Category Archives: Gender and Sexuality

Feminism and its Malcontents in Canadian Universities

Black-and-white photograph of several women in a library, looking for books on the shelves and working at tables.

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”

The title page of Woman and Her Secret Passions (MC 4516 James Waddell family fonds); photo taken at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (PANB).

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 »

Who Speaks? Who Tells? Who Listens? – Part 3

Excerpt of A World Without Martha: A Memoir of Sisters, Disability, and Difference By Victoria Freeman For so many years, my knowledge of my sister had been defined more through her absence than her presence, through the shape of the void she left in my life. I had been able to approach who she was only through echoes and shadows,… Read more »

The Missing History of Disappearance in Vancouver: The Rise and Fall of the Neighbourhood Safety Office

  James FitzGerald The Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver has been described as Canada’s Poorest Postal Code and one of the country’s densest populations of substance-using and low-income communities. Largely due to the disappearances and murders of so many of its women and girls, the DTES has also become known as ground zero for disproportionate violence against Indigenous women, as… Read more »

The Historical Reality of Queer Families

      No Comments on The Historical Reality of Queer Families

Erin Gallagher-Cohoon In this morning’s post, I focused on how parliamentarians were invoking a sense of history and nationalism to argue both for and against legalizing same-sex marriage. In this post, I explore the history that is often left unsaid in this debate: the history of queer parenting. By 2005, when many parliamentarians were arguing that marriage rights should not… Read more »

“We as parliamentarians can feel the gaze of history upon us”: Historical Consciousness and Bill C-38, the Civil Marriage Act (2005)

Erin Gallagher-Cohoon In 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. During the House of Commons’ debates on Bill C-38, an act respecting certain aspects of legal capacity for marriage for civil purposes, parliamentarians on both sides argued that what they were contemplating doing was unprecedented; whether a brave or a reckless act, it was… Read more »