Library Guides: Violence Against Women and Girls: Remembering the Montreal Massacre: December 6th, 1989

We shall not forget you

On Wednesday December 6th, 1989 fourteen women were gunned down at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, and Annie Turcotte

These women are a part of our collective memory in the tragedy that is violence against women and girls. They are held in our thoughts and prayers, especially on the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women.

Natalie Provost: wounded

"'We are not feminists.'"

An audio and visual memory and contemplation

After the Montreal Massacre
After the Montreal Massacre is a useful tool for helping us come to terms with these murders and how they relate to the larger picture of male violence against women. The haunting images taken on the day of the massacre and in the days following, set the stage for an exploration of the urgent issues of misogyny, male violence and sexism.
Beyond December 6
One year after the tragedy that took the lives of fourteen female students, Montreal's École Polytechnique has returned to something resembling normalcy. Nathalie Provost is a survivor of the shooting at the engineering school. Today, with friends, she opens up. About the tragedy, about feminism. About racism and sexism. About the fact that society has difficulty accepting difference. And, above all, about life, which must go on beyond December 6.
Legacy of pain
On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into Montreal's École Polytechnique and shot 14 young women to death. The massacre shocked the world. Questions about Lépine and his motives were difficult to answer. A profile of Marc Lépine traces his upbringing and other factors that shaped his distorted world in an effort to provide some explanation for his heinous crime. Legacy of Pain also looks at the aftermath from a number of perspectives, starting with the families of the murdered women.
Polytechnique
Villeneuve… says he wanted to explore the massacre’s narrative from the point of view of the male students who witnessed Lépine’s terror. “We have talked a lot about how this drama has affected women, as we should have, but men were hurt as well. It had a major impact on them,” the 41-year-old director says. “I wanted to explore and illustrate the humiliation and shame that [those] men lived.” (Bailey, 2009)

Ann

A first year student in chemical engineering

Suzanne Laplante-Edward “recalled her daughter’s excitement after being accepted on the University of Montreal alpine ski racing team, just one week before her death at the hands of Lepine. ‘Never mind that she will never actually race a single race on that team. She made it, didn’t she? And all through fall, she trained and practiced, and raised funds for the team. The main thing is she had a ball doing it. And she is racing with theme in spirit.’” “’She was a charmer, especially to handsome young men, but she was also warm and sincere.’” (Bueckert, 1991)

A call to action

December 6 : from the Montreal massacre to gun control : the inside story by Heidi Rathjen
Call Number: HV7439.C3 R37

ISBN: 9780771061257

Publication Date: 1999

“Yet Rathjen's account captures none of the upheaval of that time. In her quest for pragmatic solutions, she insistently severs gun control from any social discussion of violence -- violence against women, violence against men and our culture of violence -- omissions all the more glaring given the recent wave of school shootings.” - Review
Arming and disarming: A history of gun control in Canada by Brown, R. Blake
Call Number: E-Book

ISBN: 9781442626379

Publication Date: 2012

"From the École Polytechnique shootings of 1989 to the political controversy surrounding the elimination of the federal long-gun registry, the issue of gun control has been a subject of fierce debate in Canada. But in fact, firearm regulation has been a sharply contested issue in the country since Confederation. Arming and Disarming offers the first comprehensive history of gun control in Canada from the colonial period to the present." - Publisher

Our collective grief and thought

"I hate feminists!" : December 6, 1989, and its aftermath by Mélissa Blais
Call Number: HV6535 .C33 B5313

ISBN: 9781552666807

Publication Date: 2014

"On December 6, 1989, a man walked into the engineering school Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal armed with a semi-automatic rifle and, declaring "I hate feminists," killed fourteen young women. Originally published in French in 2009, "I Hate Feminists!" examines the collective memory that emerged in the aftermath of the massacre as Canadians struggled to make sense of this tragic event and to understand the motivations of the killer." - Publisher
Because they were women: the Montreal Massacre by Boileau, Josee
Call Number: HV6535.C33 M65

