The politics of print: Feminist publishing and Canadian literary production

This project considers the impact of two small feminist publishing houses, Press Gang and Women's Press, on the Canadian literary field between 1970--1997. It locates the economic and cultural circumstances of Canadian small feminist presses within shifting markets, both local and global, and examines the literary marketplace in relation to traditionally marginalized producers such as women of colour and lesbian writers. Key texts by Sharon Riis, Anne Cameron, Nicole Brossard, Gail Scott, Betsy Warland, Shani Mootoo, and Larissa Lai, as well as two landmark feminist conferences, Women and Words and Telling It, are used to illustrate the ways in which feminism is positioned in various discourses over time, the slippage between women's and feminist writing, and the ways in which both categories produce ideologies and practices of gender.;Reading together the social histories and the publishing lists of Press Gang and Women's Press provides an exciting opportunity to examine how political and aesthetic discourses intersect. As mediating institutions that brokered relations between various leftist political communities and women's writing, Press Gang and Women's Press' activities are richly suggestive for thinking through the links between literary texts and social movements. The emergence of these presses in the 1970s within a literary field dominated by masculine and national interests introduced competing narratives of feminism, socialism, and lesbian sexuality into the dominant narratives of Canadian culture and identity.;The social histories of these two presses speak broadly to a range of interests pertinent to the cultural field. First, since texts published by these publishing houses have shaped the literary field in Canada, they speak to the critical role of small presses in this country. Second, Women's Press and Press Gang, as politically engaged publishers, produced groundbreaking feminist texts and helped develop women's communities through the medium of print. The constructions of these literary and social networks were crucial in developing social and cultural capital for the women's movement. Finally, the positions of Press Gang and Women's Press within the cultural field reflect a series of larger ongoing debates within Canada over the appropriation of voice, racism and publishing, censorship, and identity politics.