate concerns and aspirations of Québecers. Most recently, Harper stated publically that the PQ, with their minority government, had no mandate from the people of Québec to pursue a seperatist agenda, that they should just shut up about it, and would not be "permitted" to rock the boat (the interview on the CBC with the PQ MLA [elected representative to the assembly in Québec] was partly a response to Harper's statements). But the PQ representative was very clear that not only was Harper incorrect, but that his statements continued the pattern of outright disrespect and disregard for the people of Québec that Harper's government has pursued. Harper's specific words: "that’s how the government in Quebec will be forced to interpret it one way or the other". Not the words of a statesman, more the words of a bully looking to pick a fight with someone finally standing up for themselves... and maybe not such a good plan because Québec has considerable economic and political resources (globally as well as in Canada), and a public that is much more activist than the rest of Canada.

The problem is that Québec has repeatedly come to the table asking for very reasonable things, but they have been deliberately ignored, often in the most humiliating of ways, every time (again, I'm convinced it's a big reason why the PQ got elected). For instance, Harper's government is scrapping the billion dollar Canadian Gun Registry; Québec asked to assume financial and administrative ownership of the portion of the gun registry in Québec (all parties in Québec agree on this, fyi, separatist or not, because it aligns with the values of the people of Québec). Harper has refused and has stated that all the data will be destroyed one way or the other. Québec expressed extreme distress at Harper pulling Canada out of the Kyoto Accord, and his effectively eviscerating environmental regulations in Canada (including giving his office the ability to approve any project without an environmental review at all), but were ignored. The environment is a critical area of concern for the people of Québec and their government was representing them. The federal government informed them that their opinion didn't count. And the other major issue raised was the Harper Conservatives' "Young Offender Act" (along with building a billion dollars worth of new penitentiaries) that moved Canada toward an incarceration style justice system (which even Texas lawmakers have publically indicated to Harper was a horrific failure there). Québec vehemently disagrees with that binary approach to the administration of justice. Again, they were utterly ignored. With Harper's latest comments, there is no reason to expect anything but further beligerence towards the government and people of Québec, and while the PQ don't really have a chance of introducing a referendum to separate during their term as a minority government, you can bet they are going to make sure the people of Québec know how badly their values and society fit within Harper's vision of Canada, and going back to the polls in a few years looking for a majority mandate to pursue separatism through a vote is looking pretty realistic at the moment.

If you're particularly interested in listening to one of the architects-in-waiting of the breakup of Canada (he makes a very convincing case, btw, rationally but with conviction and plausible evidence), the article begins at the 14:24 mark. The interviewee starts talking at 18:20 or so. And one last thing, on the subject of a referendum, a decision was handed down by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1998 that so long as Québec's government asked its population a clear question of secession, and the people voted with a "strong majority" in a referendum (it was unclear on what this means), that Québec could act unilaterality to remove itself from confederation. Specifically, should a referendum decide in favour of independence, the rest of Canada "would have no basis to deny the right of the government of Quebec to pursue secession".

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/thehouse_20120908_47079.mp3

I should mention that there was another major thing that toppled the previous government in Québec and allowed the PQ to be elected: the student uprising during the spring. Basically, the students there were furious that their tuition was going to be hugely increased. They weren't specifically concerned about the increase itself, but rather the reasons behind the increase: that the previous generations had plundered the considerable financial wealth of the province and pocketed the money for themselves, leaving nothing to the next generation in Québec who were then being forced (by the previous generation that controlled the government and much of the wealth) to pick up the tab for them. On top of it, the same sort of belt-tightening wasn't being imposed on those that had done the plundering (and were therefore continuing to plunder). It resulted in months of riots and protests. When the previous government implemented "Bill 78" to essentially prohibit organized protests, and effectively impose a curfew (not officially, but effectively), huge swaths of the the non-student population in Québec began a civil protest movement where they would go out and night, against the law, and bang pots and pans (there were even protests in other parts on Canada in support of the movement in Québec). So it was between the terrible relationship that Québec has had with the current neo-con federal government and the previous Québec government's attempt to clamp down on civil liberties, that revitalized the separatist movement and placed the current government tentatively (with a minority) in power.

