The 21st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How to Do It, released this week, is touted as the first anthology of its kind. Published by , it features more than 80 chapters representing motherhood organizations from around the globe.

“We need to encourage people to look at motherhood as an autonomous social movement, much in the same way feminism has been framed in the past,” says the book’s editor, 91��ɫ women's studies Professor Andrea O’Reilly in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

“Mothers are becoming activists out of necessity,” she says. “Being a mother is still one of the most demanding jobs out there; we need to keep pushing for a shift in thinking so the roles and responsibilities of motherhood are given the value they deserve. Motherhood organizations, such as the ones profiled in this book, empower mothers to transform the society in which they live in order to improve their own lives.”

Part of this challenge is tackling “invisimomibility” – the chronic and pervasive undervaluing of mothers’ unpaid care giving. “This leads to an inability to successfully fulfill one's care giving, civic and paid work responsibilities and leaves primary caregivers vulnerable to social and economic risk,” says O’Reilly.

Conversely, the term “mamazon” was coined to describe mothers who refuse to become invisible. “We’re talking about moms who aren’t afraid to engage in non-traditional behaviours – to be loud, angry and assertive,” she says.

The 976-page book is divided into seven sections: Becoming a Mother; Maternal Identities; Maternal Advocacy; Maternal Activism; Violence, Militarism, War and Peace; Social Change and Social Justice, and Writing/Researching/Performing Motherhood. It features prominent organizations such as Moms Rising, Mocha Moms, and LGBTQ Parenting Network.

The volume also provides an overview of the history and ideological frameworks of the 21st century motherhood movement, discusses the challenges and possibilities of maternalism, and details the specific practices and strategies of maternal activism.

“The writings in this anthology show how the 21st century motherhood movement has opened the door to a mother-centered theory and politic of feminism,” says O’Reilly. “Motherhood is a crucial aspect of feminism that we need to continue to explore both through activism and research.”

By Melissa Hughes, media relations officer. Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Slowly, over the past 12 years, the landmark book – critical of Islamic fundamentalism and its treatment of women – has become increasingly available in Muslim countries. A year after it first came out, Oxford University Press released it as part of its millennium series in Pakistan. Last year, it was translated for Korean audiences (see YFile, Oct. 6, 2010).

, which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award in sociology in 2000, was translated and released in Indonesia by the Jakarta-based International Centre for Islam and Pluralism and publisher LKiS Yogyakarta.

Moghissi, who teaches  women’s and equity studies, couldn't be more pleased about her book's release in Indonesia, which has blossomed into democracy since the overthrow of President Suharto in 1998. “Indonesia is the largest Muslim country on Earth," she points out. “Obviously, the ideas remain current and of concern if publishers are making available a book that is critical of fundamentalism and of its treatment of women."

Neighbouring Malaysia long ago banned Moghissi’s book. “The fact that it is being published next door in Indonesia makes me even happier,” she says. No doubt copies will filter across the Strait of Malacca.

In her ongoing effort to illuminate the experience of Muslims in the West, Moghissi on the subject, .

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The next instalment of the series will be delivered by , a professor in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Environmental Studies and . The lecture will take place Monday, March 21, in 001 Vanier College from 6 to 7pm.

Sandilands is the author of numerous publications in environmental literature, history and cultural studies, including writings on national parts, queer and feminist ecologies, ecocriticism and environmental public cultures.

Sandilands' lecture, titled "A State of Nature? National Parks and Canadian National Identity", places a different kind of lens on Canada's national parks. Anyone who has ever visited one and wondered why there are so many rules, trails and signs in the "wilderness" should consider coming to this free public lecture.

Above: Cate Sandilands and the unnatural signage in the Bruce Peninsula National Park

"Canadian national parks are often referred to as 'national treasures', part of a public understanding of heritage that view them as a sort of repository of the essence of Canada. In this view, parks 'preserve' a nature that is the origin of the nation, a key part of our collective identity as Canadians," says Sandilands.

"In fact, national parks are deeply political creations. They 'organize' nature in specific ways, and have served a variety of economic and other agendas since the first Canadian national park – Rocky Mountains Park, now Banff – was established in 1887," she says.

"This presentation will consider the politics of national parks over the last 125 years, with a particular focus on the dynamics of 'national natures' as they are a part of different economic, political and ideological trajectories for Canadian identity," says Sandilands. "Thinking about parks solely as sites of preservation obscures a far more interesting history."

