Bodies at Risk: Urban Danger in Zsuzsi Gartner’s “City of my Dreams” and Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down

Domenic A Beneventi

doi:10.33776/candb.v3i1-2.3038

Domenic A Beneventi Sherbrooke University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33776/candb.v3i1-2.3038

Keywords:

Urban space, poverty and homelessness, gender, Vancouver, Toronto

Abstract

This article discusses the representation of Toronto and Vancouver as urban landscapes of danger, toxicity, and as sources of corporeal pollution, especially for the poor, the homeless, prostitutes, and women. Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down and Zsusi Gartner’s “City of my Dreams” imagine the city as a verticale space of “fallenness,” both literal and figurative, and show that contemporary Canadian cities are not always the well-ordered places we imagine them to be, but are rather complex, multilayered spaces of risk, bodily danger, economic dispossession, and social alienation.

Author Biography

Domenic A Beneventi, Sherbrooke University

Domenic A. Beneventi teaches Comparative Literature and Translation at the University of Sherbrooke. He was a post?doctoral research fellow at the CELAT research group at the University of Quebec at Montreal (2008-2010) and a SSHRC post-doctoral fellow at the University of Sherbrooke (2006-2008), where he undertook research on the representation of homelessness in Canadian and Quebec literatures. He is co-editor of "Adjacencies: Minority Writing in Canada" (Guernica, 2004) and has published articles on urban writing, homelessness, anglo-quebec literature, and minority writing with U of Toronto P, Wilfrid Laurier Press, and the Journal of Canadian Studies.