Browsing by Author "Sullivan, Rebecca"

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    A Space of their Own? A feminist exploration of gendered spatial relations in Professional Women’s Organizations in Alberta's Resource Sector
    (2018-05-18) Bjarnason, Alicia Dawn; Blue, Gwendolyn; Sullivan, Rebecca; Miller, Byron
    Throughout the life cycle of a geoscience career gender inequalities still exist, even in the face of legislative change. One response in Alberta is the formation of professional women’s groups. Drawing on feminist geography, the objective of this research was to explore the social relations and power structures involved within the work environment that categorized where women’s groups are created, why they are created, and the strategies used in addressing gender disparities and inequality. This mixed methods study included an inventory of current groups that exist in Alberta, an online survey to reach professional STEM women within the geoscience community who have been members of one or more professional women’s groups, and in-depth semistructured interviews with three key actors from one Alberta based group. The intended outcomes are to create evidence-based solutions, which in turn will help contribute to concrete solutions to better support professional female geoscientists in Alberta.
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    Canadian Television Today
    (University of Calgary Press, 2006) Beaty, Bart; Sullivan, Rebecca
    What's on TV? Canadian Television Today explores the current challenges and issues facing the English-language television industry in Canada. Television in Canada has long been one of the principal conduits of national identity. But has it kept pace with the rapidly changing landscape of Canadian culture? After presenting an overview of the main issues and debates surrounding the Canadian small screen, Beaty and Sullivan offer their suggestions for the future of the medium. They argue that in today's globalized world, Canadian television should be a more fitting reflection of Canada's multicultural society, embracing a broader range of languages, cultures, and viewing strategies. Visualizing the potential reach of a revitalized industry, Beaty and Sullivan illustrate the promise and possibility of Canadian television that serves the cultural needs of all its citizens.
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    The Cure for Plastic
    (2019-11-21) Forestell, Peter; Van Herk, Aritha; Sullivan, Rebecca; Lai, Larissa; Sumara, Dennis J.; Williams, Ian
    The Cure for Plastic explores a gay man’s relationship to effeminacy through his attempts to adopt traditionally feminine roles, particularly those of the spinster and the homemaker. More specifically, when faced with the primary care of an infant, Lawrence, the narrator, mines his memory to answer the question of why he agreed to adopt the baby in spite of his own reluctance and lack of support from his husband. The uncomfortable, unsatisfactory answer lies with stories of Lawrence’s female role models, his relationships with women, and his own desire to put his house in respectable order. Rooted in his love for women and, at the same time, his misogynistic caricaturing of them, Lawrence’s narration explores the many, and often problematic, ways in which white gay men envision women, femininity, and their own effeminacy. In a time of climate panic, environmental crisis, and the emergence of a vibrant, increasingly intersectional queer community, Lawrence’s inward turn also marks a desire for the privilege of safety, literally the comforts of home, even as they fall away. The critical afterword explores Lawrence’s taciturn narration in light of his troubled adoption of these opposing, yet traditionally feminine roles. This problem is considered from historical, literary, stylistic, and personal perspectives. First, The Cure for Plastic is considered in light of the history of the novel, asking whether this novel, with Lawrence at the helm, constitutes a novel at all. Second, the detritus of the ocean becomes a metaphor for the impulse to tell stories. Third, Lawrence’s resistance to narrative strategies that transform spinsters into mothers is explored through a reading of Anne of Green Gables. Fourth, narratives of gay vanity, especially that of Gaëtan Dugas, often mislabeled the AIDS Patient Zero, are explored to root out the effemiphobia of gay men. Fifth, the literary landscape of New Brunswick is considered against the work of Antonine Maillet, and her ear for orality. Sixth, Lawrence’s relationship to women and traditionally feminine roles are critiqued in light of the misogyny and transmisogyny of gay men through a reading of Peter Wildeblood’s Against the Law and E.M. Forster’s Maurice. Finally, Alice Munro’s distaste for literary “tricks” becomes the basis for a style.
