Girls in “White” Dresses, Pretend Fathers: Interracial Sexuality and Intercultural Community in the Canadian Arctic

• Published in: Theatre Research in Canada
• Main Author: Davis-Fisch, Heather
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2011
• Subjects: Visual Arts and Performing Arts; Arctic; inuit; Nunavut
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/tric.32.1.84; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/tric.32.1.84

In 1903-04, men and officers of the Era and the Neptune and local Inuit socialized extensively while the two ships wintered near Fullerton Harbour (Nunavut). Square dances, the most popular shipboard events, functioned as sites where racial differences were manipulated and enacted through social performance. Examining Inuit women’s choice to wear “white” clothing to these dances allows one to see a specific way that costuming and social performance facilitated intercultural sociability and interracial sexual relationships. Providing clothing that made Inuit women appear more “white” and teaching them square dances allowed whalers to contain, ostensibly, the threat posed by “going native” through miscegenation; however, the clothing also highlighted the women’s racial alterity. Non-Inuit men also produced social performances to facilitate interracial sexual liaisons: the relationships that whalers developed with Inuit women resembled the spousal exchanges practiced in many Inuit communities and their behaviour toward Inuit children mimicked the traditional behaviour of Inuit men toward their families. The sexual and social performances produced by Inuit women and non-Inuit men were recognized as “pretend” by those who witnessed and participated in them, but they also created an actual sense of intercultural community among whalers and Inuit. Considering the community as constituted through performance locates it as a specific site at which ethnicity, like gender, emerges as a performative rather than expressive marker of identity, demonstrating how racial and ethnic identities are “tenuously constituted in time [. . .] instituted through a stylized repetition of acts [. . .] through the stylization of the body” (Butler 519).