Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

In their upcoming book, LJ Slovin looked at the physical, mental and emotional labour that trans youth undertake in high schools

Being trans in high school today can be a lot of work �C and while some of that work can be seen, much of it can��t.

LJ Slovin is fascinated with this physical, mental and emotional labour that trans youth undertake each day in order to feel safe, connected to their peers and to comfortably and safely express who they are.

A post-doctoral researcher at the University of Toronto��s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, Slovin spent a year with several trans youths at a high school in western Canada to better understand this kind of labour.

Their findings are documented in a new book to be published this August, Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity.

��As a trans non-binary person and a former youth worker, I��ve worked with a lot of trans youth,�� Slovin says.

��I was interested in the normative ideas that shape what we understand as trans in schools, and how those limited ideas create a context in which trans youth have to do a lot of labour.��

The book is filled with stories about the day-to-day experiences of six high school trans students between the ages of 14 and 18 who Slovin worked alongside for a year.

Slovin observed some students from a distance by sitting in the same classrooms.

��Some other young folks wanted me to be with them all the time,�� they say. ��I went to their classes, we hung out at lunch. I went to all their performances in the evenings, we would leave school at the end of the day and get snacks.��

Slovin was also intrigued with how the participating school operated and observing how these youth navigated socially within it.

��That included looking at school policy and the school��s physical space, but it also included the relationships the trans youth had with teachers [and] with other classmates �C looking at all of these elements of a school that a young person would interact with on a daily basis.��

Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid will be available in Canada in August (photo by LJ Slovin)

Slovin identified three different forms of work that the students undertook.

The first is the labour of understanding and forgiveness by continually having to be patient and compassionate when others incorrectly identified them.

��I was in a progressive school; many of the adults had good intentions towards supporting trans folks,�� says Slovin.

But Slovin nevertheless noticed that the teachers, though well-meaning, would make mistakes when identifying the students�� names, genders or pronouns. The adults also wanted the students to extend empathy to them as they tried to be allies.

��That creates work for a young person to be like, ��I understand this is a challenging thing for you to learn, and I forgive you for misgendering me,�� Slovin says, adding that such interactions �C continually having to correct, explain and forgive �C can be emotionally taxing.

The second type of labour Slovin observed is what they describe as legibility: having to make a distinct effort to demonstrate one is trans to elicit a response. While not all students were interested or compelled to perform this labour, Slovin says those students who wanted to be recognized as trans did this work on a regular basis.

��If they want to access accommodations, they have to be known as a transgender person, which means they have to do something to make themselves visible to adults,�� they say. ��So, they behave in a way that would be expected according to normative notions of trans identity.

��These students are understanding adults�� ideas of what it means and looks like to be trans, and then trying to enact that so that they can access the accommodations they need so that they��re not misgendered all the time.��

This can result in inner conflict and frustration, with some students being conflicted about how to dress, speak and act in a way that conforms to people��s often narrow understandings about trans identity.

The third form of labour Slovin calls ��world building�� C trans youth creating, maintaining and investing in safe spaces where they can be themselves with no expectations or demands.

��Safe spaces are tricky,�� says Slovin. ��People are creating them based on what they need to feel safer in a school. I was interested in the spaces they built away from all of the surveillance and observation where they could just live in relation to their gender in ways that weren't noticed in school.��

One such space was the tech booth in the school��s theatre, where Slovin spent hours with two students.

��When we were in the tech booth, everything was different,�� they say. ��They didn't have to prove that they were trans to me or to each other, they didn't have to worry about having their pronouns respected, they didn't have to worry about dressing in a certain way that undercut their legitimacy as being who they are.

��They were able to dream about what it would be like when they were not in the school anymore, and they could live in a trans community and live more aligned with their desires.��

Through their book, Slovin hopes to provide educators with ideas about how to re-evaluate school environments.

��How do we shift the ways that we think about trans youth and about gender nonconformity? What if we step back and ask, ��What is happening in school environments that is creating hardship for young people?��

��Instead of adults being accommodating when a transgender person makes themselves known, what about creating environments that already invite the possibility of gender non-conformity?��

Slovin is looking forward to discussions their book will spark upon its release next month.

