Ben Authers
Dalhousie University
“The Order
of Nature is Never Fixed”:
Canadian
Multicultural Policy, Sexuality
and Larissa
Lai’s When Fox is a Thousand.
The Preamble to the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988) lists as
one of its aims the recognition of “the diversity of Canadians as regards
race, national or ethnic origin, colour and religion”, and the production
of a Federal policy to “preserve and enhance the multicultural heritage
of Canadians.” The Act, which exemplifies government strategies to construct
the Canadian nation as diverse and unified, attempts to acknowledge cultural
difference as constitutive of individual identity, what Charles Taylor has
termed the “politics of recognition.” However it has also been
criticised by commentators such as Smaro Kamboureli for the decontextualised
and stagnatory manner in which it constructs ethnicity, producing a
“contaminated heritage.” Through a reading of Larissa Lai’s
novel When Fox is a Thousand this paper considers how official policies of multiculturalism in
Canada operate as both a “politics of recognition” and a
“sedative politics,” neither of which interrogate the assumptions
of the hetero-normative anglophone Canadian culture. Lai’s novel analyses
the links between ethnicity and sexuality through the fluid identifications
made by its queer Asian-Canadian protagonists with “community”, and
particularly in its problematic associations of sexual and cultural identity,
clothing and embodiment. Consequently the text`s “queer”
interrogation of selfhood questions the presumption that culture and identity
are experienced similarly by all members of a community, and postulates both
subjectivity and community as far more complex and situated than official
policies such as the Multiculturalism Act might suggests.
Ben Authers is completed undergraduate degrees
in Arts and Law at the University of Adelaide, where he was awarded the John
Howard Clark Prize for English, and has worked for the South Australian Equal
Opportunity Commission. Most recently he completed a Masters in English at
Dalhousie University in Canada.
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