gay research Archives | Research & Innovation

91��ɫ-led global project to examine criminalization of sexual orientation

fmaquito — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Nancy Nicol’s team receives $1 million to study LGBT human rights around the world

91��ɫ visual arts professor Nancy Nicol will lead a major international project on the impact of criminalizing sexual orientation and gender identity, with $1 million in funding over five years from the (SSHRC).

The award will fund Envisioning Global LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Human Rights, a collaborative project that will foster international research links between Canada and the global south.

Nicol, a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts and faculty associate in 91��ɫ’s Centre for Feminist Research, will lead a 22-member research team as they explore how LGBT and human rights groups resist criminalization of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The researchers will also study the implications for human rights policy formation, social services, and immigration and refugee policies.

“Envisioning will capture and contribute to history-in-the-making of distinct but linked struggles at a key moment of national and global change,” says Nicol. “Our strategic alliance of partners has proven capacity in international LGBT human rights work, with grass roots partners in Canada and the global south. Our work will combine documentary and participatory video with qualitative interviewing, focus groups, legal data research and analysis and a limited use of surveys. We plan to make a unique contribution to documenting and analyzing criminalization, asylum and resistance to criminalization within and beyond regions.”

(CURA) awards, among the largest awarded by SSHRC, bring postsecondary institutions and community organizations together as equal research partners to jointly develop new knowledge and capabilities, provide research training opportunities, and enhance the ability of social sciences and humanities research to build knowledge in areas that affect Canadians and their changing communities.

“91��ɫ has developed a strong record in leading national and international collaborative research projects on key social issues,” said Stan Shapson, vice-president Research & Innovation. “Through its connections to the Faculty of Fine Arts, , the Center for Feminist Research, and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies’ Department of Sexuality Studies, this project reflects the interdisciplinary strengths 91��ɫ offers in human rights research and the success of our researchers’ collaborative focus with local and global partners.”

Nicol’s research team includes 22 researchers and 32 partner organizations. The co-applicants include four 91��ɫ Professors: , director of the Centre for Feminist Research; Jennifer Hyndman, associate director of the ; and .

Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science & Technology), announced the funding on March 25. Nicol’s project is one of nine large-scale research projects funded through SSHRC’s CURA program at a total cost of $8,993,254.

“These grants highlight the excellence of our country’s talented researchers and recognize the importance of fostering collaboration to keep Canada at the leading-edge of research, development and innovation in the 21st century,” said Chad Gaffield, president of SSHRC.

For a complete list of CURA awards, visit Web site.

Project Partners:

Africans In Partnership Against AIDS (APAA)
Alliance For South Asian AIDS Prevention (ASAAP)
ARC International
Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention (Black Cap)
Center for Feminist Research, 91��ɫ
Coalition of African Lesbians
Egale Canada
Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW)
Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK)
Global Alliance for LGBT Education (GALE)
Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film and Video Festival
International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC)
International Lesbian and Gay Law Association (ILGLAW)
Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG)
Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana (LEGABIBO)
Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
Naz Foundation (India) Trust
Naz International Foundation in conjunction with Maan AIDS Foundation
Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI)
Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION)
Osgoode Hall Law School, 91��ɫ
Pride Uganda Alliance International (PUAI)
Rainbow Health Ontario
Sangini (India) Trust
Sexual Minorities Uganda
Sexuality Studies Department, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, 91��ɫ
Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD)
The 519 Church St. Community Centre
The Inner Circle
United and Strong
United Belize Advocacy Movement (UNIBAM)
University of Witwatersrand

By Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer.

The post 91��ɫ-led global project to examine criminalization of sexual orientation appeared first on Research & Innovation.

History Professor Marc Stein's book questions US Supreme Court's sexually libertarian image

fmaquito — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 10:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ history Professor Marc Stein grew up in the suburbs of New 91��ɫ City in the 1960s and 1970s with a passionate faith in the US Constitution and US Supreme Court as strong protectors of freedom, equality and democracy in the post-war era.

That faith was shaken in the 1980s when the Supreme Court justices upheld state sodomy laws, which he initially attributed to the conservative backlash of the Reagan era. Then, in the early 1990s as a graduate student, Stein stumbled across a 1967 decision upholding the deportation of Canadian citizen Clive Boutilier, which challenged his assumptions about the earlier liberalism of the US Supreme Court.