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    Refractions: Queer History Cast Through Experimental Poetry
    (2024-01-16) Meunier, Paul; Sullivan, Rebecca; Lai, Larissa; Sullivan, Rebecca; Lai, Larissa; Prud'homme-Cranford, Rain L.; Mason, Derritt; Leblanc, Jean-René; Crawford, Lucas
    Refractions, the creative manuscript in this dissertation, presents a long-form poetry narrative of the figurative being Thousand, born through refracted light in future Calgary, Alberta, that follows their search for family in an unfamiliar space. Divided into five “Movements” that emulate a symphony, Thousand’s search for their parentage reveals a familial fabric of queerness and kinship, beyond the nuclear family unit, as they slowly learn of the community network that surrounds them. In this future space, mothers and aunts create worlds like gods, characters forge bonds across thresholds of life and death, and queer parents represent a space for love, creation, and generative capacity, outside of traditional notions of progeny. Refractions is a story of queer kinship, chosen family, and ontological awakening. As Thousand learns where they come from, authorial memoirs are stored, illuminated, and shared within the site of the queer and future archive. By exploring multidirectional conduits between past and future, Thousand not only learns of where they come from and the formative powers of chosen family, but they discover their own language for queer identity, agency, and the capacity to pursue an undefined future. The critical exegesis presents a lineage of creative foundations and theoretical examinations that influence this manuscript. These include the short stories that weave antinarrative together in Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, and the speculative fiction and mythmaking in Catherynne M. Valente’s Silently and Very Fast. Theoretical reflections underscore the importance of writing as community-situated, the politics of cultural appropriation, ethics and accountabilities. Refractions also considers the charge in José Esteban Muñoz’s pursuit for queer utopia, mindful of how Joan Retallack’s “The Poethical Wager” challenges writers to explore ethically and responsibly. In this way, Refractions considers how Thousand might hold their own space, agency, and limitless potential to pursue a Queer Poethics.
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    Transnational Cultural Capital: Managing Diversity in Caribbean-Canadian Women’s Performance of Multiculturalism
    (2019-01-04) Wall, Natalie; Srivastava, Aruna; Bennett, Susan; Sullivan, Rebecca; Stortz, Paul James; Davis, Andrea
    This dissertation investigates the politics of officially-sanctioned Canadian multiculturalism via an exploration of the experiences of Caribbean-Canadian women. Using a combination of performance theory, postcolonial and feminist theories, and the notion of hospitality as theorized by Jacques Derrida, the dissertation argues that, while ostensibly benevolent, state-sanctioned multiculturalism places onerous demands on racialized groups to perform their otherness. This, I argue, is the “price of entry” for multiculturalism’s conditional hospitality. I suggest that this price serves to radically limit the agency of the performer by simultaneously celebrating otherness (through exoticizing displays that render it as a spectacle to be alternately desired and feared) and containing it, limiting the capacity of those whose difference is celebrated to be viewed through any other paradigm than that of their spectacular difference. In making this argument I explore numerous specific sites of multicultural performance in which Caribbean-Canadian women participate: the literary-critical industry (exemplified by the celebratory treatment of the authors Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip and Claire Harris); Toronto’s Caribana festival (which I examine primarily in the context of visual representation and the development of a mode of gaze I term “tourism at home”); dub poetry (with particular reference to a matrilineal tradition that develops within Canadian dub poetry and renders it distinct from the performance of dub in other locations); the feminist monodrama (Trey Anthony’s ’Da Kink in My Hair and its TV adaptation); and finally, activism in response to emergent events. Intertwined in all these explorations are questions of space (I begin by exploring the extent to which “my” Canada is refracted through my experiences of my home city of Toronto), of black female bodies, and of agency. This final question becomes particularly salient as my project works towards a conclusion and asks what space is available to the performers of multiculturalism to resist or reappropriate the demand that they perform their non-Canadianness in order to be granted their Canadianness.
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    Turning Up the Heat: Comparing Feminist and Mainstream Pornography
    (2012) Sostar, Tiffany; Sullivan, Rebecca