The politics of location in Canadian women's novels by Daphne Marlatt, Sky Lee and Joy Kogawa

My thesis is an examination of the politics of location in three novels by contemporary Canadian women writers: Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic, Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, and Joy Kogawa's Obasan. In this project I explore how gender, race, sexuality and citizenship help illuminate the role that location plays in Canadian women's writing. Emphasizing the significance of embodied contexts in these women's novels raises questions of how writing evokes political self-placing, rather than geographical or thematized visions of space. Each novel is positioned in light of past and contemporary issues arising within Canadian socio-political and cultural contexts. Through their engagement with history, the novelists encourage readers to examine present internalized acceptance of systemic discrimination. A feminist analysis of the importance of how these novels (re)vision women's relations to gender codes, self-chosen sexuality, and race relations, reveals the possibilities and limitations of diverse Canadian women's agency.