Deadly Contact

by Amber Dean

Mystery

190 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Amber Dean became an Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at McMaster University in 2011. The bulk of her recent research develops a feminist, interdisciplinary approach to exploring the social and political implications of representations of murdered or missing Indigenous women in Canada. Her manuscript, Inheriting What Lives On From Vancouver’s Disappeared Women (currently under contract with the University of Toronto Press) is the first book-length scholarly examination of the representational practices and cultural productions that bring the story of the disappearances or murders of women from the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in Vancouver to a wider public. The book examines a diverse array of cultural productions, including police posters, documentary film and photography on the Downtown Eastside, media representations and artists’ renderings of some of the missing women, memorials (both permanent and performance-based), selected media coverage of the Pickton trial, social justice activism, and self-representations by some of the women who have been disappeared (including poetry, journal entries and participation in activist work). The book explores the potential that these various cultural productions hold for provoking a much wider sense of implication in the disappearances or murders of the women in question, and in doing so it provides provocations for reconsidering how and why these events were possible in the first place.