��It was an amazing project,�� they say. ��To spend all of that time with the same people was a gift. I got a lot out of the time we spent together �C a lot of joy, because for all the ways that we talked about trans folks dealing with intense things, it was just lovely to share that time and space with them.��

Critical Digital Humanities Initiative to examine history through lens of power, social justice

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:16:49 +0000

Critical Digital Humanities Initiative to examine history through lens of power, social justice

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 12/09/2021 - 11:16

Cutline

Cara Krmpotich, left, and Heidi Bohaker, right, are leading an international team that aims to decolonize museum practices (photos supplied)

Tina Adamopoulos

Topic

Critical Digital Humanities Network

Groundbreakers

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Robarts Library

Faculty of Information

From wampum belts to historical photographs, Cara Krmpotich and Heidi Bohaker are seeking to digitally reunite thousands of Indigenous artifacts from the Great Lakes region with the communities who once created them.

The pair of University of Toronto researchers lead an international team that aims to decolonize museum practices by creating a database, or ��knowledge sharing system,�� that, for almost 15 years, has provided digital access to Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat artifacts currently scattered in museums throughout North America and Europe.

Since 2005, the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture (GRASAC), has worked to both advance public knowledge about the history of Indigenous Peoples who inhabit the Great Lakes and provide Indigenous members of those communities expanded access to their artifacts.

��Settler colonialism is intimately connected with why so much Indigenous culture is in museums around the world,�� says Bohaker, an associate professor in the department of history in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

��We want to create this [database] in a meaningful and respectful way.��

The Great Lakes Research Alliance is one of several projects recently supported by the Critical Digital Humanities Intitiative (CDHI). The CDHI launched earlier this year and aims to bring together researchers from a variety of fields to analyze and unpack power and social justice from a historical perspective. It supports projects at the intersection of humanities and digital technology, with an emphasis on anti-racist, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship.

Elspeth Brown

��The work that the critical digital humanities does can be quite different from traditional humanities work because most projects are team-based, last for many years and involve technical and computer-related collaborations,�� says Professor Elspeth Brown, who is leading CHDI and is also director of U of T��s Digital Humanities Network

The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative is one of 19 projects currently supported by U of T��s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI) program, a tri-campus network that unites researchers, students, faculty and external partners to fuel multidisciplinary solutions to today��s problems.

��We��re usually asked to think of technologies as being separate from decision-making that is shaped by social inequalities and bias,�� says Brown. ��But technologies and algorithms are made by people whose outlooks on the world emerge from these same social structures.��

In the case of the Great Lakes Research Alliance, Krmpotich, an associate professor in the Faculty of Information, received funding for the database project through the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative��s Emerging Projects Fund. The support allowed the alliance to hire Richard Laurin, an award-winning museum project developer, to design a new, password-free interface for a public site of cultural belongings. The project, which first began in 2018, seeks to remove barriers such as logins, especially for Indigenous youth, artists and language speakers. Until now, the password-protected site was built for GRASAC members.

��Indigenous peoples have taken over digital spaces as cultural ones,�� Krmpotich says. ��It��s an active, productive and creative part of life.��

Sheila Wheesk

Meanwhile, research assistant Sheila Wheesk is seeking to enrich the database of Indigenous artifacts by describing the history and significance of items in the catalog, and including the names of belongings in various Indigenous languages.

��The information from research assistants, whether in English, Anishinaabemowin or Cayuga, will make it easy for anyone to find an item �C like a beaded bag, for example �C in the system,�� says Wheesk who recently shared a Best Graduate Paper Award with other research assistants working on the project.

��That��s why it��s important to have all of this in the database.��

The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative is also supporting a number of other important projects.

Patrick Keilty

Patrick Keilty, an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, is using support from the Emerging Projects Fund to fill in a gap in the historical record related to sex work, sexuality, and pleasure. Keilty is the archives director of the Sexual Representation Collection, the largest collection of adult film and sex work history in Canada with an emphasis on feminist, queer, trans and kink cultures. The archives contain 1,500 films, 3,000 AIDS-era video tapes and the personal papers of journalists, activists and others related to the global history of sex work and regulation of obscenity.

