Gendering the Nation

'[Gendering the Nation is] a unique, imaginative history of Canadian women's cinema that convincingly demonstrates that to know Canadian women's filmic imagination is to know another country - a country with a "global sense of place" beyond gender, identity, and nation.' -- Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, authors of Hacking the Future 'This is the most refreshing and most useful - quite simply the best - book on Canadian cinemas of the last decade. At last gender is consolidated as the central issue in questions of nationality and culture, and in a way that enriches, problematizes and expands the entire field far beyond currently existing canons. Gendering the Nation offers a wealth of perspectives by leading Canadian film scholars and by those who clearly soon will be.' -- Thomas Waugh, Professor of Film Studies, Concordia University, and author of the forthcoming The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema

The editors have produced a definitive collection of essays that address the impact and influence of a century of women's film-making in Canada. This book seeks to situate women's cinema through the complex optic of national culture.

Since Nell Shipman wrote and starred in Back to God's Country (1919), Canadian women have been making films. The accolades given to film-makers such as Patricia Rozema (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, When Night is Falling), Alanis Obomsawin (Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance), and Micheline Lanctôt (Deux actrices) at festivals throughout the world in recent years attest to the growing international recognition for films made by Canadian women. With Gendering the Nation the editors have produced a definitive collection of essays, both original and previously published, that address the impact and influence of a century of women's film-making in Canada. In dialogue with new paradigms for understanding the relationship of cinema with nation and gender, Gendering the Nation seeks to situate women's cinema through the complex optic of national culture. This collection of critical essays employs a variety of frameworks to analyse cinematic practices that range from narrative to documentary to the avant-garde.