Lowry, Michelle

Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

offer an enriched program for young people. Overall, EmbodyingEquity is an invaluable resource that belongs on the bookshelf ofevery equity edu- cator and service provider, as well as those engaged in cutting-edge work on body image. REMNANTS OF NATION: ON POVERTY NARRATIVES BY WOMEN Roxanne Rimstead. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 200 1. BY MICHELLE L O W R Y  Within Canada the poor are often portrayed as external "others"as poverty is imagined as something that largely happens elsewhere. The poor are made invisible in the national imagination because, as Roxanne Rimstead argues in Remnants of Nation: On Poverty Narratives by Women, their visibility embarrasses the nation and compromises national myths that promise prosperity, classlessness and economic stability through meritocracy. Internal colonized and poor groups-the remnants of nation-are believed to have fallen behind in the  'evolutionary model of history,' and are thus framed as outside the national community, naturally inferior, and unable to partake in progress. It is within this context that Rimstead approaches the study of poverty and representations of the poorwithin literarystudies. She notes that while race, gender, and sexuality are now more widely addressed in literary studies, poverty, class rela- tions, and poverty narratives still re- main unlderstudied. Poverty as a theme in literature, in general, has been made invisible and has not been studied in asustained or oppositional way. Rarely has work on the poor been inclusive of their own voices, particularly those of women. Thus, she is interested in creating a meth- odology that has as its project a re- covery (as opposed to a discovery), of the poor and their voices. In Remnants ofNation, Rimstead argues for the study ofpoverty narra- tives as a category of analysis, a pro- posal that should be of interest to those working with literary, femi- nist, andlor cultural theory. She en- visions poverty narratives as a con- structed field of study comprised of stories by andlor about the poor. In thisspecific study, Rimsteadexplores poverty narratives that are cross-class and cross-genre, focusing on a broad range ofwomen's prose (novels, short stories, autobiography, oral histo- ries, essays, reportage, and letters) in Canada, 19 19 to the present. This approach crosses the levels of "liter- - - ary, popular and ordinary" culture, and as Rimstead argues, transgresses the canon and ideas about what has literary value.   his call to study poverty narra- tives and excavate the voices of the poor is exciting for me as a feminist academic and anti-poverty activist. I find Rimstead's approach to poverty narratives nuanced and engaging. She recognizes the problems in reading these narratives as "true" experiences, and yet struggles with her desire to tell the truth about poor women's lives-a desire that stems from her wish to engage politically with pov- erty narratives, in solidarity with the poor. Recognizing her own conflicted reasons for reading poverty, Rimstead ultimately calls for an approach that views texts as sources of knowledge - about the complex subjectivities of the poor. She proposes that we en- gage in an oppositional reading of poverty narratives that sees these texts as sites of "struggle, meaning and power," and that readers aim to dis- cover subversive and dominant rep- resentations of poverty with them. Further, she wishes to excavate from poverty narratives the dialectic rela- tionship between the poor and non- poor, ideologies of difference, and the relationship between the poor and the nation. As feminist theory, literary, and cultural studies continue to move away from poverty and class analysis, Rimstead's goal to once again fore- ground poverty and the poor as sub- jects of study is quite radical. One benefit of this move is that it clearly acknowledges the invisibility of the poor in national consciousness, and articulates women's relationship to poverty. The challenge facing those who choose to engage with poverty narratives is to successfully investi- gate the interconnections between race, gender, and sexuality in the lives of the poor. However, I find myselfasking: is it possible to centre the poor while simultaneously ex- ploring the ways in which various systems of oppression operate? I found that Rimstead successfully re-reads texts such as Maria Campbell's Halfbreed and Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, as stories of poverty in the lives of raced and gendered women. She uncovers pov- erty and resistance in these texts, and reminds us that poverty is experi- enced both discursively and materi- ally. However, Rimstead fails to fully explore the effects of heterosexism and compulsory heterosexuality in the lives of the characters. While her task is to excavate poverty, I also wanted to understand the ways in which poor women experience their sexuality in the texts, and the ways in which their sexuality is ideologically constructed. Certainly, exploring the intersec- tions of privilege and oppression in the lives of women-fictional or real-is a difficult and ongoing task for feminist scholars. Ultimately, I believe that Rimstead's call to read oppositionally offers academics some useful tools with which to do this work. VOLUME 22, NUMBERS 3,4 

Remnants of a Nation: Poverty Narratives by Women

https://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/download/6465/5653

Remnants of a Nation: Poverty Narratives by Women

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Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)