ISBN: 9781772601428

Publication Date: 2020

"Fourteen young women, murdered because they were women, are memorialized in this definitive account of the tragic day that forced a reckoning with violence against women in our culture. The victims of what became known as the “Montreal Massacre” are remembered, their lives cut short on December 6, 1989 when a man entered École Polytechnique and systematically shot every young woman he encountered. The killer was motivated by a misogyny whose roots go far beyond one man and one day. This book examines how December 6 precipitated an entire cultural shift in thinking around gender-based violence." - Publisher
Dancing in red shoes will kill you by Decker, Donna
Call Number: PS3604.E243 D35

ISBN: 9781771332019

Publication Date: 2015

"Through the braided narratives of three spirited characters, this novel bears witness to the infamous crime that metastasized uber-civilized Montreal, the "Montreal Massacre," when on December 6, 1989, fourteen female engineering students were murdered in their classrooms." - Publisher
The December man = L'homme de décembre by Colleen Murphy
Call Number: PS8576 .U815 D43

ISBN: 9780887545955

Publication Date: 2007

“The first scene opens, years after the massacre, with the emotionally ravaged pair gassing themselves in their living room-we understand there must be some motivation, but, since Murphy's play progresses backward through time, toward 1989, we must wait to discover the antecedents.” - Review
Montreal massacre : a story of membership categorization analysis by Peter Eglin
Call Number: HV6535.C33 M648

ISBN: 9780889204225

Publication Date: 2003

“The authors deftly situate the shooter's statements within a political framing relevant to the status of women in society, including the examination of the perpetrator's suicide note, and subsequent interpretations made by media commentators.” - Review
Rage and resistance : a theological reflection on the Montreal Massacre by Theresa M. O'Donovan
Call Number: HV6535 .C33 M668

ISBN: 9780889205222

Publication Date: 2007

"A practical exercise in Canadian contextual theology, Rage and Resistance analyzes responses to a tragic historical event by engaging with the work of theologian Gregory Baum and sociologist Dorothy E. Smith. Baum articulates the theological imperative to address the context in which our lives are embedded, calling for critical social analysis in order to understand, and possibly convert, social evil; Smith takes the standpoint of women as a determinate position from which society may be known." - Publisher

A Wider Context

Extremities: trauma, testimony, and community by Miller, Nancy K.
Call Number: HV6250.25 .E9

ISBN: 9780252070549

Publication Date: 2002

"Extremities combines personal and scholarly approaches to a wide range of texts that bear witness to shocking and moving accounts of individual trauma: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Tatana Kellner's Holocaust art, Ruth Klüger's powerful memoir Still Alive, and Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial narrative of concentration camp suffering Fragments. The book grapples with the cultural and social effects of historical crises, including the Montreal Massacre, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the medical catastrophes of HIV/AIDS and breast cancer." - Publisher
Femicidal fears: narratives of the female gothic experience by Meyers, Helene
Call Number: PR888 .T3 M49

ISBN: 9780791451526

Publication Date: 2001

"In Femicidal Fears, Helene Meyers examines contemporary femicidal plots--plots in which women are killed or fear for their lives--to argue that these female Gothic novels of death actually bring the nuances of feminist thought to life. Through her examination of works by Angela Carter, Muriel Spark, Edna O'Brien, Beryl Bainbridge, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood, as well as such infamous cases as the Montreal Massacre and the Yorkshire Ripper, Meyers contends that these femicidal plots restage and embody feminist debates flattened by such glib and automatic phrases as "essentialism" and "victim feminism." Bringing the Gothic and the quotidian together in discussions of heterosexual romance, the sadomasochistic couple, female paranoia, postfeminism, and images of the female body, the book affirms that refusing victimization may not be a simple story, but it is nevertheless one worth telling." - Publisher
Killing women: the visual culture of gender and violence by Burfoot, Annette
Call Number: E-Book

