Preliminary Programme

During the period 1880 to 1940, the present-day “Atlantic Region” of Canada experienced high rates of outmigration. While most of the literature has focused on immigration to the United States, this paper examines female “internal migrants” who moved to Montreal to take advantage of employment, educational, consumption and cultural opportunities associated with Canada’s largest city. French-speaking Acadians and English-speaking Maritimers and Newfoundlanders moved west and through their internal migration served as a two way conduit. This paper argues that these women’s disproportionate involvement in education and social service not only integrated the Atlantic region into Canada but also placed them in the role of hinged role of nation building as they reinforced Montreal’s Canadian metropole status over the Atlantic region. (Show less)

An often cited passage from Andrew Parker et alia?s Nationalisms and Sexuality engages the long held dogma that ?.... this trope of the nation-as-woman of course depends for its representational efficacy on a particular image of woman as chaste, dutiful, daughterly or maternal.? Such an image does not conform to European nation-state symbols such as Germania, Britainia and even less to the French Marianne. It does aptly describe the female symbol of the Philippine nation-state ?Inangbayan? As ?Ina,? she?s Mother; meek and chaste like Maria Clara; mirror-image of the Virgin Mary; and, dutiful daughter and mother, as s one of the thousands of Overseas Contract Workers who have joined the economic Diaspora to support parents and younger siblings back home. In other words, I would like to present a Her-story of ?Inangbayan,? from the 19th century when the idea of being a nation germinated in the minds of members of the Filipino Propagandist Movement and the Katipunan, the brotherhood for the redemption of the nation from Spain, up to the present time, while outlining the paradigmatic shifts that have accompanied the transformation of ?Inangbayan? from an abstract symbol to actual undisguised faces of regular people whose sanction by the government to be the nation?s trope reside purely in their capacity to alleviate the country from the dire economic plight that the Philippines finds herself in. In other words, this paper aims to produce an introductory historiography of ?Inangbayan.? Books, articles, archival research with direct or indirect references to ?Inangbayan? written within the chosen time frame will serve as documentation for my study. It is in such a vein that I hope to give future researchers and policy-makers an orderly and organized presentation of the narrative of the ?Inangbayan? not to provide answers but to formulate a different perspective that could entail a drawing out of a much larger discourse of the gendering of this nation-state. Already, the official government calendar of holidays is replete with events commemorating male heroes, in lieu of male saints. So where do the women fit in? Will they be again be cast aside when their sacrifice in form of separation from family and friends becomes unnecessary in face of improvements in the economy? Does this change from Virgin, Mother, and Maria Clara into the multiple faces of our foreign domestic workers, cultural dancers, nurses, medical aids, caregivers have an impact in the way Philippine society views women? Finally, it is my hope is that the narrative of the transformation of ?Inangbayan? fulfills our national hero Jose Rizal?s admonition to the Young Women of Malolos: ?...to be bold, aggressive, industrious, to get rid of the inhibiting ties with religion and convention.? (Show less)

In their much-cited list concerning women's implication in nationalisms, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1989) identify women as "reproducers of the boundaries of national groups (through restrictions on sexual or marital relations)". On the other hand, feminist migration research has shown that the crossing of national boundaries in the context of migration has consequences for understandings of gender (e.g. Espín 1999). This paper, which is part of my ongoing PhD dissertation research, combines these two views by analyzing constructions of both gender and nation in the context of transnational marriages in Finland in the 1950s. By analyzing various public texts – texts that either partake in public discussions about, or are produced within public administration in order to regulate relationships between Finns and foreigners – I use transnational marriages as an optic through which the intersectionality of gender and nation becomes visible and legible. I claim that as transnational marriages are located at the boundaries between nations they necessarily form a point of negotiation for these boundaries and the identities they claim to contain. Simultaneously, however, also notions of gender are in flux: for example, in the beginning of 1950s the successive marriages of, first, a Finnish Miss Universe and, second, a small town girl next-door to foreign, non-European men brought about heated discussions about the nature of both Finnish women and men as well as the Finnish gender order in general. In the 1950s, Finland was a rather peripheral country with relatively high emigration and low immigration, and transnational marriages within the country as such were a marginal phenomenon (in 1952, out of a population of four million, roughly 400 Finnish women and 20 men married non-Finnish citizens). Despite their social marginality, symbolically transnational marriages seem to have been rather more central. Even as the more traditional nationalist discourse was somewhat restrictive of Finnish women marrying foreign men, these marriages were also seen as desirable from the point of view of a nation(-state) aspiring to belong to the modern, capitalist Western world. In this paper I use concepts from both feminist and postcolonial theory to claim that transnational marriages articulated mixed concerns and hopes for the changing status of both women in the modernizing Finland as well as the Finnish nation(-state) in the post-war/cold-war world.

References:
Anthias F. & Yuval-Davis N., eds. (1989) Woman-Nation-State. Macmillan.
Espín, O. (1999) Women Crossing Boundaries. Routledge. (Show less)

Prompted by current concern about the definition of "marriage", this paper explores the impact of socio-economic change and stress upon marriage as an institution among the middle class in Victorian Canada. It does this through a case study of a marital scandal involving a respected Presbyterian minister in Brantford, Ontario in 1883. This is placed within the wider context of competing definitions of marriage as found in folk tradition and community networks, in various ecclesiastical marriage liturgies, and in marriage, divorce, and property law. In its final section it examines briefly the contradictions, tensions and anxieties which surrounded these definitions in late Victorian Canada as a result of changes in people's experience of space and time. (Show less)