Tracing the textures of an ethical relation to the dead: trauma, witnessing, and the "Montreal massacre".
This essay offers a consideration of English-language feminist memorial discourse as this has been sedimenting in Canada since the 1989 murder of 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique. The author suggests that remembrance now, almost a decade after the murders, exceeds the terms offered by a politic in which the living and the dead are connected through feminist alignment ["it could have been me"]. In its place, the author argues that there is a binding relation to the dead that is forged through understanding the murders as an event of historical trauma and rupture. She then contemplates and explores the implications of this rethinking of an ethics of relation through a situated analysis of annual memorial vigils.
Rosenberg
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D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism; D006117:Grief; D006708:Homicide / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D009864:Ontario; D011057:Politics; D017741:Survivors / Q000523:psychology*