Chantal Nadeau

When imagined in relation to other regions of the United States, the Midwest is often positioned as the norm, the uncontested site of white American middle-class heteronormativity. This characterization has often prevailed in scholarship on sexual identity, practice, and culture, but a growing body of recent queer work on rural sexualities, transnational migration, regional identities, and working-class culture suggests the need to understand the Midwest otherwise. This special issue offers an opportunity to think with, through, and against the idea of region. Rather than reinforce the idea of the Midwest as a core that naturalizes American cultural and ideological formations, these essays instead open up possibilities for unraveling the idea of the heartland.The introduction provides a discussion of the theoretical and critical motivations for understanding the middle as a queer vantage, while the six articles focus on social movements, queer community networks, Midwest-based expressive cultures, and local and diasporic rearticulations of racial, gender, and sexual politics.At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Martin Manalansanis Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Chantal Nadeau is Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Richard T. Rodríguez and Siobhan B. Somerville are Associate Professors in the Department of English.

Fur Nation traces the interwoven relationships between sexuality, national identity, and colonialism. Chantal Nadeau shows how Canada, a white settler colony, bases its existence and its nationhood on a complex sexual economy based on women wrapped in fur.Nadeau traces the centrality of fur through a series of intriguing case studies, including:* Hollywood's take on the 330 year history of the Hudson Bay Company, founded to exploit Canada's rich fur resources* the life of a postwar fur fashion photographer* a 1950s musical called Fur Lady* the battle between Brigitte Bardot's anti-fur activists and the fur industry.Nadeau highlights the connection between 'fur ladies' - women wearing, exploiting or promoting furs - and the beaver, symbol of Canada and nature's master builder. She shows how, in postcolonial Canada, the nation is sexualised around female reproduction and fur, which is both a crucial factor in economic development, and a powerful symbol through which the nation itself is conceived and commodified. Fur Nation demonstrates that, for Canada, fur really is the fabric of a nation.

Fur Nation traces the interwoven relationships between sexuality, national identity, and colonialism. Chantal Nadeau shows how Canada, a white settler colony, bases its existence and its nationhood on a complex sexual economy based on women wrapped in fur.Nadeau traces the centrality of fur through a series of intriguing case studies, including:* Hollywood's take on the 330 year history of the Hudson Bay Company, founded to exploit Canada's rich fur resources* the life of a postwar fur fashion photographer* a 1950s musical called Fur Lady* the battle between Brigitte Bardot's anti-fur activists and the fur industry.Nadeau highlights the connection between 'fur ladies' - women wearing, exploiting or promoting furs - and the beaver, symbol of Canada and nature's master builder. She shows how, in postcolonial Canada, the nation is sexualised around female reproduction and fur, which is both a crucial factor in economic development, and a powerful symbol through which the nation itself is conceived and commodified. Fur Nation demonstrates that, for Canada, fur really is the fabric of a nation.