Cautiously Hopeful: Metafeminist Practices in Canada

Metafeminism is a term coined by Lori Saint-Martin that defines and embraces the divisions of feminism. Marie Carrière's book "Cautiously Hopeful" brings together seemingly disparate writing by Anglo-Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois women authors under the banner of metafeminism, familiarizing readers with major streams of feminist thought and showing how literary works tackle the entanglement of gender with race, settler-invader colonialism, heteronormativity, positionality, language, and the posthuman condition. Despite the growing anti-feminist backlash, the book remains hopeful that feminism can effect social change in the twenty-first century.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 18 November 2020
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Feminism has always been characterized by its divisions, but metafeminism, a term coined by Lori Saint-Martin, defines and embraces this disorder. As a carefully devised reading practice, metafeminism understands contemporary feminist literature and theory as both recalling and extending the tropes and politics of the past. In Cautiously Hopeful Marie Carrière brings together seemingly disparate writing by Anglo-Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois women authors under the banner of metafeminism. Familiarizing readers with major streams of feminist thought, including intersectionality, affect theory, and care ethics, Carrière shows how literary works by such authors as Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Naomi Fontaine, Larissa Lai, Tracey Lindberg, and Rachel Zolf, among others, tackle the entanglement of gender with race, settler-invader colonialism, heteronormativity, positionality, language, and the posthuman condition. Meanwhile, tenable alliances among Indigenous women, women of color, and settler feminist practitioners emerge. Carrière's tone is personal and accessible throughout, in itself a metafeminist gesture that both encompasses and surpasses a familiar feminist form of writing.

Despite the growing anti-feminist backlash across media platforms and in various spheres of political and social life, a hopefulness animates this timely work that, like metafeminism, stands alert to the challenges that feminism faces in its capacity to effect social change in the twenty-first century.

Weight: 510g
Dimension: 161 x 235 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780228003816