Care Under Raid: Policing, Privacy, and Queer Resistance

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Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

Leanne Powers, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.

“Suddenly, I heard nothing outside, and that was when the police were walking through that area. I heard a knock at the door, and I put myself in front of the person who was in the temple with me and stood up to just [maintain] as much control of the situation as I could.”

—Leanne Powers, Temple Priestess

Around 12:45 a.m. on September 15, 2000, five plainclothes male police officers entered the Pussy Palace under the pretense of a liquor licence inspection. They walked through the pool and sauna. They knocked on closed doors. They recorded names and addresses.

For many patrons, the violation was immediate and visceral. But to understand why the raid felt so profound, we have to understand what the police were interrupting.

The Pussy Palace was not simply a party. It was a space deliberately structured around consent, orientation, and collective care. Volunteers greeted newcomers and explained etiquette. Security circulated not to police pleasure but to support it.

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The Extraordinary Meaning of Everyday Life: Joy Parr’s Pioneering Vision in the History of Technology

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By Jessica van Horssen

Historians aren’t really made to be on film. Or at least not beyond a 15-second “talking head” clip in a documentary, and even then, we can be woefully thrown off-course. As a fan of Diane Morgan’s Philomena Cunk, I’m well-versed in the risks of historians on the screen. This is why I was both excited and terrified when I was asked to create a film about Joy Parr’s scholarly life and impact following her passing in 2024.

Joy Parr was one of Canada’s leading historians, and she forged new epistemological frameworks and fields through her work in the history of childhood, gender, technology, and environment. She also didn’t like her photo being taken, and there is no film footage of her that I could have used to craft a visual tribute around. To solve these issues, I focused on Parr herself, being led by the work, and so too is the film I made with the help of a fantastic undergraduate student, Sedona Micale.

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Listening to Youth: Historicising & Challenging Parental Rights Discourse

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Derek Cameron, Karissa Patton, and Kristine Alexander


A repeating pattern of multicolored prohibition symbols crossing out the words “Parental Rights.”  Created by Karissa Patton.

In early February 2026, the United Conservative Party announced a change to MyHealth Records, a website that provides Albertans with online access to medical records. Previously limited to children under the age of twelve, parental access to medical records now extends to adolescents up to the age eighteen. 

In response to this change, Dr. Sam Wong, president of the pediatrics section of the Alberta Medical Association, told a CBC reporter that allowing parents to access their teenage children’s medical records would “jeopardize…the health care of certain adolescents.” This is the latest in a series of efforts by the UCP to remove young people’s rights to quality sex education and healthcare in Alberta. By privileging parental rights over adolescent autonomy, the UCP have expanded parental surveillance of young people’s healthcare decisions, including contraception, abortion, gender-affirming care, and vaccination.

This type of parental rights discourse, which poses particular risks for queer and trans youth, is not limited to Alberta. The idea that the rights of individual parents and guardians should come before the rights of young people as well is a transnational phenomenon. It is also historically specific. We suggest it should be understood as one outcome of the post-1970s coming together of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that Melinda Cooper has studied in the context of the United States. Over the past few decades, Canadian politics and public discourse have also been shaped by calls to return to what Cooper dubs the English “poor law tradition of family responsibility.”[1] This framework shifts authority away from the state by redefining healthcare and education as private family obligations and reinforcing hierarchies of gender and sexuality. It also undergirds claims that parents and caregivers have a unique right to surveil and control many aspects of their teenage children’s lives.

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Rural Museums Matter: The Ross-Thomson House & Store

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By Erin Isaac and Cady Berardi

The thoughts and sentiments shared in this essay are our own and do not represent the Nova Scotia Museum or Shelburne Historical Society.

As part of the significant cuts set out in the 2026-2027 Nova Scotia provincial budget, the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage announced last week that they needed “to focus [their] efforts where they will make the most difference.” Those efforts will no longer extend to the 12 rural museums they suddenly, and without warning, decided to permanently shutter. Shelburne’s Ross-Thomson House & Store was among the casualties. 

In their statement, the department indicated that they considered several factors when deciding which museums to close, but noted especially that these sites had low visitor attendance. This measure does not acknowledge the value of these heritage spaces to their communities or the important histories they preserve.

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Judging a Book by its Cover: Making Sense of Sources and Silences in the History of Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in Rural Nova Scotia

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By Sarah Kittilsen

In the summer of 2025, I was rifling through a box of uncatalogued materials at the Farm Equipment Museum in Bible Hill, Nova Scotia, when I happened upon an old record book. Tattered and yellowed with age, it had been used by fourteen-year-old Frank Daniels in the early 1930s to document what he expended and earned while raising his calf, Princess Pet.
But that wasn’t what struck me about the record book. I wasn’t particularly interested in the money Daniels had spent, nor the pounds of milk Princess Pet had consumed, nor how tall she had measured in the month of May. It was scarce on these details anyway, since Daniels had only filled out the first two pages. It was the cover, instead, that caught my eye. Between the crisp typeface, Daniels had scribbled in big, pencilled letters: “Prize Ribbons in here, Do not destroy.”