��Traditional archives and libraries don��t attach the same importance to these histories as they do others, which constitutes an archival gap,�� says Keilty.

��What that means for historians, archivists and members of the sex industry is that to construct those histories, you often have to turn to the fan market to source and purchase your primary source materials.��

In other words, historians are forced to source materials from large, private (and often inaccessible) collections. In 2014, Peter Alilunas, a cinema studies professor at the University of Oregon, and Dan Erdman, a film archivist in Chicago, created an online archive space that gathers materials related to adult film history. They invited scholars around the world to collaborate in an effort to make these materials more visible and accessible.

Keilty answered the call.

With support from the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, Keilty hired a research assistant to write a protocol on digitizing different media formats, which will equip researchers from universities around the world to contribute to the Adult Film History Project.

Through the project, students learn about digitization, the history of the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts, and how to create metadata for effective information retrieval. Students are currently digitizing text-based materials, including case notes from legal cases and safe sex guides, and will soon digitize silent-era films.

��We��re interested in ways to build community, to disseminate items in new ways and create new arrangements online. We want to be a dynamic space that engages with old and new technologies,�� Keilty says.

Earlier this fall, nearly 200 people registered for the fourth Digital Humanities Conference, which included presentations by U of T faculty, librarians, post-doctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students. Held online, the event featured conversations on everything from cultural identity and feminism to mapping archaeological sites and archiving music history.

At the conference, Mariam Karim, one of eight Critical Digital Humanities Network graduate student fellows, said the use of social media as a grassroots digital tool for documentation is limited in Arab women��s movements because it is often subject to censorship, and that meaningful engagement with social justice advocates and academics is vital to cite and preserve their work. Thy Phu, a professor in the deparment of arts, culture and media at U of T Scarborough, described a project that puts refugee perspectives front and centre, giving them control of a narrative about migration by documenting their own stories. And Robarts Library��s Alex Jung, an open technology specialist, and Kyla Jemison, a special formats metadata librarian, tackled the reconstruction of digital research infrastructures to community-driven tools such as Wikidata, a free, multilingual, open-knowledge database that makes information easily findable. Through shared meetups and training, participants from U of T Libraries have contributed about 4,000 Wikidata edits spanning a wide range of use cases including improved archival collections discovery and open-source bibliographic data and citation management.

One of the network��s most successful platforms is the Lightning Lunches series. The moderated panels bring three scholars together to discuss various themes centred on equity and justice. Discussions have included surveillance studies and challenges faced by multilingual digital humanities scholars.

The Critical Digital Humanities Network is also developing a spring speaker series and an international conference for next fall �C and exploring global partnerships to break barriers in obtaining funding for critical digital humanities scholars.

��It��s often difficult for [critical digital humanities] scholars to find support,�� Brown says. ��That��s why it's wonderful that U of T gives us the opportunity to create a robust network.��

This article is part of a series about U of T's Institutional Strategic Initiatives program �� which seeks to make life-changing advancements in everything from infectious diseases to social justice �C and the research community that's driving it.

Queer and Trans Research Lab opens at U of T's Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 14:05:58 +0000

Queer and Trans Research Lab opens at U of T's Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 09/17/2021 - 10:05

Cutline

(Photo by University of Toronto)

Krishna Rau

Topic

English

Graduate Students

U of T Mississauga

Undergraduate Students

Dana Seitler wants the University of Toronto��s new Queer and Trans Research Lab �C the first of its kind �C to break down barriers, rethink traditional academic practices and empower community activists.

Dana Seitler

The director of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, which will host the Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) beginning this month, sees the groundbreaking initiative as a way to counter the isolation of queer and trans researchers, as well as a crucial opportunity to forge closer ties with the wider community at a time of increased systemic anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-queer violence.