Boutilier vs. the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was one of the Supreme Court's first major gay rights cases, says Stein, an award-winning author, editor and teacher in 91��ɫ's Department of History, School of Women's Studies ��Ի��Sexuality Studies Program, all in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

What the Supreme Court justices did in this case did not protect equality and freedom. Instead, they upheld a provision of the 1952 Immigration & Nationality Act that authorized the exclusion and deportation of aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, which the US Congress, the INS and the Supreme Court interpreted to apply to homosexuals.

Canada had introduced its own version of the US immigration law in the 1950s, but repealed it in the 1970s, a few years after homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The US didn't repeal its law until 1990.

Left: Marc Stein

Although liberals celebrate and conservatives condemn the US Supreme Court of the 1960s and 1970s for its rulings on issues such as abortion and birth control, Stein says, neither is correct in depicting the court of that era as sexually libertarian or egalitarian. He argues this point in his new book , which looks at six major Supreme Court cases – Griswold, Fanny Hill, Loving, Eisenstadt, Roe and Boutilier.

More than half the book is devoted to the Boutilier case. Stein is the first scholar to examine this episode in any depth and to tell Boutilier’s tragic story following the Supreme Court ruling. Boutilier had moved from Nova Scotia to the US with his family in the 1950s and several of his brothers served in the US military. When he applied for US citizenship in the early 1960s and revealed that he had once been arrested, though not convicted, on a sodomy charge in New 91��ɫ City, his legal troubles began.

In doing the research for the book, Stein studied liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage and obscenity, alongside the conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. What he found was that the sexual rights doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1973 was not liberal or egalitarian. In fact, it upheld heteronormative assumptions regarding "the supremacy of adult, heterosexual, marital, monogamous, private and procreative forms of sexual expression," he writes. Marital and reproductive rights were upheld; sexual rights were not. These decisions also reproduced and reinforced social hierarchies based on class, race, gender and citizenship. And liberal and leftist advocates who argued these cases before the Supreme Court "condoned sexual discrimination".

Right: Andrew Boutilier (left), Clive Boutlilier's brother; Joyce Boutilier, Andrew's wife; Clive Boutilier; and Eugene O'Rourke, Clive's partner

Their arguments in birth control and abortion cases, for example, distinguished between laws that interfered with marital and reproductive rights, which they challenged, and laws against adultery, fornication and sodomy, which they said were constitutional, says Stein.

In Boutilier’s case, the ruling concurred with the view that homosexuals suffered from psychopathic personality and so should be deported. After the decision, Boutilier’s case was all but forgotten. The decision against him didn’t conform to popular narratives about the liberalism of the US Supreme Court after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision on racial desegregation, so it was ignored.

Stein adds that many US gay and lesbian activists challenged discriminatory policies and practices during the 1950s and 1960s, but that was also forgotten, giving rise to the popular myth that the gay and lesbian rights movement began in the 1970s. In fact, says Stein, it started much earlier and was quite vigorous, as can be seen by the extraordinary coalition that defended Boutilier, which included immigration advocates, civil libertarians and gay rights activists.

"My book is the first to show that the US gay and lesbian movement of the 1950s and 1960s had a well-developed strategy of turning to the courts to defend sexual rights," he says.

The sexually conservative aspects of the Supreme Court's "liberal" decisions on abortion, birth control, interracial marriage and obsenity in the late 1960s and early 1970s vanished from the public consciousness. Instead, the US public came to believe that the Supreme Court's decisions of that era were sexually libertarian and egalitarian. Decades later, the Supreme Court itself seemed to adopt the public's point of view, declaring in its 2003 decision striking down state sodomy laws that the ruling was consistent with the decisions of the 1960s and 1970s, says Stein.

This, he says, is consistent with new theories of "popular constitutionalism," which emphasize the importance of popular understandings of legal rights.

Stein hopes Sexual Injustice will shed light on the implications of some of the Supreme Court’s decisions, as well as the sexual revolution, and help educate the public regarding heteronormative rights and privileges in the past and the present.

