TORONTO, June 17, 2003 -- The Mt. Trudeau debate, is examined in the spring issue of TOPIA, Canada’s journal of cultural studies based at York University.
In his article, The Colonial Climbs of Mount Trudeau: Thinking Masculinity through the Homosocial, Bruce Erickson of the University of Alberta says Prime Minister Jean Chretien sought to build an image of himself in the shadow of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau through the renaming of Mt. Logan.
Theorizing on the homosocial as activities between men that are important to the construction of power, Erickson compares the Mt. Trudeau debate to a particular ethic in the mountaineering community that "points to an insecurity in white Canadian masculinity…." He says the controversy around Mr. Chretien’s attempt in the fall of 2000 to rename Canada’s highest peak after Mr. Trudeau reveals how we position ourselves in society through leisure activities and their associated notions of gender, race and sexuality.
In his article, Reading the "Real" in Survivor: Unearthing the Republican Roots in Reality Narrative, Tony Tremblay of St. Thomas University in Fredericton writes that reality shows are an "elaborate ideological staging of reality" whose popularity is guaranteed by their synchronicity with the current cultural and political climate. "Survivor has become the most successful narrative since Dallas to profitably reproduce dominant bourgeois ideology in a way that guarantees pleasure," writes Tremblay.
Robert E. Babe of the University of Western Ontario introduces an annual column with a critique of money as "our pre-eminent medium of communication." He challenges readers to confront the devastating effects of money policies on democracy, community and ecological survival. "…biodiversity is omitted from the value calculus of relative prices, which is to say that in money terms, biodiversity is worthless," writes Babe.
TOPIA is edited by Jody Berland, a professor of cultural studies at York University, and is published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. For a complete table of contents, visit www.yorku.ca/topia/. To obtain a copy, visit the York University Bookstore; to order a single issue or a subscription, visit www.wlu.ca/~wwwpress/.
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For further information, please contact:
| Prof. Jody Berland | Susan Bigelow |
| Graduate Program in Communication and Culture | Media Relations |
| York University | York University |
| 416-654-1727 | 416-736-2100, ext. 22091 |
| jody.berland@sympatico.ca | sbigelow@yorku.ca |
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