The Canada Like You’ve Never Heard it Before Lecture Series series showcases the breadth and depth of Canadian scholarship and research at 91��ɫ. The series was organized by Jon Sufrin, coordinator of the Canadian Studies Program. This academic year, several senior faculty and two Canada Research Chairs have delivered presentations.

Sponsors of the series include: the Dean's Office, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies; Stong College; Vanier College; Winters College; New College; Calumet College; Founders College; Students for Canadian Studies; and the Canadian Studies Program.

For upcoming lectures and speaker bios, visit the Canada Like You’ve Never Heard it Before Lecture Series website.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The talk will take place on Nov. 11, from 7 to 10pm in N201 Ross Building, Keele campus.

There have been at least 26 film or television English-language adaptations of and a new adaptation is currently in the works. It would seem that both producers and audiences never tire of Brontë’s classic novel.

Cummins, a filmmaker whose doctoral work specializes in feminist film and filmmakers, will examine how the gender relations and sexual politics of Brontë’s proto-feminist text have been re-interpreted and represented in four different adaptations over a 50-year period.

Integrating adaptation studies and feminist theory, her analysis will consider the impact of paratextual factors such as history and market forces, including star personas and studio/network brands, on media producers’ fidelity to Brontë’s vision.

Cummins work has been screened and broadcast internationally. She has written for magazines about film, and her most recent publication is a peer-reviewed chapter in , published by Wilfred Laurier Press. Currently, she teaches courses in the Media Fundamentals Program at Sheridan College Institute for Advanced Learning & Technology.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Much of what informs environmental thinking springs from a view that equates nature with sexually straight and queer with unnatural. The editors of a new book , turn those notions upside down.

Co-editors Bruce Erickson (PhD 09’) and 91��ɫ environmental studies Professor Catriona Sandilands, Canada Research Chair in Sustainability & Culture, wanted to challenge the current thinking about what is considered sexually “normal” in nature and how nature is used to create normative sexualities. To do so, they gathered a group of mainly senior scholars who’d done work close to the intersection of sexuality studies and environmental studies in research areas such as queer geography, eco-feminism, environmental justice and gender and sexuality studies.

The result is a book that looks at three broad topics – “Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality”, “Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics” and “Desiring Nature? Queer Attachments” – with contributors from literary studies, landscape ecology, geography, science studies, history, philosophy, sociology and women’s studies, including leading researchers from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Erickson, who studied with Sandilands and is now a post-doctoral fellow in environmental history at Nipissing University, says part of the reason for Queer Ecologies was to explore the connection between environmentalism and discourses of homosexuality. “The birth of modern environmentalism and the birth of modern understandings of homosexuality and queerness came about at the same time through very similar actors and so we wanted to think about that a little bit more and see how those connections are actually a lot more deeply ingrained than simply being a kind of accidental event,” says Erickson.

Queer Ecologies asks contemporary environmental thinkers and activists to consider how their practices and assumptions about nature are located in homophobic and heterosexist perspectives, and to ask the queer communities to engage in more ecological discourse and action, says Mortimer-Sandilands. “It’s important to make nature and environmental issues part of a more robust queer platform. It’s not just about achieving equality in an ecologically disastrous world. It’s also about thinking about the interrelationship between sexual resistances and environmental justice, for example.”

Left: Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson

There are several historical connections between sexual and environmental politics, says Sandilands, author of .

“First, species, race and population were all hotly contested concepts in the late-19th and early-20th centuries; these debates influenced emerging understandings of both ecology and sexuality, which also influenced each other. Second, large-scale industrialization and urbanization both created new spaces in which new sexual cultures could thrive, and also contributed to larger social anxieties about hygiene, degeneracy and what was considered an 'effeminization' of white national virility. Out of these processes arose both modern understandings of sexuality and gender and modern institutions of nature conservation, most notably national parks.”

With these historical connections, it is important to understand that the modern environmental movement has sexual origins, and also that sexual politics have embedded understandings of nature and environment, she says. “In addition, political resistances to dominant sex/nature categories also have a history: from Radclyffe Hall’s literary defence of gender inversion to Oscar Wilde’s refusal of ‘natural authenticity’ to the Radical Faeries to the Lesbian National Parks & Services. It's a fascinating history.”

As a result, Queer Ecologies includes essays on both the “historical links between sex and nature and on more contemporary issues, such as the current popular fascination with the sexuality of animals, conflicts about public sex in designated nature areas, heterosexual panic in anti-toxics activism, population and development politics, and resistances by the queer communities to all of the above in art, literature and politics,” says Sandilands.

