sexuality 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.

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Professor Sheila Cavanagh on Toronto's unisex washroom trend

fmaquito — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Sheila Cavanagh, professor of sociology at 91��ɫ [Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies], called Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination, in which transgendered and other queer interviewees discuss the difficulties that divided bathrooms present, wrote the

The evolution of bathroom-stall signage — from line drawings to hens-versus-roosters shtick to ambiguously arty pin-ups — has left a growing number of Toronto restaurants with no sign at all. In Ottawa, meanwhile, the so-called “bathroom bill” recently passed in the House of Commons by a narrow margin. Among other things, the controversial legislation reinforces the rights of transgendered people to use whatever bathroom they see fit.

. . .

Cavanagh loves seeing bathroom signs that are victims of their own cleverness, the ones that make it difficult to figure out which door means what, said the Star. “That moment of confusion gives people a moment to pause and wonder, ‘Does that sign fit me or not?’. . . (and to) wonder what it might be like for those whose gender identity isn’t so clear,” she says. “What do you do when you need to use the bathroom but you’re not sure which door to go into?”

At the book launch for Queering Bathrooms at the Gladstone Hotel in November, a 91��ɫ graduate student named Teresa Jewell made washroom signs with a variety of different gender-signifying images – bras, ties, high-heels, pads – and pinned them over the usual male-female signage.

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

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Psychology professors' article on gender and dating among 10 most cited in Journal of Research on Adolescence

fmaquito — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 10:00:00 +0000

In the last decade, 10 of the articles published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence have stood out from the rest as the most cited.

One of them was an article co-authored by members of 91��ɫ’s LaMarsh Centre for Child & Youth Research, psychology Professor Jennifer Connolly and Distinguished Research Professor Debra Pepler in the Faculty of Health, along with Professor Wendy Craig (MA ’89, PhD ’93) of Queen’s University and Adele Goldberg (MA ’91, PhD ’10).

Left: Debra Pepler

The article, “”, is available in a virtual Special Issue: Decade in Review published this month and representing the best of the Journal of Research on Adolescence in celebration of its 20th anniversary.

The Society for Research on Adolescence and the journal's editorial team say the 10 articles embody “the exemplary quality of scholarship upon which the journal has solidified its reputation as a leading publication in the field of adolescent research.”

“Mixed-Gender Groups, Dating, and Romantic Relationships in Early Adolescence”, first published in the journal’s May 2004 issue, details a study on the dating-stage and developmental-contextual models of romantic relationships during early adolescence.

Right: Jennifer Connolly

The study looked at same-gender friendships, affiliation with mixed-gender groups, dating and romantic relationships in a sample of 1,284 young adolescents of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds. Data was collected cross-sectionally in Grades 5 through 8, as well as longitudinally in the fall and spring of an academic year.

For more information, visit the website.

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

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Professor Sheila Cavanagh publishes book on public bathrooms, sexuality, gender and segregation

fmaquito — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Few people consider the public washrooms they use as bastions of segregation, but for 91��ɫ sexuality studies Professor , these places are in fact among the last gender segregated public places in western countries.

Right: Sheila Cavanagh

In her new book , Cavanagh, a queer theorist, explores how the gendered nature of public washrooms has become a source of anxiety and political controversy in recent years.

“While talk about public facilities is often designated as out-of-bounds and not to mention crude and impolite in everyday conversation, these places condition ideas about gender and sexuality,” says Cavanagh. “Bathrooms have always been places where we segregate folks on the basis of gender, sexuality, class, disability and race.”

This segregation has a long history in North America and Cavanagh says that in the not too distant past; there were racially segregated bathrooms and water fountains in the American south. People with physical disabilities are today often desexualized by unisex facilities. “When you are physically disabled, your gender doesn’t seem to matter and you are desexualized in the built environment,” says Cavanagh.

