Canada’s Sex Work Legislation Must Change
Sex workers’ lives are directly at risk because of C-36.
Category Archives: Gender and Sexuality
Spotting the Difference: Comparing Canadian Sex Work Legislation from 1985 and 2014
The countless number of sex workers, organizations, and newspaper articles all argued the same underlying premise as they had with Bill C-49: that the government’s legislation endangers sex workers.
Canada’s Sex Work Legislation Hasn’t Changed
It is unsurprising that the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform launched a constitutional challenge to the PCEPA in 2021- brought to the Ontario Superior Court between October 2 and 7, 2022.On September 18, 2023, the Ontario Superior Court released its decision in CASWLR v. Attorney General (Canada), deciding to uphold the PCEPA.
Opting for “Sexual Wellbeing for All”: Community & Sex Education in Alberta, 1970s and 2024
Karissa Patton and Nancy Janovicek Eric Dyck’s comic lampoons a longstanding dispute on sex education in Canada: comprehensive sex education as crucial to young people’s health, bodily autonomy, and human rights vs. parents’ rights to make decisions about what knowledge and services their children’s access. Since the 1960s, students and youth have been vocal in the debates about curriculum on… Read more »
Feminism and its Malcontents in Canadian Universities
Sara Wilmshurst First off, I’d like to bless the Internet Archive for preserving human folly. The paper under review today has been scrubbed from its original home but lives on in infamy through the Wayback Machine. I am speaking of “On the Challenges of Dating and Marriage in the New Generations,” published under the name of Benyamin Gohjogh. It made… Read more »
Thinking Historically about Sexuality, Gender, and the Implications of “Safety”
Gemma Marr “The luxurious habits of civilized life lead to many excesses. Those of gluttony and hard drinking have been sufficiently commented upon. Tracts and newspapers showing the fatal results of intoxication, surround us on all hands. But an evil more destructive than any of these has received, comparatively, but little attention. It is time that the warning was given,… Read more »
Is the gay steel mill closed? Reflections on queer histories of deindustrializing Cape Breton
by Liam Devitt In 1991, the AIDS Coalition of Cape Breton was founded. Cape Breton Island, a small industrial region, was a far cry from the perceived metropolitan hotspots of the AIDS epidemic. It did not have the cosmopolitan queer nightlife of these cities and little activism that could be called “gay liberation” manifested in any visible way. In short,… Read more »
Canadian History Shows that Sex Workers Usually Get the Short End of the Stick
Margaret Ross Late one evening in January 1923, police descended on Millie Jones’s bawdy house at 757 Mercer Street in Windsor, Ontario. She was forty-eight years old, and ran the house with her husband, George.[1] The couple was Black, and they employed two other Black women. The entire group was arrested, including two clients who were being entertained at the… Read more »
Ten Resources to Learn About Queer and Trans History in Canada
Krista McCracken It’s nearing the end of Pride Month. As a non-binary, queer scholar who offers workshops on gender and queer identities, June is a busy month. Throughout the month I’ve received a number of requests for reading recommendations about teaching about gender, history, and pride in Canada. In light of those requests I’ve created a list of ten books,… Read more »
Building a white Canada: gender, sexuality, race, and medicine
By Allison Lynn Bennett Sexual control is inherent to empire. Colonial authorities and doctors understood sexuality as key to maintaining white superiority. Reproduction and health were the focus of eugenic measures that played on gender, sexual, and racial stereotypes. As a settler colony, Canada imagined itself as “British”, or “white”, and therefore regulated the sexual lives and behaviour of both… Read more »