Erickson’s essay takes issue with the iconic nature of the canoe. “My starting point for the essay is Pierre Berton’s comment that a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe. I try to trace back this national feeling through these very normative ideas of heterosexuality and how the assumption by those that take up Berton’s statement as being such an interesting and witty way of understanding Canada reify a kind of heterosexist image of the nation.” He also looks at the politics of colonialism that have allowed the canoe to become a symbol of the nation.

Sandilands turns her gaze to two authors, Jan Zita Grover and Derek Jarman, and how they responded politically and with dignity to the massive losses brought about by AIDS, and how they offer a model for thinking intelligently about the daily losses that are part of the environmental crisis. Too often environmental loss becomes tourism. Everyone runs out to see the natural wonder before it’s gone.

“But that approach is part of the problem, ethically and politically, we can't just ‘move on’ to other natures, and some of the approaches to loss and memory explored in the massive artistic and literary response to AIDS are very instructive to help us think about the consequences of what we are losing environmentally,” she says.

The book came about through a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada grant Sandilands received related to her work as Canada Research Chair, which included funds for a workshop which inaugurated the Queer Ecologies project.

Sandilands' next book, This Is For You: Walks with Jane Rule (UBC Press), is forthcoming.

Queer Ecologies was published last week; a launch will take place in the fall.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The award is given annually by the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) in honour of the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English. Wider Boundaries of Daring (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009) was chosen by a jury from among the 13 books submitted this year, for its outstanding contribution to scholarship on Canadian literature. This is the second time it was awarded to Godard, the first being in 1988. mentioned the award at the funeral service for Godard on Friday, May 21 (see YFile, May 19).

“The essay collection is a productive, revealing critique of the masculinism of Canadian Modernism. One of the great strengths of the book is its detailed archaeology of the lives of Modernist women writers in relation to their works; the biographical scholarship contributes substantially to an understanding of the writers in question,” writes the ACQL. “The essays, on a remarkably wide range of authors and texts, collectively draw attention to the ways in which women writers work against, resent, and countermand Canadian Modernism.”

Left: Barbara Godard

Wider Boundaries of Daring looks at the exemplary contribution to Canadian modernism of women poets, critics, cultural activists and experimental prose writers. The contributors argue that these writers are the real founders of Canadian modernism for their innovative esthetic and literary experiments and for their extensive cultural activism. They founded literary magazines and writers’ groups, wrote newspaper columns, and created a new forum for intellectual debate on public radio. At the same time, they led busy lives as wives and mothers, social workers and teachers, editors and critics, and competed successfully with their male contemporaries in the public arena in an era when women were not generally encouraged to hold professional positions or pursue public careers.

A professor in the Department of English in the former Faculty of Arts and in the graduate programs of social & political thought, women’s studies and French, Godard began teaching at 91��ɫ in 1971. She published widely on Canadian and Quebec cultures and on feminist and literary theory and translated the works of several Quebec writers, including Nicole Brossard, Yolande Villemarie and Louky Bersiani. In 2002, she received teaching awards from 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. Godard served as 91��ɫ’s first Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian Literature, was a founding co-editor of the feminist journal Tessera and the author and editor of several books.

For more information on the Gabrielle Roy Prize, visit the Web site.

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Here, 91��ɫ humanities Professor , English Professor and PhD student Elena Basile offer an appreciation of Prof. Godard and her tireless work:

It is with great sadness that the Department of English at 91��ɫ announces the death of Professor Emerita Barbara Godard, a professor of English, French, social & political thought and women’s studies. A pillar of the 91��ɫ community and one of Canada’s pre-eminent literary scholars, Prof. Godard broadly influenced the fields of Canadian and Quebec studies, translation studies, feminist poetics, semiotics and cultural studies.

Right: Prof. Barbara Godard

She was a generous supervisor and mentor who trained and influenced a contemporary generation of cultural workers, including academics, writers and artists. The scope of her mentorship was fully recognized in 2002 when she became the recipient of teaching awards from 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. Prof. Godard retired from full-time teaching in 2008, but continued a full intellectual and pedagogical life until her sudden passing.

Prof. Godard was a prolific and influential intellectual. An extraordinarily sharp and encyclopedic thinker, Prof. Godard’s interests encompassed semiotics, translation, gender, textuality and the body, as well as archives, memorials, and the history and changing politics of cultural production. With a keen eye for detail and a unique capacity for breadth of vision, she catalyzed interdisciplinary connections among culture, language, gender, politics, poetics and meaning.