She points out that separate bathrooms for the chamber maid or hired help were also built into many of the homes of the bourgeoisie classes. “In Toronto, bathrooms of today are often designated for ‘customers only,’” she says. “People who are homeless or street active or sex workers are frequently denied access to public facilities.”

The book is based on 100 interviews Cavanagh conducted with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer and/or intersex (LGBTQI) people living in North American cities. It delves into the ways that queer and trans communities are challenging the rigid gendering and heteronormative composition of public washrooms. Incorporating theories from queer studies, trans studies, psychoanalysis, and the work of French philosopher , Cavanagh argues in the pages of Queering Bathrooms that the cultural politics of excretion are intimately related to the regulation of gender and sexuality.

The book took four years to create – two years for Cavanagh to transcribe the interviews and another two to write and edit. “I came up with the title Queering Bathrooms in discussions with my research assistants. We felt that it was important to prompt the reader to think about how the rules governing gender in the bathroom are queer – meaning odd or unusual,” says Cavanagh. “I refer to the hygienic imagination in the subtitle because part of what it means to govern the gender of bathroom users is to clean up or excommunicate those imagined to be ‘out of place’."

What amazed her most as she compiled the book are the stories told by LGBTQI folks during the interviews. Many revealed they had witnessed or had been harassed for allegedly using the "wrong" washroom. It is no wonder, says Cavanagh, that activists must continue to campaign for more gender-neutral facilities.

"Access to bathrooms is a human rights issue and we must not police the gender of bathroom occupants," says Cavanagh. "While it is important to build gender neutral bathrooms, like the ones built at 91��ɫ by the SexGen committee, it is equally important to challenge what counts as a man and as a woman when in more rigidly gendered rooms."

The cover image of was chosen because the gender of the subject peering into the Victorian mirror is unclear, says Cavanagh. "The viewer wonders whether he/she is taking off a moustache or putting on lipstick. The slim hips and flat chest coupled with the wearing of a suit further complicates the image. I wanted a cover image that would prompt viewers to question our certainty about the gender identities of others in public spaces."

Her recommendation is not to do away with the gendered designs of bathrooms entirely but to be uncertain about what the gendered signs mean. "We must remember that there is always a gap between gender identity and the signs used to authorize our social status as gendered subjects. While gender neutral toilets are an absolute necessity, it is equally important to be creative with gender signage."

Cavanagh envisions that such creativity would allow the bathroom to become a pedagogical space where patrons would be gently challenged about their assumptions about what counts as a man or as a woman.

In addition to the book, Cavanagh says she gathered such a wealth of material that she is now working on a script for a new play, Queer Bathroom Monologues. The first iteration of the play was staged at the book launch at the Gladstone Hotel which took place in November. "It was such a hit," says Cavanagh, "that I knew I had to develop it for a larger audience."

For more information or to purchase a copy of the book, visit the web page on the University of Toronto Press website.

By Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor

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

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Professor Deborah Britzman's book examines psychoanalysis, Freud and education

fmaquito — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

In her new book , author Deborah Britzman follows the threads of the concept of education – its dangers and promises and its illusions and revelations – throughout Sigmund Freud’s body of work.

Britzman, a Distinguished Research Professor in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Education, defines how fundamental Freudian concepts such as the psychical apparatus, the drives, the unconscious, the development of morality and the transference have changed throughout Freud’s oeuvre. Freud and Education concludes with new Freudian-influenced approaches to the old dilemmas of educational research, theory and practice.

Right: Deborah Britzman

“People have very strong views about Freud and psychoanalysis. People are also passionate in their views about what education is and what it should be,” Britzman says, reflecting on her reasons for writing the book. “This book introduces Freud and psychoanalysis as well as education without the superstitions traditionally associated with these subjects.

“What happens to education if we begin with the idea that the subject is unconscious and begins in sexuality?” Britzman asks. “Freud insisted that human sexuality begins at birth and that the human is affected by its unconscious life.”

