Janine Marchessault is a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalisation at York University in Toronto. She is the director of the Visible City Project and Archive at York University, which examines urban art cultures and citizenship in the context of globalisation. She is a founding member of the Public Access Collective and the journal Public: Art/Culture/Ideas.

The papers in this publication originate from a series of public lectures held at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in May 1991. Working Papers on Culture is intended to extend the forum for artists and critics to exchange ideas on cultural politics as these relate to strategies of social change and alternate art historical/critical paradigms. Some writing tends to be more performative in nature than others, and we have made an effort to keep that spontaneity here.

– Janine Marchessault, excerpted from her “Preface”

Contents

Preface

Janine Marchessault

Framing Sexuality: Popular, Political and Aesthetic Spectacles of the Body

Tom Folland

Nothing Butt: The Truth About the Sex Trade

Gwendolyn

Autobiographical Acts, and the Difficulty of Saying I

Carol Laing

Apocalyptic Dreams and Historiographic Nostalgia

Brenda Longfellow

The Funk Dilemma

Betty Julian

Cultures of Conquest/Culture in Context

Dot Tuer

Bodily Fluids and National Health: Cleanliness, Race and Sex in English Canada, 1890-1920

Mariana Valverde

Defining the New World Order

Lennox Farrel