Beyond the logic of emblemization: Remembering and learning from the montreal massacre

Educational Theory

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 133-155

  Rosenberg, Sharon ^a   Simon, Roger I ^b  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52649167500     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00133.x     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Heidi Rathjen and Charles Monpetit, December 6: From the Montreal Massacre to Gun Control: The Inside Story (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), 10.
2. The letter, detailing anti-feminist sentiments and a "hit list" of prominent Quebec women, was released by authorities a few weeks prior to the first anniversary of the murders. It was first printed in a French-language daily newspaper in Montreal, La Presse, 24 November 1990. It is reprinted in English in The Montreal Massacre, ed. Louise Malette and Marie Chalouh, trans. Marlene Wildeman (Charlottetown: gynergy books, 1991).
3. In contrast, the anniversary markings in additionally included a women-only act of civil protest in downtown Toronto against continuing cuts to services for assaulted women, and a call to action by an alliance of feminists on university campuses in British Columbia, calling for province-wide demonstrations against, and institutional accountability for, the violences against women that continue in universities.1995
4. Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert, Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma (Latham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
5. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 96.
6. Documentation of: memory has taken many forms. These forms include art shows such as Art Against Violence Against Women: A Personal Statement (Halifax: Eye Level Gallery); Don't Remain Silent (Toronto: The Woman's Common, 1990); Threnody (Vancouver: The Lateral Gallery, 1990). Poetic responses include:1990
7. Allison Campbell, "Not One Step Back", Contemporary Verse 214, no. 4 (Spring 1992): 26
8. Maggie Helwig, "Flashpoint", Matricrt: A Canadian Feminist Art journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990):12
9. Rita Kohli, "Musings of a South Asian Woman in the Wake of the Montreal Massacre", Canadian Woman Studies 11, no 4 (1991): 13-14
10. Memorialization in video form includes Gerry Rogers, After the Montreal Massacre (Montreal: National Film Board, Studio D, 1991
11. Maureen Bradley, Reframing the Montreal Massacre (Toronto: Full Frame Film and Videc Distribution, 1995)
12. Ling Chin, Tee Hee Hee (Vancouver: Moving Images Distribution 1996).
13. Left open to question, however, is whether this historical framing also enhances the likelihood of marking and bringing to the fore other pervasive acts of such violence, since a risk of emblemization that it absorbs into its structure the specificities of other occurrences, diminishing what it is that can be learned in remembrance. This is a risk we will return to.
14. Lee Lakeman, "Women, Violence, and the Montreal Massacre", In Twist and Shout: A Decade of Feminist Writing in This Magazine, ed. Susan Crean (Toronto: Seeond Story Press, 1992), 94
15. Catherine Nelson-McDermott, "Murderous Fallout: Post-Lepinc Rhetoric", Atlantis 17, no. 1 (FallWinter 1991): 125
16. Lisa Schmidt, "Sorrow, Anger after Montreal", Kinesis (7 February 1989): 7.
17. Jennifer Scanlon, "Educating the Living, Remembering the Dead: The Montreal Massacre as Metaphor", Feminist Teacher 8, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1994): 77.
18. This response was largely mobilized by women, drawing on feminist analyses of violences against women. While we do not forget this in our writing, we are cautious about evoking the label "feminist response", as if it referenced a singular and cohesive position. This is not simply a matter of being generally attentive to language. While the arguments in this essay are calling into question positions of remembrance of the Massacre that have been understood as feminist, they do so not from a disavowal of the horror of violences against women. Instead, we are interested in contemplating other terms for remembering the event of the Massacre in the hopes of coming to terms with these horrors more fully.
19. Julie Brickman, "Female Lives, Feminist Deaths: the Relationship of the Montreal Massacre to Dissociation, Incest, and Violence against Women", Canadian Psychology 33, no. 2 (April 1992): 129.
20. "The Act of n Madman or a Tragedy?"The Globe and Mail (6 December 1990)
21. Barbra Frum"The Journal", 7 December, quoted in Lakcman, "Women, Violence, and the Montreal Massacre,". 98.1989
22. We might note that this is a practice that risks a terrible echo to Lepine's act itself: for he did not target fourteen specific and particular women, he killed the women as emblems themselves-emblems, on his terms, of feminism. Our thanks to Nicholas Burbules for drawing this point to our attention.
