Spades, Actors and Fags: Fiction and/as Queer Theory in Timothy Findley’s Spadework

Abstract

[Abstract] This paper analyses Timothy Findley’s last novel, Spadework (2002 [2001] ), to engage the relevance of Gender/Queer Theory as a visible intertext. As we read, it seems apparent that that Spadework provides a further turn of the screw to invigorate the gendermarked fiction/theory popular in Canadian writing. Issues of gender/sex performativity and performance, in several ways, populate the novel, which, as a whole, is a critique of identity very close to the one proposed by Queer Theory models, usually oriented to interrogate normativity and the identities that it produces.