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Weaponizing Sound and Space: Spatial and Sonic Patriarchy as Forms of Anti-abortion Violence

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Shannon Stettner[1]

The space outside abortion clinics is complicated. Much of it is public and there are important discussions about the uses of public space, the right to protest, and the “ownership” of such spaces.[2] In Canada, many legal injunctions or safe access zones (theoretically) prevent protestors from occupying the area directly in front of clinics because clinics are also private medical spaces that provide vital healthcare services.[3] From the mid-1980s to the early-2000s, Canada experienced anti-abortion violence that some observers classified as single-issue terrorism.[4] This violence included aggressive clinic pickets, abortion clinic attacks, and gun and knife attacks against abortion providers, both in their homes and at or near their clinics. There are moments, in this period of violence, when some elements in the anti-abortion movement knowingly and willfully transgressed the line between lawful and violent protest. It is important that we interrogate this violence and do not simply dismiss it as a fringe element of the movement.[5]

Scholars have paid significant attention to the gendered use of space and, in particular, to women’s use of space as it is mitigated by their fear of male violence. Geographer Gill Valentine, for example, argues that “women’s fear of male violence…is tied up with the way public space is used, occupied and controlled…. This cycle of fear becomes one subsystem by which male dominance, patriarchy, is maintained and perpetuated.”[6] In the instance of aggressive clinic protests, I argue that even when women are part of the anti-abortion group, this existing fear of violent male bodies in public spaces is compounded by the actual presence of physically aggressive men seeking to block clinic access. Additionally, recent scholarship has argued that the noise surrounding abortion clinics is not harmless, forming a type of “sonic patriarchy” that is described as “the gendered domination of a sound world (whether public or private), shaping the ways in which women are heard or forced to hear.”[7] In the following analysis, I highlight how spatial and sonic patriarchy attempted to control women’s access to abortion clinics.

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Godin chez les grecs

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“I vote for Mr. Godin. I don’t care for what party he belongs.” – George Zoubris1

Bernard Vallée, « Portraits de Gérald Godin, Ministre de l’immigration, » 19 November 1980, BAnQ numérique.

1976 is best remembered in Quebec as the year the levee broke. The rising tides of québécois nationalism and the sovereigntist movement evolved into a majority victory in that year’s general election for the Parti québécois [PQ], the national progressivist party seeking a sovereignty-association agreement with the Canadian federal government. Under its founder and first Premier, René Lévesque (1922-1987), successive PQ cabinets passed legislation and reforms from 1976 through 1985 that radically altered the course of Quebec’s history. Amidst those years, narratives emerged about peoples on the margins of the province’s society challenging what it meant to be québécois and who could benefit from the Quiet Revolution. Montreal’s Mercier district played host to one such narrative.

~

Mercier was a provincial electoral district in central Montreal. Going into the 1976 general election, its deputy was Robert Bourassa (1933-1996), Parti libéral du Québec [PLQ] leader and Quebec’s Premier. Bourassa had held this largely francophone working class district in every general election since 1966. Mercier was considered a PLQ stronghold, a belief reinforced by a growing immigrant demographic commonly assumed to lean in the governing party’s favor.2 A strong contingent of the electorate, however, had tired of their “absent” deputy and his party’s unpopular policies. Still, few believed that would help Bourassa’s underdog rival in Mercier, PQ candidate Gérald Godin. This burgeoning politician was a marginal figure in the popular imagination and his party, but Godin nonetheless conducted an intensive door-to-door campaign that turned him into a fixture of the community. His charisma and personability throughout countless hours of speaking with voters set a precedent which could not be matched by a Premier.3 And it paid off.

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Building a Radical Space: Inclusion, Fracture, and the Limits of Utopia

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By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

T’Hayla Ferguson, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.

“I think the intention was to make women’s sexuality and women’s play just normal. Not such a sideshow. We want to have a place to go and get naked and fuck and play, and it not be unusual.”

-T’Hayla Ferguson, Pussy Palace Patron

The Pussy Palace was built by naming things that were not supposed to be said out loud. From its earliest moments, the project challenged dominant ideas about women’s sexuality, public sex, and who bathhouse culture was for. But the Palace did not emerge fully formed as a radical, inclusive utopia. It was assembled through improvisation, disagreement, and ongoing negotiation. Inclusion was not a settled principle, but an aspiration—one that required constant work, generated conflict, and exposed the limits of what a single space could hold.

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The Indian Act as Wendigo

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By Jenni Makahnouk

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series

The Indian Act is commonly treated as a governance structure: an object to be interpreted, amended, or dismantled through policy reform. This framing assumes neutrality where there is appetite. This article argues that the Indian Act functions less as a static legal instrument and more as a consuming force—one that survives through the ongoing ingestion of Indigenous self-determination. Read through Indigenous epistemologies, the Indian Act emerges as Wendigo, if you will, an Indigenous malevolent manitou animated by greed, selfishness, and insatiable hunger. What happens when the Indian Act is viewed as Wendigo? By framing the Indian Act as Wendigo, we can illuminate its predatory dynamics in ways that conventional settler analyses of the Act cannot capture, and we can draw on Indigenous epistemologies of how to cure Wendigo.

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Celebrating Black History and the Works That Shape It

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February 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the first national celebration of Black History Month in Canada. This milestone offers an important opportunity to recognize the enduring legacy and resilience of Black Canadians and to reflect on a history that has often been overlooked.

Canadian historians especially must confront the mythology that depicts Canada solely as a haven from racism. In reality, the Canadian government and public have imposed deliberate, often legislated barriers to Black success. From immigration bans under the pretext of “climatic unsuitability” to provincial school acts that enforced racially segregated schools well into the 20th century, systemic exclusion was a core feature of the Canadian state. 

Given these historic and ongoing systemic injustices, Canadian historians can center the experiences of Black Canadians and concepts of anti-Black racism within their work. We must move beyond symbolic celebration toward a methodology that weaves these essential perspectives into the very fabric of our historical research.

With such a project in mind, members of the Active History editorial collective offer the following suggestion on scholarship and resources that have shaped our own learning journeys. These articles, book chapters, and monographs have challenged the way we undertake our historical pursuits, and we hope they inspire similar deep reflection for our readership. 

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