23. For examples of this position, see Marusia Bociurkiw,, Fuse 8, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 6-10."Je me Souviens: a Response to the Montreal Killings"
24. Caffyn Memory, "Contentesting History", Matrint 5 no. 3 (1995), 6-11
25. Rita Kohli, Musings
26. We wonder, however, if the issue of repetition is perhaps an indicator that the initial reading of the Massacre as an act of violence against women has been losing the force of its meaning as this emblematic structure becomes more and more commonplace. What is being lost, we sense, is the legacy being bequeathed in this memorial stance, and why we feel some urgency in writing now.
27. There Were 38 students in the class, 31 women and 7 men. Most students were in their early to mid-twenties. The class appeared to be predominately white; the extent of its ethnocuitural composition was not recorded.
28. This line comes directly from the Wyrd Sister's song, "This Memory", which contains lyrics referencing the likely substitutability of other women for those murdered, ending with the lines: "don't let us lose this memory / because it could've been you or me" (on The Wyrd Sisters, Leave a Little Light (Manitoba: Oh Yah! Records.). This theme of instantiating substitutability within the event structureof the Massacre is not limited to this particular song, but has been prevalent across feminist memorial response. We note, also, the installation series, "Murdered by Misogyny," by artist Lin Gibson, which paired the names of the women murdered in Montreal with the names of fourteen living women, anchoring the second list with the phrase, "guilty as charged" (in Marian Yeo, "Murdered by Misogyny:1992
29. Lin Gibson's Response to the Montreal Massacre, Canadian Woman Studies 12, no. 1 (Fall 1991), 8-11
30. Working slightly differently within the same remembrance pedagogy, Pati Beaudoin created a horizontal panel of photographs of the 14 women murdered, completing the panel with a mirror (installed as part of the show, Don't Remain Silent). For a sustained discussion of each of these works, sec Sharon Rosenberg, "Rupturing the 'Skin of Memory': Bearing Witness to the 1989 Massacre of Women in Montreal" (Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1997).
31. Bociurkiw, "Je me Souviens", 10.
32. Obviously normativity is not singular - what is expected/anticipated for women in different positions and locations may differ substantially.
33. Colette Guillaumin, "Madness and the Social Norm", trans. Mary Jo Lakehead, Feminist Issues 11, 1991): 13
34. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 64.
35. In exploring what learning might be staged in and through traumatic awakening, we of course recognize that such awakenings may he too troubling to be consciously sustained. In other words, the "shock of the known", the return of the repressed, will inevitably be repressed again. While we here set out the pedagogical significance of traumatic awakening, it is beyond the bounds of this essay to pursue the question of what social and institutional forms might sustain moments of pedagogical engagement with such awakenings.
36. What is at stake in these questions is quite different from those instances where school authorities have-provided trauma counseling for students who have experienced, in their own schools, the aftershocks ol mass violence (as at Columbine High School in Colorado).
37. Deborah P. Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 133.
38. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 64.
39. We are using the term "survivor" here not in the usual feminist sense of "the survivor"- an identity category that marks a state of being. Rather, what we want to underscore through our deployment of this term is that an awakening into survivorship is an awakening into a relation not only with the dead, but also with others who have experienced the Massacre as a trauma.
40. We note here the importance of recent scholarship that is calling attention to the ways in which certain feminist discourses regarding violences against women become inadvertently complicit with structures of intimidation and subordination. See in particular the work of Sharon Marcus, "Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: a Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention", in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York and London: Roiitiedge, 1992), 385-403
41. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995
42. Nadia Burton, "Tools Not Rules: Cultivating Practices of Resistance to and Prevention of Sexualized Violence" Ph.D Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1999).
43. Shoshana Fclman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 49-50.
44. Britzman, Lost Subjects.
45. Michael S. Roth, The Ironist's Cage: Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History (New York: Colombia University Press, 1995), 222.
46. Judith Butler, "Review Essay of Spirit in the Ashes, E. Wyshogrod (1985)," History and Memory27, no. 1 (1988): 69.
47. Roth, The Ironist's Cage, 226.
48. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Presc, 1998)