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From There to Here: Place and Public Cultures

Volume 32, Number 2 (2007)

(Un)Settling the Prairies: Queering Regionalist Literature and the Prairie Social Landscape in Shane Rhodes’s The Wireless Room

Submitted
December 5, 2008
Published
2007-06-06

Abstract

Shane Rhodes engages with the familiar conventions of Canadian prairie poetry in his first volume of poems The Wireless Room (2000). A queer writer from central Alberta, he employs and redirects recognizable regionalist literary traditions and tropes identified by such critics as Alison Calder and Robert Wardaugh, such as the autobiographical return to a childhood prairie home, the prairie tall tale, and the garden poem, in order to establish himself as a prairie writer. By reminding his readers that the region is home to sexual minorities, Rhodes queers prairie regionalism and challenges misleadingly outdated and homogeneous hegemonic constructions of the Canadian prairies. The Wireless Room pushes back against what theorists such as Lawrence Knopp and Kath Weston identify as the queer geographical imaginary, that which typically pressures sexual minority groups to migrate to metropolitan centres.