��The Bonham Centre is already very good at fostering connections across the disciplines because our programs �C both undergraduate and graduate �C are interdisciplinary at their core�� says Seitler, who is also a professor in the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science. ��Moving to something like a research lab is a natural progression from there. We hope it will allow us to build ongoing relationships between researchers, artists and community leaders who are doing the kind of work that positively affects people��s lives in LGBTQ and BIPOC communities.

��At the lab, we are committed to providing an interactive, creative space for collective work and to building the necessary infrastructure for this work to successfully evolve.��

Seitler adds that she is excited participants will have the chance to work together and share cross-disciplinary and creative methods and challenges.

��As yet, U of T doesn��t have a mechanism in place for faculty members that are doing LGBTQ2S+ research to collaborate with each other, or for students to learn from these collaborations. At the lab, we��ll immerse students in both faculty and community projects and have monthly meetings which we��ll call ��Share and Tells,�� with everyone presenting their work on the different queer methods that inform their approach.

��The kinds of approaches that a researcher takes in sociology, for example, are very different from what someone does in law or media studies, which are very different from approaches taken in public health work or immunology. The lab brings with it a sense of possibility, of experimentation and creative unpredictability. It��s really important to us that we remain open and capacious as we grow.��

Seitler is also enthusiastic about the opportunity for academics to collaborate with artists and activists. For this purpose, Seitler developed the Artist-in-Residence and Community Leadership programs. The 2021-22 artist-in-residence is trans opera singer Teiya Kasahara ��ԭ ؑҰ and the two community leadership residencies will be held by Tatiana Ferguson, co-founder of the Black Queer Youth Collective and Somali-Canadian multidisciplinary artist and videographer Abdi Osman. While the initial appointments are drawn from Toronto, the lab seeks to collaborate with future appointees from elsewhere in Canada and around the world.

��A problem that tends to exist with universities in general is a lack of accountability to our communities,�� says Seitler. ��The lab wants to break down those divisions by creating a space where community leaders and artists and others can work and create together with faculty and student researchers. The reality is that those of us doing this kind of work are also active members of the queer, trans and BIPOC communities working for change. Many of us might even say we exist more in our various communities than we do in the university.��

The artist and community leadership appointments will be joined by research associates, post-doctoral fellows, faculty members and student research assistants as part of the inaugural QTRL cohort.

Nikoli Attai will be the new research associate and the QTRL program co-ordinator; Elif Sari will hold the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellowship; Assistant Professors Andrea Allen and Jordache Ellapen will be Martha LA McCain Faculty Research Fellows; M��nica Espaillat Lizardo, Ian Liujia Tian, Chido Muchemwa and Elliott Tilleczek will be graduate research assistants; and Chelle Carter, Jade Nelson, Madison Garces and Riya Joshi will be undergraduate research assistants.

��The QTRL is a new and exciting endeavour that will provide us with opportunities to do the necessary and critical work of addressing the deeply complex experiences and needs of LGBTIQ2SA+ communities,�� says Attai. ��I am particularly excited and motivated by our inaugural cohort of community leaders, artists, students, faculty and our postdoctoral fellow, whose projects pay critical attention to a wide array of issues impacting queer and trans, Black, Indigenous and people of colour communities locally and transnationally.��

The QTRL has received support from across the university, according to Seitler. In fact, the lab is launching its three-year pilot project ahead of schedule. The original plan was to have only the post-doctoral fellowship, the artist-in-residence and one community leadership role this year. But the response, especially from sponsors Mark S. Bonham and Martha LA McCain, was so enthusiastic �C especially when coupled with matching funding from the Faculty of Arts & Science �C that this year will see the full QTRL vision come nearly to fruition.

Bonham says he was delighted to support the addition to his namesake centre.

��This is an exciting time for the Bonham Centre as it builds an impactful research lab on LGBTQ+ issues,�� he says. ��Academic institutions have always been at the forefront of research on leading issues of the day, and the new Queer and Trans Research Lab will help fortify and expand the strength of the Bonham Centre in addressing the pressing issues of the community.��

McCain agrees that the QTRL can play a major role in tackling issues facing queer, trans and BIPOC people.

��I believe strongly that problems are best solved at the intersection of diverse learning, talent and perspective,�� she says. ��For this reason, I am so very pleased to have played a role in the creation of the Queer and Trans Research Lab.

��The QTRL is founded upon the principle of creating connections to learn from one another, share our strengths and work together to create change. I am convinced that the bridges built and communities formed through the interdisciplinary efforts of the QTRL can only assure progress in addressing the local and transnational LGBTQ2S+ issues of greatest concern to all of us.��

Seitler is quick to point out that the continuation of this pilot project will depend on ongoing funding. But given the ongoing structural inequalities the pandemic has highlighted, she says the QTRL��s importance is clear.

��One of the things we��ve seen in the pandemic is how it has disproportionally impacted specific communities, including (or especially) undocumented, BIPOC, queer and trans communities. But this didn��t reveal anything new. It just underscores what we already know about how particular people are actively targeted for neglect �C this includes health inequities in LGBTQ2S+ and QTBIPOC communities, human rights abuses against gay and lesbian communities around the world, and the epidemic of violence against Black trans women.

��The QTRL wants to be a place where we can come together to address and actively challenge these problems.��

Queer Italian-Canadian anthology seeks to broaden acceptance, fuse identities

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 14:26:00 +0000

Queer Italian-Canadian anthology seeks to broaden acceptance, fuse identities

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 07/27/2021 - 10:26

Cutline

Paolo Frasc��, an assistant professor, teaching stream, of Italian studies, was among the contributors to what's being billed as the most comprehensive volume yet of queer Italian-Canadian writing (photo by Jason Krygier-Baum)

Sean McNeely

Topic

Italian Studies

The department of Italian studies in the University of Toronto��s Faculty of Arts & Science has helped create what may be the most comprehensive volume yet of queer Italian-Canadian literature.

Launched in June, Here & Now: An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian Writing includes short stories, poems, memoirs, excerpts of novels, plays and film scripts from 35 contributors of different immigrant generations.

They include: Steve Galluccio, screenwriter and playwright, most noted for his play Mambo Italiano and its feature film adaptation; playwright Frank Canino; award-winning writer Monica Meneghetti; author and poet Amber Dawn; slam poetry champion Liana Cusmano; Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies instructor and writer Elena Basile; novelist and founder of the Violet Hour Reading Series Christopher DiRaddo; and filmmaker Luis De Filippis.

Together, the contributors offer unique perspectives from those who identify as gay, lesbian, queer or trans, and are of Italian heritage in Canada.

��This volume takes on subjects that are not traditionally discussed in the Italian-Canadian household,�� says Licia Canton, a writer, literary translator and the anthology��s editor, who worked with the Frank Iacobucci Centre for Italian-Canadian Studies within the department.

��The anthology can start an important conversation between the queer community and the Italian-Canadian community �C two communities which don��t necessarily talk to one another.��

For some contributors, this is their first time being published, while others are established authors or artists. Though spanning different genres and voices of different generations �C from writers in their 20s to their 80s �C a recurring theme is the clash between queer identity and the expectations of immigrant families.

There are also tales of love and support.

The anthology opens with three introductory essays, one of which was written by Paolo Frasc��, an assistant professor, teaching stream, of Italian studies at U of T. He also wrote a personal story and a poem.

��There's a history, with lots of exceptions, of close-mindedness; Italian-Canadians being seen as very conservative when it comes to family traditions and sticking to the benchmarks of a normative life,�� says Frasc��.

So often, Frasc�� adds, the Italian immigrant dream is to come to Canada, work hard, buy a home, get married, become successful, have children and have them follow in the parents�� footsteps �C and being queer sometimes doesn��t fit into this narrative.

��It can be a disappointment to those who have come to Canada in the 1960s or 70s to build a stable life here,�� says Frasc��. ��But there are other ways of being Italian-Canadian �C ways that do not follow the posts that are put along the way for an Italian-Canadian child to prove themself.��

While being queer can cause a disruption, so too can the decision to become an artist.

��Because of that history of hard work and wanting to motivate future generations to pursue stable career paths, artists sometimes have a difficult time coming out as artists, as well as coming out as queer,�� says Frasc��. ��It's the fear of losing the financial security that the first generation was, generally speaking, able to achieve here.��

Frasc�� has no doubts about Here & Now��s potential positive impact and message.

��In addition to having an impact on the literary community, this anthology has started important conversations about queerness in the Italian-Canadian community and its institutions, such as Villa Charities and the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers,�� says Frasc��. ��For one, it can help young Italian-Canadians who are queer feel that they have support when it comes to trying to reconcile these identities that sometimes are at odds with one another.

��It's also important for other Canadians to see Italian-Canadian communities not only through one lens �C the master narrative of Italian migration to North America �C but also through the stories that are not part of mainstream accounts of Italian presence in Canada.��

Though just released, Frasc�� has already seen the anthology spark discussion. Some Italian-Canadian community members have expressed apprehension about the book, but Frasc�� notes that they are in the minority.

��I've been pleasantly surprised by the way this has been welcomed by established figures in the Italian-Canadian community,�� says Frasc��. ��Our community is ready for this conversation that is long overdue.��

Frasc�� intends to use Here & Now as a teaching tool for his courses.

��When we study the history of the Italian-Canadian community, we often focus on the workers, the families, the struggle of migration and the success achieved,�� he says. ��The anthology asks us to also acknowledge the queer stories, which have remained largely untold, as part of Italian-Canadian history.��

To keep the conversation going, Frasc�� and Canton have future projects on the horizon that aim to build on Here & Now��s momentum.

Frasc�� will be teaching a course this year titled ��Sex and Gender in Contemporary Italy,�� which will include units on sexual and gender diversity in the Italian diaspora. A qualitative research project is underway with the assistance of two work-study project assistants, Heather Sdao and Ariana Magliocco. Plans are also in the works for a conference next year, tentatively titled Queering the Italian Diaspora.

Canton and Frasc�� also intend to co-author research articles on queer Italian-Canadian artists, and plan to organize community-based activities and events that intersect queerness and Italian-Canadian identity.

��Ultimately, I hope this anthology will inspire some change in dinner conversations and lead to more inclusivity,�� says Canton, who was recently awarded a one-year research fellowship at the Frank Iacobucci Centre.

��Hopefully, more queer Italian-Canadians will have the opportunity to be understood and accepted within their families and the Italian-Canadian community.��

'I guess I was always an activist,' U of T's David Rayside looks back on a career supporting sexual diversity

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:15:25 +0000

'I guess I was always an activist,' U of T's David Rayside looks back on a career supporting sexual diversity

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 06/17/2020 - 10:15

Cutline

Professor Emeritus David Rayside helped form an early 1990s committee on homophobia, helped conceive of the Positive Space initiative and became the founding director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (U of T file photo)

Chris Sasaki

Topic

Muslims

University College

At 11 p.m. on February 5, 1981, 200 police officers descended on four bathhouses in downtown Toronto in a series of co-ordinated raids. By the end of the operation, more than 300 charges were laid for being found in a common bawdy house or operating a bawdy house. At the time, it was the largest single arrest in the city��s history.

The raid immediately mobilized Toronto��s gay community, sparking protests against mistreatment at the hands of the police. Among those galvanized by the raids was David Rayside, who now, nearly 40 years later, is a professor emeritus in the University of Toronto��s department of political science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the founding director of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at University College.

��I guess I was always an activist,�� Rayside says. ��I was active in feminist circles soon after my appointment to the faculty in 1974. Gay activism came a few years later when I started where lots of people started �C stuffing and licking envelopes for the monthly gay magazine, The Body Politic.

��The police raids got me and many people mobilized. I wasn��t so good with a bullhorn, but I was good at organization, so I became active in the Right to Privacy Committee, the Citizens�� Independent Review of Police Activities and, a few years later, in the coalition pressing for the addition of sexual orientation to the Ontario Human Rights Code.��

Rayside��s activism continued at U of T. He helped form an early 1990s committee on homophobia. In the mid-90s, he and Rona Abramovitch, the then status of women officer at U of T, alongside a group of students, faculty and staff conceived of the Positive Space initiative.

In 2004, Rayside became the founding director of the Bonham Centre. Arts & Science writer Chris Sasaki recently spoke to him about the centre and his current research focus: the Muslim response to sexual diversity in Canada and the U.S. �C work he is conducting with Momin Rahman from the department of sociology at Trent University.

David Rayside (centre) is pictured in a 2016 photo during an event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Positive Space campaign (photo by Johnny Guatto)

How did the Bonham Centre come to be?

Back in the mid-90s, a group of faculty members and graduate students started meeting to discuss curriculum change that recognized sexual diversity. We wanted departments and faculties to take sexuality seriously �C just as feminist activists had wanted gender studies to be taken seriously. In 1998, we created a minor program that took advantage of a few existing courses as well as a course I had introduced over a decade earlier on the politics of gender and sexuality. Then, in 2005, we expanded to a major program and created the centre, three years later adding specialists at the undergraduate level and a collaborate graduate program.

Right from the beginning, we had significant undergraduate enrolment and, from 2008 on, the graduate program drew students from across the campus. We weren��t the first program in sexual diversity but we soon became the biggest with the highest profile. There were keen instructors �C dynamic program directors who had a lot of enthusiasm and energy like Maureen FitzGerald, David Townsend and Scott Rayter. My successor as director, Brenda Cossman, as well as the current director, Dana Seitler, have built on that foundation, expanding our reputation nationally and internationally.

Your most recent work relates to the queer Muslim experience in Canada. What have you found?

For queer Muslims, there��s been a long history of challenge in asserting their distinctive place within their own ethno-religious community and in the broader LGBTQ world. Those who want to retain their faith face a struggle familiar to those in other religious communities, where queerness is too easily seen as a threat.

And it��s complicated for Muslims, as it is with other ethno-racial minorities. Within the broader queer community, they can and do experience racial prejudice, compounded by the view that their faith makes them unrecognizable outsiders. Being queer and Muslim, in that sense, is thought impossible without abandoning that crucial faith part of their identity. The exclusion they experience from Muslim communities is not categorically different from that felt by many others, but it��s perhaps slower to change because of the dominance of traditionalist family attitudes in the countries they have migrated from and among North American Muslim clerics.

Your current research will appear in a book being edited by your collaborator Mohmin Rahmin. For that, you interviewed queer and political activists in the Muslim community to gain insight into the response to sexual diversity from mainstream Muslim political or religious groups. Have you found that attitudes are changing?

There has been some change and there are encouraging signs. Muslim political groups have a lot on their plates, dealing with Islamophobia, anti-Muslim incidents and sentiment. Some organizations are struggling with how to be more supportive, recognizing the importance of building alliances with groups representing other forms of prejudice.

The preparedness of queer Muslims to claim their own voices helps to force change. There are queer Muslim groups that are explicitly feminist and LGBTQ inclusive. In Canada, Salaam supports Muslims who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and/or intersex. They have a mosque and regularly livestream LGBTQ-inclusive services.

And I think we will be seeing the large-scale shift in Muslim attitudes in Canada that we have started to see in the United States. Children are growing up with all kinds of other kids in their classes and schools have been moving �C often slowly �C to a recognition of sexual diversity. On balance, Muslim Canadians are well educated and have relatively progressive views, and I can see indications that their attitudes on sexual diversity will align more closely with their views on other social and political issues.

Has your activism given you any particular insight into the current protests against police mistreatment of Black Americans?

The raids in 1981 opened my eyes to how powerful the culture within the police force was. And the same applies today. I��ve known a number of police officers over the years who have really confronted their own prejudice and the discriminatory patterns they see within their own forces. But there is still a very conservative organizational culture that we and they have to contend with �C one with a very us-versus-them approach to various already marginalized communities. I see some indications of change in some North American cities, but I fully appreciate that Black and Indigenous communities have reason to be skeptical and demand more �C and quickly.

