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Anglos need to break from the Québec Liberals
QueerQuébec anglophones should break with their knee-jerk position of voting for the Liberals and vote for Québec Solidaire instead, argues Nora Loreto.
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Selling Sex: Experience, Advocacy, and Research on Sex Work in Canada
FeminismAs a Canadian sex Worker, I know too well how hard it can be to find a balanced, nuanced analysis of the lived experiences of people in my profession and the complex legal and social realities we encounter. Selling Sex proved to be a notable exception.
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Review: One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military During World War II
Through careful and painstaking research, using archival evidence including court martial proceedings and interviews, Paul Jackson writes into World War II a social history of homosexuality in the Canadian Forces – a social history that had been, as he notes, ignored by military historians.
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Queer Liberation: The Social Organization of Forgetting and the Resistance of Remembering
QueerIn much of the Left and within gay/lesbian communities our rich queer histories of struggle have been forgotten, creating a kind of social and historical amnesia.
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Queers Against Apartheid: From South Africa to Israel
QueerLike South Africa twenty-five years ago, Israel today portrays itself as a progressive liberal democracy, an endangered island of modernity in a backward and hostile region. The existence of a gay rights movement in Israel is deployed as another example of this modernity.
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Queer & Radical Politics
QueerAt the time of writing we were informed that Pride Toronto had banned Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from participating in this summer’s Toronto Pride March. Capitulating to Israel lobby groups and to City Hall threats to withdraw funding if the group marched, the board of Toronto Pride has chosen to set a dangerous precedent by censoring a community human rights group. We are thinking about the impact of QuAIA on queer movements, queer politics, and where the “movement” is now.
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Peeping in on Goldie (and liking the show)
In queersexlife: Autobiographical Notes on Sexuality, Gender & Identity Terry Goldie offers up a heady brew of theory and introspection that is both refreshing and biting. The “autobiographical notes” that infuse the book reveal the intimacy and inextricability of personal experience and theoretical perspective which grounds the work and makes it feel “human” and accessible. At the same time, the deeply personal details jar the reader who might find his frankness unfamiliar, if not uncomfortable. And good for him. Goldie’s narratives are not merely casual observations that superficially draw links between the personal and political; instead, he is willing to be vulnerable and raw. Academic writing rarely offers this intimacy—moans and other physical pleasures in the first person—and it is a welcome shake-up. Indeed, it causes the reader, at least this reader, to question what that initial discomfort may mean, about the boundaries of knowledge production and about the scopophilia that positions the reader in a unique relationship to the text, gazing upon the strokes and sounds that emit from the pages.
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Fist of the Spider Woman
When I decided to venture “out,” I yearned for lesbian literatures that would brace my trembling, newborn limbs. I’d spent years projecting my own lesbian desires in my mind’s wide dark room while at the hands of male lovers, but at the brink of queerdom, I struggled to connect sex and emotions. For guidance, I bought the annual Ultimate Lesbian Erotica, which wasn’t ultimate, I was so disengaged from the contrived characters and situations I never finished reading the collection. Instead, I wish I’d picked-up a literary collection like Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire, an anthology edited by Vancouver’s Amber Dawn, however, I doubt there were many like it. This anthology’s diverse cast of characters skillfully embodies the political and personal that molds a lesbian’s desire, constructing stories and poems that are sexy and substantive.
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State Repression of Sexual Minorities
QueerIn 1996 Justice John Wesley McClung, Q.C. ruled against Delwin Vriend in the famous case prompted by his dismissal from a religious college owing to his sexual orientation. Warning against sanctioning “deviant practices,” McClung asserted that the province had appropriately refrained from “the validation of homosexual rights, including sodomy, as a protected and fundamental right, thereby rebutting a millennia [sic] of moral teaching.”
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Contempo Abo
QueerNoam Gonick spoke on Alert Radio with aboriginal artists Kent Monkman and Adrian Stimson about Two-Spirit in their contemporary art practice. Adrian Stimson is a Blackfoot performance artist living in Saskatoon who works in installation and photography and is well known for his persona “Buffalo Boy” who often appears at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Toronto-based Kent Monkman plays the role of “Miss Chief Eagle Testicle” in a performance context and is a painter of Cree descent, raised in Winnipeg, who also works in video installation and film.
