Hyphens, Hybridities and Mixed-Race Identities: Gendered Readings in Contemporary Canadian Women’s Texts

Resumen

A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF CANADIAN WRITERS work in the gap between the idealist official discourse of multicultural ism and the day-to-day realities of a sometimes grudgingly multicultural society. Strictly speaking, all Canadians inhabit that space, consciously or unconsciously, from the documented moment in which the nation decided to define itself as multicultural and the more indefinite moment in which the country became a diversified social group. Writers of all ethnic backgrounds are interpellated by this fact, and many address it in their writing. Women, on the other hand, inhabit the gap and the tension between a multicultural discourse and the discourse of gender, and the tempo marked by the realities of both. White writers have been forced to revise their positions, while racialized writers have entered the world of Canadian literature with politically and poetically charged texts, a resistant and transformative language born of that site which is variously defined by the hyphen, the gap or the centrifugal force of mixed-race voice.(...).