Daphne Read, English and Film Studies Julie Rak, English and Film Studies Michael O'Driscoll, English and Film Studies Teresa Zackodnik, English and Film Studies Cressida Heyes, Philosophy Sneja Gunew, English and Women's Studies, University of British Columbia We inherit not "what really happened" to the dead but what lives on from that happening, what is conjured from it, how past generations and events occupy the force fields of the present, how they claim us, and how they haunt, plague, and

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... inspirit our imaginations and visions for the future. -Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History, 150 Abstract In this dissertation I examine representations of the events surrounding the disappearance and murder of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, in the interests of animating a sense of implication in these events among a wider public. To do so, I build on theoretical concepts developed in the work of Avery Gordon, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown, namely the notions of hauntings, grievability, and inheritance. My approach to knowledge production builds upon Avery Gordon's theorizing about the significance of hauntings in particular. Following Gordon, I argue that while the women disappeared from Vancouver are no longer physically "there" in the Downtown Eastside, they do indeed maintain what Gordon describes as a "seething presence" in Vancouver (and beyond), one that suggests matters of some urgency for contemporary social and political life, and so my research traces those presences as they have arisen through my engagement with a variety of cultural productions (including documentary film, photography, journalism, art, and poetry). Building on insights from each of the three theorists listed above, I argue that ethical encounters with the ghosts of the women who have been disappeared require rethinking conventional ways of understanding the relationships between self/other and past/present/future. Because the women disappeared from the Downtown Eastside are disproportionately Indigenous, I begin by investigating how histories of colonization, and in particular the frontier mythology so commonplace in western Canada, are implicated in these contemporary acts of violence. I argue that conventional understandings of space, temporality, and history are inadequate for understanding these events in all of their complexity. From there, I investigate how and why the women were initially cast, in a variety of representations, as living lives that many assumed could not be widely recognized through the framework of what Judith Butler has coined a "grievable life." And finally, I ask after what kind of memorial practices might be most capable of hailing an "us" into relations of inheritance with the women who have been disappeared -such relations, I argue, are a necessary part of reckoning with our individual and collective implication in the disappearances of women from the Downtown Eastside. me from several potentially embarrassing mistakes, and our conversations while I was writing this dissertation have expanded and enriched my thinking in so many ways. To him, everything.