The book inspires critical thinking on such questions as: Why consider contemporary education through psychoanalytic theories? What does Freud teach is about the problems of dependency, aggression and group psychology in educational institutions? What did Freud think about the problem of education?

One key insight, Britzman says, comes from an essay, "Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology", which Freud wrote when he was 60.

“Freud said he did not know what affected him more: how teachers were as people, or what they know as teachers,” Britzman says. “Both are operative in learning environments. We often forget that, even in the university setting, personality matters.”

Freud and Education draws on Britzman's background. She trained as a psychoanalyst and is widely known for bringing psychoanalysis to discussions of contemporary pedagogy, teacher education, social inequality and problems of intolerance and historical crisis.

Part of the Routledge Press Key Ideas in Education series, the book’s back cover says Freud and Education “seeks to shape ongoing discussions in the field of education by putting the field’s contemporary luminaries in dialogue with its foundational figures and critical topics.”

Through her previous books – , , , , – and other scholarly writings, Britzman has won many awards for her contributions to education and psychoanalysis.

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

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Professor and anthropologist David Murray examines homosexuality and hate around the world

fmaquito — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Why does homosexuality incite vitriolic rhetoric, hate and violence around the world, and does homophobia operate differently across social, political and economic terrains? Those are just some of the questions examined in the book , edited by 91��ɫ anthropology Professor .

Published by Duke University Press, Homophobias looks at these questions through critical interrogations and analysis of diverse sites where homophobic discourses are produced, including New 91��ɫ City, Australia, the Caribbean, Greece, India and Indonesia, as well as American Christian churches. The idea is to uncover the complex operational processes of homophobias and their intimate relationships to nationalism, sexism, racism, class and colonialism.

In the book's preface, Murray notes that the term "homophobia" had moved into the global sphere. This got him thinking about the term's meaning and the existence of homophobia. "Homophobia had gone global, and to be accused of being homophobic was to be accused of something more than just not liking homosexuals; furthermore, this accusation now carried potentially serious economic and political repercussions." He hopes the book will be the initial step in answering some of the questions the term homophobia raises.

Left: David Murray

Murray gathered researchers from a diverse range of ethnographic sites "to demonstrate how homophobia is a phenomenon that has no centre or origin, but more importantly, to examine how, or if, a transnational, comparative ��Ի��ethnographically informed perspective might extend, challenge or change our understandings of homophobia."

In part one – "Displacing Homophobia" – some of the issues the contributors examine include homophobia in New 91��ɫ's gay central, American Christian homophobia and homophobia as racism. In part two – "Transnational Homophobias" – they look at homosexual hate in Jamaica, political homophobia in Indonesia, as well as the Barbadian media. In examining these issues, Homophobias provides innovative analytical insights that expose the complex and intersecting cultural, political and economic forces contributing to the development of new forms of homophobia.

Murray, the director of the Graduate Program in Women’s Studies at 91��ɫ, is the author of .

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

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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

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Professor Priscila Uppal collaborates on photography exhibit exploring dream-states, trauma, sexuality and texture

fmaquito — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ English Professor (BA Hons. ’97, PhD ’04) has a thing for dreams, sometimes dreaming fragments of poems. She adores the odd dialogue that can only happen in that surreal state of being. So when artist Daniel Ehrenworth, a former fine arts cultural studies student at 91��ɫ, asked her to collaborate with him for his latest photography ��Ի��mixed media installation – Curse.Sleep. (That’s the Thing With Trouble) – Uppal couldn’t resist.

The opening reception for the exhibition, which both Ehrenworth and Uppal will attend, will take place Thursday, Sept. 9, from 6 to 9pm at , 800 Dundas St. W., Toronto.

Right: A photograph from Daniel Ehrenworth's newest exhibit

Uppal has collaborated with Ehrenworth twice before, composing full lyrical poems, interpretations of his photographs, for his exhibitions Holocaust Dream in 2003, which was made into a book, and The Sea of Ending Pt. 1 in 2005. But this time was different. The idea for Curse.Sleep. (That’s the Thing With Trouble) was to “create poetic subtext” or “short, poetic expressions” of the photographs, says Uppal.

