Bodies at Risk: Urban Danger in Zsuzsi Gartner’s “City of my Dreams” and Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down

Abstract

This article discusses the representation of Toronto and Vancouver as urban landscapes of danger, toxicity, and as sources of corporeal pollution, especially for the poor, the homeless, prostitutes, and women. Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down and Zsusi Gartner’s “City of my Dreams” imagine the city as a verticale space of “fallenness,” both literal and figurative, and show that contemporary Canadian cities are not always the well-ordered places we imagine them to be, but are rather complex, multilayered spaces of risk, bodily danger, economic dispossession, and social alienation.

Keywords

• espacio urbano
• pobreza
• sin hogar
• género
• vancouver
• toronto