autoblography

Jiwani and Young, looking at representations of the Vancouver missing and murdered women in news media representations, identified frames which “entrenched stereotypes about women, Aboriginality, and sex-trade work” (1). Chester Brown’s Paying For It, a memoir of the author’s longstanding status as a john, does something quite different: Brown actually removes these problematic frames of race, class and drug addiction. In fact, he removes almost any frame at all. In an effort to protect the anonymity of the sex trade workers he’s engaged with, Brown works to refrain from “putting…read more

When the Haitian earthquake of 2010 first hits, Dany Laferrière describes how he initially “thought of those disaster movies and wondered if the earth would gape open and swallow us up” (15). Once the tremors are over, he notes how “We slowly got to our feet like zombies in a B-movie” (16). Laferrière’s ability to articulate the experience is directly gleaned from the popular imagination, and this opens up avenues to view Laferrière’s account as informed by popular culture. For my part, I’m interested in how The World is Moving…read more