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

The post History Professor Marc Stein's book questions US Supreme Court's sexually libertarian image appeared first on Research & Innovation.

SSHRC-funded book challenges notions about 'normal' sex and the environment

fmaquito — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

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, ��Ի��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.

The post SSHRC-funded book challenges notions about 'normal' sex and the environment appeared first on Research & Innovation.

91��ɫ study on gay men's brains covered on TIME.com, other international outlets

fmaquito — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Gay men can recall familiar faces faster and more accurately than their heterosexual counterparts because, like women, they use both sides of their brains, according to a new study by 91��ɫ researchers. The study published in the journal, and led by Psychology Professor Jennifer Steeves in the , has attracted international coverage.

Here's an on June 24. The story's had 86 tweets and 335 Diggs:

It's long been an accepted truth among married couples that it's the wife who must usually steer the pair through social gatherings, reminding her husband if he's meeting someone for the first, second or 15th time – and science backs up that observation.

In lab settings, women routinely outperform men in facial recognition skills, both in terms of speed and reliability. Now, research from 91��ɫ in Toronto has added a wrinkle to the existing wisdom. It's not just women whose brains are so nimble, the investigators have determined, it's gay men, too.

In the Canadian study, Jennifer Steeves, a psychology professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, recruited a sample group composed of homosexual men, heterosexual men and heterosexual women. Significantly, she also took care to include both left- and right-handed people among the subjects. All of the volunteers were shown pictures of 10 faces and given time to try to memorize them. Those 10 faces were mixed with similarly edited images of 50 other people, and flashed on a screen for just milliseconds apiece. The subjects' job was to press a key when they saw a face they'd seen before.

The results confirmed what the investigators suspected they'd find: the gay men and the straight women scored about equally well in the test, and both did better than the straight men. What's more, within the straight male group, lefties outperformed righties. The explanation is rooted mostly in the genes.

All people are born with genetic coding that regulates body symmetry and asymmetry. This includes not just handedness, but which way the whorl in the hair at the crown of the head grows, or which hemisphere of the brain will be dominant for processing language. "Characteristics like this are determined very, very early on," says Steeves. "A baby's handedness can sometimes even be observed in utero."

If sex and symmetry get mixed up this way, there's no reason the phenomenon should sidestep the brain, and Steeves does not think it does. Gay men, she believes, probably do so well at recognizing faces because, like women, they're putting both hemispheres to work at once. Greater crosstalk between the two halves via the corpus callosum – the cable of nerve fibres that serves as sort of a superhighway between left and right – probably contributes to this as well. That, however, is not something Steeves and her colleagues have been able to demonstrate conclusively yet, since they have not had the chance to rerun their study while simultaneously scanning the brains of their subjects with a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI). "The University just doesn't have one," she says. "But we're getting one soon and we'll be able to take that next step then."

None of this means that it will ever be possible simply to take an fMRI of a brain and tell from that alone if it belongs to a homosexual or heterosexual – and given privacy concerns and the risk of bias, Steeves wouldn't even want to try. "I would hesitate to do post-hoc analysis," she says. "There are scary things that could happen with that." What it does mean, however, is that science's understanding of the roots of sexuality, so long shrouded in misinformation, is steadily edging into the light – and there's nothing scary about that.

The Times of India Online and DailyIndia.com covered the research June 23:

A new study by 91��ɫ researchers has shown that gay men can recall familiar faces faster and more accurately than their heterosexual counterparts because, like women, they use both sides of their brains.

The study examined the influence of gender, sexual orientation and whether we’re right- or left-handed on our ability to recognize faces. It found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – the usage of both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

Jennifer Steeves, psychology professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, and her colleagues also investigated the influence of hand dominance on such tasks. They found that left-handed heterosexual participants had better face recognition abilities than left-handed homosexuals, and also outperformed right-handed heterosexuals. “Our findings are consistent with what we know about the organization and laterality of how we process faces depending on our gender, sexual orientation and handedness,” Steeves says.

The study was also covered in :

Gay men are on a par with women when it comes to never forgetting a face, according to a study. Homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – using both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women.

"Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information," said study lead author Jennifer Steeves, at Toronto’s 91��ɫ.

Stories on the research also appeared in Sun Media newspapers and June 22.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post 91��ɫ study on gay men's brains covered on TIME.com, other international outlets appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Gay men's bilateral brains better at remembering faces: 91��ɫ U study

fmaquito — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

The study, published in the journal, , examined the influence of gender, sexual orientation and whether we’re right-or-left-handed on our ability to recognize faces. It found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – the usage of both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

“Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information,” says study lead author Jennifer Steeves, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, .

Study participants were asked to memorize photographs of ten faces, and differentiate them from 50 others, shown to them for only milliseconds each. The images were rendered in black and white and edited to remove ears, hair and blemishes, which can serve as obvious identifying cues. Participants then had to relay which faces were new, as quickly and accurately as possible.

Steeves and her colleagues also investigated the influence of hand dominance on such tasks. They found that left-handed heterosexual participants had better face recognition abilities than left-handed homosexuals, and also outperformed right-handed heterosexuals.

Hand dominance is thought to be linked with both hemispheric functioning and sexual orientation; previous studies have shown that homosexual individuals are 39 per cent more likely to be left-handed.

“Our findings are consistent with what we know about the organization and laterality of how we process faces depending on our gender, sexual orientation and handedness,” Steeves says.

Anatomical studies of the corpus callosum, which facilitates communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, also indicate differences in handedness: women and left-handed men have been shown to possess larger corpus callosum and more symmetrical cortices than right-handed men.

“These anatomical differences likely contribute to the more lateralized performance results seen among right-handed and heterosexual men,” says Steeves.

The study, “Sex differences in face processing are mediated by handedness and sexual orientation,” was co-authored by 91��ɫ psychology graduate student Caitlin R. Mullin, and 91��ɫ undergraduate psychology students Paul W. H. Brewster, and Roxana A. Dobrin.

By Melissa Hughes, media relations officer.

The post Gay men's bilateral brains better at remembering faces: 91��ɫ U study appeared first on Research & Innovation.

LA&PS series on why research matters to feature 91��ɫ's Knowledge Mobilization Program (KMb)

fmaquito — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

It’s been a year of research-intensive events and activities in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies and one of the most notable initiatives has been the Research Matters series. It attempts to answer the question: “Why does research matter?” In particular, it focuses on the ways in which LA&PS researchers – both faculty and students – are using their skills and expertise to address timely community, cultural, social, economic and industry challenges.

Missed out on a Research Matters session? Videos and audio files are available online.

There are two more Research Matters sessions scheduled this year, open to the 91��ɫ community. The first, which will be held on March 24 from 10am to noon in 109 Atkinson Building, takes up the theme of knowledge mobilization. Michael Johnny, manager of 91��ɫ’s Unit, will provide general insights into what knowledge mobilization is and how it ties to LA&PS researchers. Professor from the School of Social Work will discuss his knowledge mobilization efforts in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender research.

The second session will be held on April 19 from 10am to noon in 305 91��ɫ Lanes and will focus on human rights, international law and global health policy. Political science Professor Lesley Jacobs, director of the , will present in collaboration with four emerging 91��ɫ scholars: Hope Olumide Shamonda (PhD candidate in philosophy); (PhD candidate in philosophy); Ruby Dhand (PhD candidate in law); and Mariette Brennan (PhD candidate in law).

The series has also explored topics ranging from pandemic planning, indigenous research ��Ի��China’s competitive advantage in the world market to the grammar of aid in international development, community engagement as methodological practice, and, most recently, the value of Canada’s North.

“One of the highlights of the year for me in the role of associate dean, research, has been the launch of this series,” says Professor Barbara Crow. “I’ve gained helpful insight into the individual and collaborative research undertakings of faculty and students, and enjoyed watching connections being made between academic research and what’s going on in our communities, our workplaces and our lives.”

To RSVP for either of the upcoming sessions, e-mail Lorraine Myrie at lmyrie@yorku.ca.

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

The post LA&PS series on why research matters to feature 91��ɫ's Knowledge Mobilization Program (KMb) appeared first on Research & Innovation.