As we navigate the urban labyrinth, whenever we follow the invisible paths laid down by our longings, we trace desire lines across the city. Like the rutted footpaths worn across well-used playgrounds, and the spontaneous shortcuts that materialize at street corners, desire lines mark the movements we make by choice rather than at the command of curbstones and social conventions. Radiating outward from the soul of every city dweller, they are the outward expressions of internal desire, a compass charting our most intimate longings.
Curiously, these cartographies of desire come to us not from poets but from transportation engineers, who once designed highway networks by charting destination preferences they called “desire lines.” Subsequently the expression has come to refer more commonly to the informal footpaths worn by pedestrians deviating from paved pathways in pursuit of an efficient shortcut or playful detour. More recently, desire lines have been traced across digital terrain, mapping virtual networks and documenting patterns of electronic wanderlust. A thread connecting these seemingly divergent desire lines is an acknowledgement that between the urban imperatives of production and consumption lies a vast, corporeal landscape made by our movements in the pursuit of leisure, pleasure and play.
In today’s class we will examine representations of gender and sexuality in Toronto literature. Literary works discussed will include Stephen Marche’s Raymond and Hannah (Doubleday Canada, 2005), Daniel Jones’ “Things I Have Put into my Asshole,” Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless (HarperCollins, 2007) and Gordon Stewart Anderson’s The Toronto You are Leaving (Untroubled Heart, 2007).
Slides for today’s class are available here.
