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Dissertation Information for Vivian Margot Sexton May

NAME:
- Vivian Margot Sexton May

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- Rebecca S. Chopp

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Martine Watson Brownley
- Pamela M. Hall

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Dividing Lines and Binding Words: Border Subjectivity in Contemporary Canadian and American Literature

Abstract: This project analyzes how spatial and generic borders intersect with gender, racial, and sexual identities in contemporary Canadian and American literature. As paradoxical constructs, borders delineate lines meant to be crossed: as they exclude, they invite entry. Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, Morley Callaghan's The Loved and the Lost, and Melvin Dixon's Vanishing Rooms highlight how strictly defined and controlled borders encourage violence--rape and murder. Their novels center upon interracial and homosexual love. However, Jim Crow and compulsory heterosexuality mandate that sexual-racial border subjects, who do not conform to oppositionally defined normative identity categories, be eradicated. Smith, Callaghan, and Dixon emphasize the epistemological and physical violence necessary to maintain borders in their most absolutist formulations.

Thus violence ways of perceiving the world ("the cartographic imagination") are also associated with rigid border definitions, particularly positivism and notions of transparent objectivity. Smith, Callaghan, and Dixon critique the cartographic to make readers critically aware of hierarchical borders which can only see complex ambiguity as dangerously disorderly. They call for a multidimensional approach to subjectivity that can ethically account for differences without mandating their erasure.

Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine acknowledge borders as violent, but also as constructed, arbitrary, and fluid. These novels highlight borders as indeterminate hybrid sites. Unlike the drive to clarity critiqued in part one, reason and ethics are here allied with ambiguity and paradox. Cisneros, Kogawa, and Erdrich conceive of the border as a space that allows multiplicity to flourish rather than one which forecloses ambiguity.

Their texts also play with generic structure, disrupting genre borders. Consciously open-ended, the novels offer multiple narrators, circular time frames, and several versions of "the" story. They therefore require readers to engage with many convergent and divergent textual layers. Essentially, we must put aside cognitive practices which utilize oppositional set logic and recognize knowledge as necessarily partial in order to make meaning out of these nonlinear, polyvocal texts.

Borders divide and bind. Recognizing this paradox may offer insight into how to reconceive subjectivity without relying on an opposition between self and other.

MPACT Scores for Vivian Margot Sexton May

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-02 21:32:34

Advisors and Advisees Graph