91亚色 history Professor Marc Stein grew up in the suburbs of New 91亚色 City in the 1960s and 1970s with a passionate聽faith in the聽US Constitution and US Supreme Court as strong聽protectors of聽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聽Clive Boutilier,聽which challenged his assumptions about the earlier liberalism of the US Supreme Court.

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

What the Supreme Court justices did in this case聽did not protect equality and freedom. Instead, they upheld a provision of the 1952 Immigration & Nationality Act that聽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Canada had introduced its own version of the US immigration law in the 1950s, but repealed it in the 1970s, a few years after聽homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.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聽鈥� 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聽tell Boutilier鈥檚 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亚色 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鈥檚 case, the ruling concurred with the view that homosexuals suffered from psychopathic personality and so should be deported. After the decision, Boutilier鈥檚 case was all but forgotten. The decision against him didn鈥檛 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聽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聽Sexual Injustice will shed light on the implications of some of the Supreme Court鈥檚 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鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin

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

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鈥�) and 91亚色 environmental studies Professor Catriona Sandilands, Canada Research Chair in Sustainability & Culture, wanted to challenge the current thinking about what is considered sexually 鈥渘ormal鈥� in nature and how nature is used to create normative sexualities. To do so, they gathered a group of mainly senior scholars who鈥檇 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 鈥� 鈥淎gainst Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality鈥�, 鈥淕reen, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics鈥� and 鈥淒esiring Nature? Queer Attachments鈥� 鈥� with contributors from literary studies, landscape ecology, geography, science studies, history, philosophy, sociology and women鈥檚 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. 鈥淭he 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,鈥� 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. 鈥淚t鈥檚 important to make nature and environmental issues part of a more robust queer platform. It鈥檚 not just about achieving equality in an ecologically disastrous world. It鈥檚 also about thinking about the interrelationship between sexual聽resistances and environmental justice, for example.鈥�

Left: Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson

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

鈥淔irst, 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.鈥�

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. 鈥淚n addition, political resistances to dominant sex/nature categories also have a history: from Radclyffe Hall鈥檚 literary defence of gender inversion to Oscar Wilde鈥檚 refusal of 鈥榥atural authenticity鈥� to the Radical Faeries to the Lesbian National Parks & Services. It's a fascinating history.鈥�

As a result, Queer Ecologies includes essays on both the 鈥渉istorical 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,鈥� says Sandilands.

Erickson鈥檚 essay takes issue with the iconic nature of the canoe. 鈥淢y starting point for the essay is Pierre Berton鈥檚 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鈥檚 statement as being such an interesting and witty way of understanding Canada reify a kind of heterosexist image of the nation.鈥� 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, 补苍诲听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鈥檚 gone.

鈥淏ut that approach is part of the problem, ethically and politically, we can't just 鈥榤ove on鈥� 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,鈥� 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聽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鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin.

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

鈥淥ver the last 25 years, the topic of motherhood has emerged as a central and significant topic of scholarly inquiry across a wide range of academic disciplines. A cursory review of motherhood research reveals that hundreds of scholarly articles have been published on almost every motherhood theme imaginable,鈥� says O鈥橰eilly, who coined the term "motherhood studies" to acknowledge and demarcate motherhood scholarship as a聽legitimate and distinctive discipline.

"Indeed, similar to the development of women studies as an academic field in the 1970s, motherhood studies, while explicitly interdisciplinary, has emerged an autonomous and independent scholarly discipline in the last decade," she says. "This intellectual tradition of maternal scholarship both made possible and created the need for an encylopedia on motherhood."

Founder and director of the newly formed (developed from the former Association for Research on Mothering at 91亚色), O'Reilly approached contributors and compiled articles by some 300 women scholars throughout the United States, Canada and beyond for the book.

The , the first scholarly reference devoted to the subject, covers a vast array of topics, including how the study of motherhood is almost completely ignored in archeology, mothers in popular culture, hip mamas, influential maternal theorists, the economics of motherhood, psychoanalysis, fertility, guilt, ecofeminism, refugees and the future of mothering. The encyclopedia touches on mothers, and what it means to be a mother in almost every country. It also looks at mothers in film, books, art and poetry, as well as in the Bible.

鈥淭he publication is for me a significant moment in motherhood scholarships as it confirms that motherhood has indeed arrived as a legitimate and distinct academic discipline and scholarly field." says O'Reilly. "As well, the encyclopedia, in bringing together for the first time over 700聽motherhood topics from A to Z, from aboriginal mothering to zines, and in providing a detailed summary and a bibliography for each topic, is an invaluable resource for anyone 鈥撀爏tudents, journalists, writers, researchers, community agencies 鈥撀爄n need of an overview of a particular motherhood topic and/or interested in doing further research on聽the subject matter.鈥�

Left: Andrea O'Reilly

The book聽delves into the anthropology of mothering, a discussion on advice literature for mothers, a chronology of motherhood and mother activists. It explores the concept of bad mothering, absentee mothers, alcoholism, ethics, HIV/AIDS, race, slavery, lesbian and bisexual mothers, breastfeeding and more. In addition, it examines terms, concepts, themes, debates, theories and texts of motherhood within history, geography and academia.

To O鈥橰eilly (BA Hons.聽'85, MA '87, PhD '96), the publication of the encyclopedia is like the coming of age of mothering research. The scholarship of motherhood has been legitimized and recognized, she says.

She introduces the Encyclopedia of Motherhood with a quote from author Adrienne Rich: 鈥淲e know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.鈥� And that is exactly what O鈥橰eilly hopes the encyclopedia will change, that it will provide a glimpse into all things associated with and to mothering.聽The publication of the encyclopedia demarcates motherhood as an academic discipline and points to the future.

O鈥橰eilly is the author of and . She is also the editor of 14 collections.

For more information, visit the Web site.

Republished courtesy of YFile鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin.

The post From Roman times to today, covered in one mother of a book appeared first on Research & Innovation.

It鈥檚 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: 鈥淲hy does research matter?鈥� In particular, it focuses on the ways in which LA&PS researchers 鈥� both faculty and students 鈥� 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亚色 community. The first, which will be held on March 24 from 10am to聽noon in 109 Atkinson Building, takes up the theme of knowledge mobilization. Michael Johnny, manager of聽91亚色鈥檚 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聽noon in 305 91亚色 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亚色 scholars: Hope Olumide Shamonda聽(PhD candidate in philosophy);聽 (PhD candidate in philosophy); Ruby Dhand (PhD candidate in law); and Mariette Brennan (PhD candidate in law).

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

鈥淥ne of the highlights of the year for me in the role of associate dean, research, has been the launch of this series,鈥� says Professor Barbara Crow. 鈥淚鈥檝e 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鈥檚 going on in our communities, our workplaces and our lives.鈥�

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

Republished with files courtesy of YFile 鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin.

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