ISBN: 9780889204973

Publication Date: 2006

"The essays in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence find important connections in the ways that women are portrayed in relation to violence, whether they are murder victims or killers. The book’s extensive cultural contexts acknowledge and engage with contemporary theories and practices of identity politics and debates about the ethics and politics of representation itself. Does representation produce or reproduce the conditions of violence? Is representation itself a form of violence? This book adds significant new dimensions to the characterization of gender and violence by discussing nationalism and war, feminist media, and the depiction of violence throughout society." - Publisher
Legalizing misandry: from public shame to systemic discrimination against men by Nathanson, Paul
Call Number: E-Book

ISBN: 9780773528628

Publication Date: 2006

"Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young believe that this reveals a shift in the United States and Canada to a worldview based on ideological feminism, which presents all issues from the point of view of women and, in the process, explicitly or implicitly attacks men as a class. They argue that ideological feminism is silently reshaping law, public policy, education, and journalism." - Publisher
Roadblocks to Equality: Women Challenging Boundaries by Klaehn, Jeffery
Call Number: HQ1121 .R59

ISBN: 9781551643175

Publication Date: 2009

"Covering a wide range of topics and dealing with real-life issues, these international contributors, who are both male and female and who cross a variety of boundaries-social, cultural, and political-examine various dimensions of women's lived experiences in order to address the challenges that arise from women's contemporary struggles in relation to globalization, human rights, and a political economy." - Publisher
States of rage: emotional eruption, violence, and social change by Curry, Renee R.
Call Number: HN90.V5 S83

ISBN: 9780814715307

Publication Date: 1996

"What is the relationship between rage and power(lessness)? How does rage relate to personal or social injustice? Can we ritualize rage or is it always spontaneous? Finally, what provokes rage and what is provocative about it? This book contains essays that focus on the psychological and social origins of rage, and, its relationship to the self." - Publisher
The word of a woman : feminist dispatches by Morgan, Robin
Call Number: E-Book

ISBN: 1497678072

Publication Date: 2014

"Robin Morgan is widely known as one of feminism's strongest, most persuasive activists. As a writer, she is unique in her ability to distill ideas into smart pieces of nonfiction that can transform a reader's worldview forever." - Publisher

A mother's pain

Aftermath: the mother of Marc Lepine tells the story of her life before and after the Montreal massacre
“For the first time since they had told me that Marc was the killer, I felt anger and dislike for the forces of law and order. For all their feigned consideration, those two detectives had little regard for what I might be going through. They were intent on carrying out the orders of their superiors with single-minded determination.” (p. 11)

Chorus

All life is sacred

my mother keeps repeating

as daughters’ bodies spasm

bleeding fragments of life

curled in fetal position

I cringe “All life is sacred”

I murmur from my chair

My breath wraps around images

tries to make sense of a world

that created this sensibility

stealing your life too soon

by Lee Maracle

Lest we forget

The Montreal Massacre
"The Montreal Massacre is a translation of essays, letters to editors, and poetry about the impact of the deaths of fourteen women engineering students, murdered by a gun-wielding man out to kill "feminists." In words both tender and scathing, its writers struggle to place the killings in their social context." - Publisher

References

Bailey, P. (2009, March 19). Reliving the tragedy: Director Denis Villeneuve discusses his film about the Montreal Massacre. CBC News: Arts & Entertainment.

Bueckert, D. (1991, January 17), Mother of massacre victim pleads for tougher gun laws. The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo).

Maracle, L. (2015). Talking to the Diaspora. APR Books.

Subject Guide

Richard Sims

Email Me

Contact:

Progress Campus Library

416-289-5000 ext 5423

Subjects: Citations, Culinary Arts, GNED Electives: Humanities & Social Sciences, Hospitality, Multidisciplinary: All Subjects, Research & Writing, School of Hospitality, Tourism and Culinary Arts (SHTCA), The Business School (TBS), Tourism & Recreation