Metafeminism and Post-9/11 Writing in Canada and Québec

This article considers the impact of crisis in the post-9/11 writing of Nicole Brossard and Margaret Atwood, undeniable trailblazers of literary feminism in Canada. The post-9/11 world newly situates local and global, as well as social and economic challenges that feminism has always confronted. Atwood’s and Brossard’s post-millennial work, particularly its post 9/11 backdrop, widens the scope of feminist social and ethical concerns, as well as the different, expansive outlook of feminist writing in Canada today. Atwood and Brossard have recently set themes and scenes of impending, real, and perceived terrorist and bioterrorist threat, ecological and economic doom, corporate domination, torture, heightened surveillance, and state control in the face of global menace and the framework of vulnerable times. The forty-year span of these two writers’ oeuvre is particularly remarkable. It attests to the very trajectories of Western feminism in Canadian and Québécois literatures, and its culmination in the phenomenon and ethos this article proposes to call metafeminism – that which both transgresses and harks back to familiar feminist positions that continue to impact women’s writing in Canada to this day

Foreword/Avant-propos

No abstract

Deuils au pluriel : Sur deux textes d’Abla Farhoud

Les auteures de cet article traitent de l’exil qui entraîne un deuil des origines dans deux textes migrants d’Abla Farhoud, soit Jeux de patience (1997), pièce dramatique, et Le bonheur a la queue glissante (1998), oeuvre romanesque. Dans ces oeuvres, où il y a une juxtaposition de deuils, entre en jeu une déchirure antérieure, ce qui amène à conjuguer le deuil au pluriel. Dans la pièce et le roman, il existe une tension entre mémoire et refoulement, entre deuil et mélancolie, qui habite les personnages féminins. Les auteures cherchent également à souligner l’importance de la prise de parole qui motive le deuil, un travail toujours inachevé, intrinsèquement lié à la perte, une composante incontournable de toute subjectivité et de toute écriture.The authors of this article deal with exile and the process of mourning the loss of origins in two migrant texts by Abla Farhoud: a dramatic work, Jeux de patience, and a novel, Le bonheur a la queue glissante. In these narratives, involving a juxtaposition of bereavements, a previous break becomes part of the story, and bereavement is constructed in the plural. While these bereavements are represented in different ways in the play and the novel, the female characters are inhabited by tensions between memory and repression, mourning and melancholy. The authors also emphasize the importance of finding a voice to motivate mourning — an always unfinished task, inherently related to loss as an inescapable element of all subjectivity and all writing

Trois exils, trois femmes, trois Médées du Québec contemporain

The myth of Medea makes its contemporary appearance in the feminist writings in Quebec. However, the works in the study need first and foremost to be rewrites of the myth situating the infanticide mother in a very precise social and historical context — namely one of exile and of migration. Résumé Le mythe de Médée fait son apparition contemporaine dans l’écriture au féminin du Québec. Or les œuvres à l’étude se veulent d’abord et avant tout des réécritures du mythe situant la mère infanticide dans un cadre social et historique très précis — notamment celui de l’exil et de la migration

Coupling of importin beta binding peptide on plasmid DNA: transfection efficiency is increased by modification of lipoplex's physico-chemical properties

BACKGROUND: Non-viral vectors for gene transfer are less immunogenic than viral vectors but also less efficient. Significant effort has focused on enhancing non-viral gene transfer efficiency by increasing nuclear import of plasmid DNA, particularly by coupling nuclear localization peptidic sequences to plasmid DNA. RESULTS: We have coupled a 62-aminoacid peptide derived from hSRP1α importin beta binding domain, called the IBB peptide to plasmid DNA by using the heterobifunctional linker N-(4-azido-2,3,5,6 tetrafluorobenzyl)-6-maleimidyl hexanamide (TFPAM-6). When covalently coupled to plasmid DNA, IBB peptide did not increase the efficiency of cationic lipid mediated transfection. The IBB peptide was still able to interact with its nuclear import receptor, importin β, but non-specifically. However, we observed a 20-fold increase in reporter gene expression with plasmid DNA / IBB peptide complexes under conditions of inefficient transfection. In which case, IBB was associated with plasmid DNA through self assembling ionic interaction. CONCLUSIONS: The improvement of transfection activity was not due to an improved nuclear import of DNA, but rather by the modification of physicochemical properties of IBB peptide / plasmid complexes. IBB peptide increased lipoplex size and these larger complexes were more efficient for gene transfer