“Practicing Self-Care on a Highway in the Middle of Nowhere”
Ashley McKenzie’s Cape Breton
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20462000 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Thompson (0000-0003-4661-6233, University of New Brunswick, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 55-68 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Review of Canadian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0272-2011 • E-ISSN: 1943-9954 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02722011.2025.2500840 |
| OpenAlex | W4411928464 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
This article examines the way in which film-maker Ashley McKenzie depicts changes in Cape Breton’s landscape and its economic and social fabric. McKenzie’s films, Werewolf (2016) and Queen’s of the Qing Dynasty (2022), give us a vocabulary for understanding the island in the cost of living era: they move our gaze to Cape Breton’s experience of opioid addiction; a collapsing mental health system; an influx of international students who McKenzie depicts as a new class of labor to be exploited; a particularly grim version of the “gig economy”; a mismatch between expectations around gender and patterns of work; and non-normative sexuality in a marginal place. This article explores how McKenzie’s films document the impacts of economic change in industrial Cape Breton and looks specifically at her portrayal of “noxious deindustrialization.”
Archaeology · Art · Cape · Geography · Australian History and Society · Canadian Identity and History · Short Stories in Global Literature
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |