Sexuality Studies

Queen of the Maple Leaf reveals the role of beauty pageants in entrenching settler femininity and white heteropatriarchy at the heart of twentieth-century Canada.

Red Light Labour, the first book to examine sex work policy and advocacy since Canada v. Bedford, showcases the perspectives of sex workers and activists and deepens our understanding of sex work as labour.

Reconsidering Radical Feminism investigates the legacy of feminist debates about the politics of heterosexuality, examining how we become invested in arguments that position us as feminists – and as gendered subjects.

A Queer Love Story chronicles the poignant, incisive exchanges and intimate friendship that developed between Jane Rule, lesbian novelist and essayist, and Rick Bébout, gay journalist and activist, as they reflected on and participated in the key issues and events that shaped LGBT communities in the ’80s and ’90s.

By challenging the erasure of radical histories, this book makes an invaluable contribution to remembering and rethinking Canadian sex and gender activism from the 1970s to the present.

Harnessing the strengths of social theory and new materialisms, this book advances a new critical theory of masculinity.

A celebratory history of how lesbians “made a scene” by creating places and opportunities to form relationships, debate politics, and build their own culture across Canada.

This book contends that Canada’s acceptance of “gay rights” obscures and abets multiple forms of oppression and details how, in the fight for equality and inclusion, some LGBTQ communities gain acceptance within the mainstream, and as a result become complicit in a system that fortifies white supremacy, furthers settler colonialism, advances neoliberalism, and props up imperialist mythologies.

Drawing on media, popular culture, and recent court cases, this book examines how various forms of non-monogamy (polygamy, adultery, and polyamory) are represented in the public sphere, how some forms of non-monogamy are tolerated and others vilified, and the effects such privileging is having on intimate relationships and other aspects of contemporary Western society.

A volume of cutting-edge scholarship that argues against the traditional assumption that religion and sexuality will always collide, instead exploring sites of intersection where various forms of both co-exist.

This book offers, for the first time, a balanced and probing textual analysis of John Money’s writing, to assess the profound impact of this pioneering sexologist’s work on the debates and research on sexuality and gender that dominated the last half of the twentieth century.

A lucid and unflinching argument for the reframing of the debate on sex work, ending limiting moralistic approaches, and respecting the unique perspectives of workers.

A diverse and comprehensive dialogue between sex workers, advocates, and researchers that looks at sex work in a new way.

This history examines shifting constructions of homosexuality over time through a comparative analysis of gay persecution in France and Quebec.

This intimate study of the lives of middle-class lesbians who came of age before the gay rights movement unveils a previously unknown world of private relationships, discreet social networks, and love.

The Canadian War on Queers shows how the Canadian state used the ideology of national security to wage war on gays and lesbians.

Undercurrents engages the critical rubric of “queer” to examine Hong Kong’s screen, uncovering a queer media culture that has been largely overlooked by critics in the West, and demonstrates the cultural vitality of Hong Kong amidst political transition.

Through a series of case studies covering such diverse subjects as car culture, mountaineering, war veterans, murder trials, and a bridge collapse, Christopher Dummitt argues that the very idea of what it meant to be modern was gendered.

This work explores how the construction of gender was thrown into crisis during the twentieth century, opening a permanent rupture in the gender system, destabilizing masculinity as an unstable category.

What makes the textual image of a woman with a penis so compelling, malleable, and persistent?

A provocative study of public and professional responses to female teacher sex scandals, this book employs queer theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist film theory to examine sensationalized legal cases, including Mary Kay Letourneau, Amy Gehring, and Heather Ingram.

Explores how youth identities have been constructed through dominant and often competing discourses about youth, sexuality, and gender, and how queer youth in Alberta negotiated the contradictions of these discourses.