Peter Dickinson
Here Is Queer: Nationalism, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. 280. CAN $19.95
Reviewed by Dennis Denisoff

In 1992, I received a Canada Council grant to edit the first anthology of Canadian gay male prose in history. Amongst the hundreds of submissions that I received was a piece by Peter Dickinson. His story “Home” stood out for its eloquence and its earnest musings regarding the relation of selfhood to sexuality and place. The same combination of eloquence and depth permeates his recently published study of the ways in which Canadian, Québécois, and First Nations literatures have fused sexual and national politics. Although Dickinson-as he himself suggests in one of the refreshing personal moments of Here is Queer-was years away from writing his theoretical study when he penned “Home,” the years of rumination over sexuality and place that preceded the writing of the academic manuscript is hinted at in that piece of prose fiction. In the story, the partner of a man who has recently died of AIDS muses on his physical, psychological, and sexual position in Canada. “For me it was not so much a question of how do I get there from here,” the narrator comments, “but rather how did I get here from there?” (Queeries [Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1993] 50). Blow this question up to national proportions without exploding the poignancy of the narrator’s voice and you have some sense of the importance and beauty of Dickinson’s highly original Here Is Queer.

In his introduction, Dickinson states that he is seeking “to juxtapose against the predominantly nationalist framework of literary criticism in this country an alternative politics, one propelled by questions of sexuality and, more often than not, homosexuality” (3). Toward this end, his analysis of fiction, drama, poetry, and criticism is necessarily rooted in contemporary queer, gender, and postcolonial theory. Dickinson is as much at home using theoretical paradigms to develop his own particular line of inquiry as he is comfortable discussing Canadian literature and its canonization. He brings his analytic skills to the works and/or perspectives of over a dozen authors including the nineteenth-century writer John Richardson; participants in the Anglo-Canadian modernist movements centered in Montréal; Michel Tremblay and other Québécois dramatists; Sinclair Ross; Timothy Findley; Daphne Marlatt; Nicole Brossard; Dionne Brand; and Tomson Highway.

An exploration of these diverse authors’ works with regard to the combination of sexuality and nationalism demands a clear historicization and political contextualization of the material. Dickinson’s effort on this account is perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the book. I also found his analysis of the critical (often homophobic, often misogynistic) rhetoric marking the reception and canonization (or not) of these works equally insightful. This latter project is one that has been long overdue. Indeed, I believe that, before Dickinson chose to address the issue directly and thoroughly in Here Is Queer, it was at risk of fading away, of being pushed aside as a tired bit of nagging. Pointing out the essentializing euphemisms-“virile,” “active,” “masculine”-that some critics of Canadian literature used to celebrate poetry by heterosexual men, Dickinson demonstrates the impact that these critics’ anxieties had on various authors’ creative production and cultural canonization. This approach is especially effective in the fourth chapter, where Dickinson addresses the rhetorical role of homosexuality in the differing receptions by Canadian and Québécois critics of plays by Michel Tremblay, René-Daniel Dubois, and Michel Marc Bouchard.

Here Is Queer also raises a number of new areas for exploration. Dickinson more than once demonstrates the concord between theories of sexual and national oppression, which makes me wonder whether the centrality of sexuality to nationalist rhetoric is virtually inescapable during the twentieth century. Are there, for example, gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, queer, and camp authors whose depictions of sexuality are not invested in questions of nation? If so, why not? Dickinson also points to the problems arising from adopting a relatively unified notion of nation when discussing First Nations literature. How then do differences in authors’ conceptions of nation reflect differences in their conceptions of sexuality? I am not suggesting that Dickinson should have answered these inquiries in his book. Such questions can be asked about any nation-however the term is defined-anywhere in the world. Indeed, academics have been contributing to our understanding of the position of sexuality in national literatures and their reception for a number of years now. Dickinson’s Here Is Queer offers the first extensive analysis of these relations as they occurred in Canada and encourages scholars to continue this work both here and elsewhere.