Bouchard, Michel

This thesis explores the body horror subgenre of film, its creation and rise in popularity during the late twentieth century (1975-1995), and how the subgenre’s grotesque and unsettling examination of the human body, its form, and reproductive processes, allowed body horror filmmakers to tackle societal taboos regarding the human body and one’s sexuality. By comparing and contrasting the body horror subgenre with both its contemporary the slasher subgenre and its thematic sexual origins within Victorian Gothic fin de siècle horror fiction, this thesis will provide evidence that the subgenre makes significant strides within the horror genre to push a more progressive narrative and representation of men, women, and the LQBTQ+ community, through its deconstruction of the human body/form, sexuality, and reproductive processes. Through a detailed breakdown and analysis of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) and The Fly (1986), Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) and Nightbreed: The Director’s Cut (2014), and Roger Donaldson’s Species (1995), this thesis will demonstrate how filmmaking techniques, themes, and narratives of these films, deconstruct previous notions of the human body and sexuality within the horror genre, and encourage audiences to re-evaluate the body, and the roles/positions/pressures society has created around sexuality and perceived sexual taboos and fears.

Simon’s Song is a self-reflexive creative-critical text composed of journal entries, research notes, and various other records written by fictional undergraduate student Simon Goodsworth, and compiled by an anonymous archivist. Through the organized presentation of Simon’s writings, there appears a fragmented narrative which follows Simon as he joins his university’s musical theatre club and becomes absorbed in planning and research for a Master’s thesis applying poststructuralist theory to the study of musical theatre. Simon’s research and original insights into the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari destabilize the hidden structures implicit in his perception of his self and his world. Through his writing Simon stages explorations of the ubiquity of performativity, the relationship between life and writing, and the inescapability of what Derrida calls “différance,” the precondition of language and meaning in general. Implicit in Simon’s Song is a recognition that each act of engagement with this text is an uniterable performance. Were it not for this recognition of provisionality, it would be safe to assert that Simon’s Song is, above anything else, a thesis about itself.

This thesis examines the enthusiasm and motivations for home canning in the twenty-first century within the context of the DIY movement of the 1990s and the current urban homesteading movement. Using interdisciplinary methodological approaches, including feminist history, feminist auto/biography, and autoethnography, the author provides historical background on home canning and homesteading in Canada and the United States; she also uses her own lived experiences of canning and gardening while pursing an MA in Gender Studies to analyze choice feminism. This thesis examines criticisms of the current interest in home canning by journalists, and the reactions of canning/urban homesteading bloggers to those articles. Ultimately this thesis argues that canning is a valuable skill and that feminism and foodwork are not incompatible; furthermore, blogging about canning and urban homesteading is breaking down the divide between the public and private spheres by providing an income for some bloggers through advertising and book deals.

This thesis will posit that the Iroquois migrations into the Northwest and Oregon Territories are misunderstood in their interactions amongst both the Indigenous and frontiersmen. By Iroquois we specifically mean the French-speaking and Catholic Iroquois who settled in New France in Sault St. Louis (1680), Lac des Deux-Montagnes (1717) and in 1755 when the St. Régis Mission was established. After 150 years of acculturation (1650s to 1800s), these Iroquois had become a hybrid culture with a syncretic Catholicism. The Iroquois immigrated to the Saskatchewan River in 1799 to escape ‘improvements of civilization’ in the east and to follow the mode of life of their forefathers. Peter Fidler’s three versions of the Chesterfield House incident, where 14 Iroquois and 2 Canadiens were killed, will be analyzed to provide a new understanding of the role of the Iroquois as central actors in the fur trade rivalries.

This thesis will posit that the Iroquois migrations into the Northwest and Oregon Territories are misunderstood in their interactions amongst both the Indigenous and frontiersmen. By Iroquois we specifically mean the French-speaking and Catholic Iroquois who settled in New France in Sault St. Louis (1680), Lac des Deux-Montagnes (1717) and in 1755 when the St. Régis Mission was established. After 150 years of acculturation (1650s to 1800s), these Iroquois had become a hybrid culture with a syncretic Catholicism. The Iroquois immigrated to the Saskatchewan River in 1799 to escape ‘improvements of civilization’ in the east and to follow the mode of life of their forefathers. Peter Fidler’s three versions of the Chesterfield House incident, where 14 Iroquois and 2 Canadiens were killed, will be analyzed to provide a new understanding of the role of the Iroquois as central actors in the fur trade rivalries.