They both drew inspiration from the 1958 hit song Sleep Walk by Santo & Johnny. The exhibition also features three audio deconstructions by Ehrenworth of a little-known recording of Sleep Walk by Canadian-born singer Betsy Brye, which features the original lyrics that Santo & Johnny wrote for the song but never recorded.

“This time I see my contribution more as a poetic conversation. We are both very interested in dream landscapes and the space and emotions we inhabit when we dream,” says Uppal. The photos embrace a range of human experience while exploring dream-states, trauma, sexuality and texture.

Left: Part of the Curse.Sleep. (That’s the Thing With Trouble) exhibit featuring the photographs of Daniel Ehrenworth and the poetry of Priscila Uppal

When Uppal first saw Ehrenworth’s photos for his new show, she immediately felt that a brief poetic missive – a line, maybe expressed by the subject of the photo, or something someone in a dream might utter – would be the perfect fit, rather than a full poem. “They’re almost like inner confessions,” she says.

Ehrenworth’s and Uppal’s artistic visions clicked. “When it works it’s so exciting,” says Uppal. For this project, she was able to enter Ehrenworth’s dream space and he was able to enter hers. “Gallery goers can enter their collective dream.” The gallery space is meant to imitate a sleepwalking state.

Uppal describes Ehrenworth's photos as dark, surreal, stark and haunting. People in the photos take on a sort of mythical, hazy appearance. They blend, at times, into the natural landscape around them. Sort of like a dream.

Her poetry will be written on the wall in charcoal next to or below each photograph. Things like: “Anything from the past bites us like insects”, “Where did you misplace your heart?”, “Shake off memories like snowflakes”, “When you’ve forgotten your phone number, the gods will call” or “I’m headed for a fictional horizon.”

Right: A Daniel Ehrenworth photo on exhibit as part of his latest mixed media installation in collaboration with Priscila Uppal

Ehrenworth is a commercial photographer and a photo-based artist, who has exhibited his work at galleries across the country, including Gallery 44 (Toronto), The MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie), The New Gallery (Calgary) and the Khyber Gallery (Halifax).

Uppal is a Toronto poet and fiction writer and the author of the poetry collections , (which was shortlisted for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize), and , and of the novels and . She is the editor of ��Ի�� and the author of . She is on the Board of Directors at the Toronto Arts Council and was poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic games. Time Out London recently dubbed her “Canada’s coolest poet.”

Curse.Sleep. (That’s the Thing With Trouble) will run from Thursday, Sept. 9, to Sunday, Oct. 3.

For more information and gallery hours, visit the Web site.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer. Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Inclusion Day 2010 call for proposals: Deadline is August 31, 2010

fmaquito — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

The Centre for Human Rights at 91��ɫ is hosting its second annual human rights conference, known as Inclusion Day, on Wednesday, Oct. 6. This one-day conference aims to recognize and respect the different beliefs, perspectives, opinions and lived experiences that exist within the University.

This year’s conference will take place on the University’s Keele campus. The 2010 conference theme is “Dialoguing Across Differences”. Keynote speakers and sessions will explore how to dialogue across relevant human rights areas in relation to this theme. Conference participants will engage in interactive sessions focused on communicating difficult topics.

Conference organizers are seeking proposals for sessions on race and racialization, gender expression and expectations, (dis)abilities or sexual orientation.

Presenters are invited to submit proposals on the conference theme for a 60-minute session in the format of a round-table discussion, individual or panel presentation, interactive workshop or dialogue process. Proposals should be provided to the Centre for Human Rights no later than Aug. 31.

For more information, e-mail conference organizers Kristina Osborne or Nythalah Baker or visit the Centre for Human Rights Web site.

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

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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.

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