The first act of the PQ (literally announced the day after the elections) will be to repeal both the tuition hikes and the law based on "Bill 78". They know what side of the bread their butter is on...

Postmodern Gothic In High and Low Places

As I said earlier, I got my final mark for the feminism seminar course I took over the summer ("The Monstrous Feminist: Gender and the Horrific in Popular Culture"): an A (yay!). Since the mark is posted I can post my essay now. We could choose any work in the horror genre (book, film, poem, etc.) and had to examine it "using the critical analysis tools presented in the class". I was overwhelmed over August with family issues and wasn't able to start on it until the last minute, and then I couldn't make up my mind whether to do it on Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant and horrifying tale "Bianca's Hands", or on the braindamaged but slightly charming gonzo book "The Haunted Vagina" by Carlton Mellick III (there are multiple videos of people reading the book on YouTube if you care to listen to it). I sent my choices in to the prof asking for guidance, and she came back and suggested that I do both. I struggled with how to pull it off given how different the stories are. Eventually, I read them both again a couple of times and saw that there were, indeed, sufficient similarity and difference, wrote the first couple of paragraphs, and the rest came together from there.

Postmodern Gothic In High and Low Places
The genre of horror can be studied in many ways. No matter the route such explorations take, most analyses of horror ultimately use it as a tool to help place the culture that generated the work into a sociological and psychological historic context – as a means of looking from the documented visible outside to the hidden or repressed internal subtexts of the day. Contemporary horror stories are less reliant on the obvious monsters that dominated into the 1960s and take a decidedly postmodern approach in pulling the dark inner dialogue of our society’s fears before the gaze of popular culture. While much of the structure and technique developed through over more than a century of Gothic horror remains intact as a backdrop for postmodern examinations of society, the subject matter and the focus has changed radically. Judith Halberstam states “Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century specifically used the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality” whereas “monstrosity within contemporary horror seems to have stabilized into an amalgam of sex and gender” (6) that may not even be externally visible as monstrous.

Two postmodern horror stories will be compared and contrasted for their representation of sex and gender within a gothic framework. The first was well ahead of its time, the 1947 short story “Bianca’s Hands” by one of the great masters of twentieth century speculative fiction, Theodore Sturgeon. The second is the novella “The Haunted Vagina” by bizarro fiction writer Carlton Mellick III, originally published in 2006. Both are also love stories in their own way and share numerous gothic story elements, but while the former was at the forefront of the postmodernist movement, it is considerably more overt at portraying female characters as outwardly monstrous than the latter. Despite its fetishistic story elements and often juvenile male writing style, “The Haunted Vagina” takes a much more nuanced approach to its portrayal of its female characters due to its situation solidly within our current postmodern feminism-influenced society.

( The rest of the essay is here... )

The two stories examined couldn’t be more different in so many ways, but the fact that they have such common elements speaks to the effectiveness of the toolkits of gothic horror and postmodernism. I purchased the 1977 Theodore Sturgeon anthology in a used bookstore when I was in my early teens, thinking from the Boris Vallejo artwork on the cover it was going to be light fantasy. The short “Bianca’s Hands” was first published in 1947 and is roughly 8 pages long in the collection, albeit in quite small print. I acquired the Carleton Mellick III book new via the Internet over 30 years later primarily on the strength of online reviews after a friend jokingly posted a link to one of his other bizarro books (“The Faggiest Vampire”, a children’s book) on a social networking site. “The Haunted Vagina” was first published in 2006 and weighs in at a fairly light 83 pages in a reasonably large font. The choices of the two stories for me were about as random as they could possibly be, and initially I could not make up my mind which to tackle. In the end, it was suggested to look at both (Ahman), and it was then that the common elements became apparent. While neither work could possibly stand as a feminist masterpiece, both use postmodern explorations of sex and gender as critical elements within a gothic horror structure to explore the place of those topics within society by looking from the edges back in. The flexibility, effectiveness, and staying power of those coexistent literary forms is evident in their use in works with such widely divergent backgrounds and narratives.

( And the bibliography is here... )