The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE ROMANCE OF TRANSGRESSION IN CANADA: QUEERING SEXUALITIES, NATIONS, CINEMAS Thomas Waugh Montreal and Kingston: McCill-Queens University Press, 2006, 606 pp. Reviewed by Margaret DeRosia The Romance of Transgression in Canada's titular inspiration comes from the National Film Board-produced cartoon The Romance of Transportation in Canada, a 1950s film that employs campy humour to shape a serious documentary lesson: that citizens-namely, children-understand the historical value of transportation in shaping the nation. At first glance, Waugh's book seems to share little with the film. The Romance of Transgression documents Canadian traditions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer filmmaking. Divided in two halves, the first offers a semi-chronological, thematic study of this history, and the second an encyclopedia of key players on and behind media screens. The Romance of Transgression also documents its own history lesson for the future. The book shapes this lesson through camp and humour as much as detailed research. Its aim: to delineate the history of Canada's ambivalent obsession with queer sexualities in the national cinemas of English Canada and Quebec. It is difficult to imagine anyone better suited to this project than Thomas Waugh, and he succeeds in elegant, witty form. Waugh has been an erudite critic of Canada's national cinemas. His life history traverses the geographical and linguistic boundaries of English and French-speaking regions. He brings a sustained political engagement against censorship and a clear commitment to Canadian gay and lesbian studies and filmmakers. Waugh's rigorous interdisciplinary methodologies and terms, sketched in the introduction, enrich Romance. His uses of genre, auteur, reception, and historical analysis supplement the book's privileged lens of close reading. Waugh's concentration on the denseness of the work refers to the semantic richness of the films, which he locates in detailed socio-historical relations. Romance queers sexualities, nations, and cinemas, but it also queers film criticism. Waugh challenges the still-frequent tendency to desexualize gay, lesbian, and queer films, and reveals what knowledge is lost when skittish critics diminish-if not ignore-queer sex and sexualities. These films and filmmakers are not worthy of analysis in spite of being queer, but in part because they are queer. After the introduction, Waugh's first two chapters provide fascinating encounters with symptomatic queerness in the films of the 1950s and 60s. The violent, competitive pas de deux between men in Norman McLaren's Neighbours flags the first chapter's analysis of shifting, anxious masculinities seen in early Cold-War-era Canadian films. The following chapter tracks a cautious ambivalence about heterosexuality seen in French and English examples of Canadian art cinema from the 1960s' sexual revolution. Both chapters show how these decades' queer moments, characters, and (sometimes closeted) makers and personnel helped to shape a public discourse on sexuality for the nation by the 1970s. Beginning Romance in the 1950s is strategic. Waugh calls for-and provides-recognition of a buried legacy of earlier queer Canadian films, filmmakers and exhibition contexts and controversies. Romance then uses this foundation to argue in later chapters for more scholarship on less well-known experimental and independent queer artists working across Canada. Mainstream films (read: Hollywood) may enable broad public awareness of gay and lesbian issues in North America, but Waugh reminds us that smaller, more regional Canadian cinemas (including video and installation art) may engage with queer desire and identities in more complex ways than a big budget Bound or Brokeback Mountain. Post-Stonewall/Omnibus films ground later chapters, all organized around thematic foci. The chapter Fairy Tales, on films of urban 1970s queerness, leads to Passages, an analysis of narratives of geographical displacement in and beyond the 1970s. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".