After completing her doctorate at the University of Bordeaux, Prof. Godard began teaching at 91��ɫ in 1971 as a visiting assistant professor and was hired into a tenure-track position in 1976. She published eight books, 80 book chapters and 115 articles and catalogue entries. She translated the major writers of Quebec feminism, including Nicole Brossard, Yolande Villemarie and Louky Bersianik. She also served as editor or on the editorial board of no less than 22 journals. She was a founding co-editor of the feminist literary periodical , a contributing editor of and , and the book review editor for Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. She also made long-standing contributions to , s and ECW among others.

Prof. Godard was committed to and passionate about her graduate students across the Departments of English, French Studies, Film and Visual Arts, the School of Women’s Studies and the Program in Social & Political Thought, supervising over 35 PhD candidates. She built bridges between people and modes of inquiry because of her genuine enthusiasm for ideas. She worked between and across languages which so often divide. Prof. Godard inspired her colleagues and students through her critical creativity and her unwavering commitment to interrogating and producing the conditions for full civic engagement in the University and in the public sphere. We will miss her greatly.

Funeral arrangements

A funeral service will take place at 11am on Friday, May 21, at St. James-the-Less, 635 Parliament St., Toronto. A reception for friends and family will follow at Prof. Godard’s house at 217 Major St.,Toronto.

Prof. Godard’s family has requested no flowers; in light of her earlier struggles, donations to the Canadian Cancer Society would be greatly appreciated.

As there may be other causes to which you might wish to make a memorial donation, the agency can inform Prof. Godard’s sister Elizabeth Cox at ecox27@sympatico.ca and her son Alexis at lex_o_matic@yahoo.com.

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91��ɫ political science Professor , , explores the precarious margins of contemporary labour markets in her new book, Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship, and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment, being launched tomorrow.

The book looks at how over the last few decades there has been much discussion of a shift from full-time permanent jobs to higher levels of part-time and temporary employment and self-employment, and the result that despite such attention, regulatory approaches have not adapted accordingly. Instead, in the absence of genuine alternatives, old regulatory models are applied to new labour market realities, leaving the most precarious forms of employment intact.

The book places this disjuncture in historical context and focuses on its implications for workers most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrants, using illustrations from Australia, the United States and Canada, as well as member states of the European Union.

provides a rigorous analysis of national and international regulatory approaches, drawing on original and extensive qualitative and quantitative material. It analyzes the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations and citizenship boundaries.

Vosko is also the author of : The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship (University of Toronto Press, 2000), editor of : Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), and co-author of : Law, Policy, and Unions (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005).

She is currently overseeing the Comparative Perspectives Database, a multi-year collaborative international research project on comparative perspectives on precarious employment linked to the project.

The launch for Managing the Margins (Oxford University Press, 2010) will take place Thursday, Feb. 25 at 7:30pm at The Annex Live, 296 Brunswick Ave. at Bloor Street in Toronto. The launch will feature remarks by Deena Ladd of Workers’ Action Centre, Professor Kiran Mirchandani of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and Laurell Ritchie of the Canadian Auto Workers union, as well as a performance by jazz musicians Kye Marshall and Dan Ionescu and a display of photographic artworks by Susana Reisman.

Everyone is welcome to attend the launch. For more information, contact Gowry Siva, research project administrator in the Office of the Dean in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, at ext. 33962 or sgowry@yorku.ca.

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Despite decades of feminism and co-parenting and men grappling with diaper changes and night feedings, moms are often by default or tradition the ones who end up having the sex talk, wrote the . Often it’s because they are the parent who spends the most time with the children.

“Often if there is a woman in the household, she takes over that part of the parenting,” says Andrea O’Reilly, a professor in 91��ɫ’s School of Women’s Studies in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies and founder & director of the Association for Research on Mothering.

Women are typically the family CEO, in charge of remembering who got which shots and setting up play dates. Having “the talk” falls into that realm. “The talk is part of a larger paradigm of gender. Until we dislodge that, women will probably be the ones to have ‘the talk’. I try to de-gender caregiving, but it’s a hard sell,” O’Reilly says.

She believes "the talk" is declining in importance in any case. “We live in such a sex-saturated culture. Kids know about sex long before children 10, 20, 30 years ago did,” she says.

Children want information about sex, according to a study of 1,200 Toronto teens released last summer. The found 28 per cent of teens weren getting information about sex from their parents and 53 per cent were getting it from their friends.

Parents might feel they lack the skills or even the stomach for a discussion about sex with their children, says Sarah Flicker, a professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies and principal researcher on the Toronto Teen Survey. “Not all parents feel comfortable telling children where a clitoris is, but you could talk about what makes a healthy relationship.”

Coverage also appeared in .

Reposted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin, and .

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