Exploring the 'smutty' archives �C U of T��s Sexual Representation Collection

Romi Levine — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 04:00:00 +0000

Exploring the 'smutty' archives �C U of T��s Sexual Representation Collection

Romi Levine Tue, 08/07/2018 - 00:00

Cutline

The Sexual Representation Collection has everything from VHS tapes to trade publications for the porn industry (photo by Romi Levine)

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Sexual Diversity Studies

Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies

Faculty of Information

History

Humanities

University College

Tucked away on the lower level of the University College building are two tiny rooms, filled floor-to-ceiling with archive-quality banker boxes containing one of the University of Toronto��s most unusual collections.

This is U of T��s Sexual Representation Collection, a comprehensive archive of modern sexuality belonging to the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

The boxes contain everything from pornographic VHS tapes, erotic novels and Playboy magazines to documents related to legal battles around censorship �C all acquired by previous collection directors and donated by a variety of benefactors including a sex shop in Scarborough, a former CBC producer and prominent sex educators.

The collection serves as a historical record of the shifts in how sexuality is viewed and understood, says Patrick Keilty, the collection��s archives director and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and sexual diversity studies.

��It tells us about the limits of our society, of what's acceptable, and it tells us about certain kinds of contexts of production and consumption,�� he says.

Over 1,000 VHS tapes in the collection came from a pornography retail shop in Scarborough, which closed in the early 1990s (photo by Romi Levine)

In the 1990s Brian Pronger, an associate professor in what was then the Faculty of Physical Education and Health, began growing the collection with the help of Mariana Valverde, a professor at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and one of the founders of sexual diversity studies at U of T. Valverde worked with Pronger to secure funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to build the Sexual Representation Collection.

The ��90s saw culture wars that divided feminists around issues of pornography and sexual identity, and the rise of the internet, which changed the way people consumed pornographic content.

��Brian started to think it was really important to start archiving the kinds of things that were beginning to happen in the early days of easy internet access,�� says Valverde.

Pronger��s collection was, no doubt, controversial at the time, but decades later, researchers are recognizing the value of this kind of archival material.

��A lot of these things are invaluable in a sense that nobody has copies of it because at the time there might have been a lot of copies of certain kinds of videos or magazines but it's not the type of stuff people would keep for the long run,�� Valverde says.

About 930 books used by television show SexTV as research material were donated to the collection (photo by Romi Levine)

The Sexual Representation Collection also highlights the ways the porn industry was ahead of the curve, adopting new technology and business models that soon after became mainstream, says Keilty.

��It was the porn industry that embraced VHS and made it ubiquitous because Sony wouldn't let them use Betamax so they were forced to use VHS, and they started up what became video rentals,�� he says.

The influence mainstream media and the porn industry had on each other is an important story to tell, says Keilty.

��Everything from 3G mobile technology to BluRay to VHS to secure credit card processing all originates or was heavily promoted by the porn industry,�� he says.

The Sexual Representation Collection has a complete run of Playboy magazines from 1963 to 2000, which Keilty says is unusual (photos by Romi Levine)

The archives are available to researchers studying various aspects of sexuality inside and outside the university and are incorporated into class curricula. This coming year, several classes will be using the archives for research projects, says Keilty.

Students in a history course called Hacking History will be creating a digital exhibition of the Max Allen collection �C an archive of materials donated by the CBC producer that includes documents relating to his legal battles around obscenity laws from the 1970s to the ��90s.

Keilty will be running a workshop out of the Faculty of Information about how to tell the story of ��smutty�� archives and archival objects.

��Archives always have the challenge of bringing to life their materials beyond just exhibiting it in an exhibit case,�� he says. ��They have to make sure it's not merely information but that it's also sexual and has a life and a history and to convey all the different sociopolitical contexts around these objects.��

The cheeky back cover of an erotic novel in the collection (photo by Romi Levine)

New to U of T, Julie Moreau explores relationship between sexual identity and legal equality

rasbachn — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 17:00:03 +0000

New to U of T, Julie Moreau explores relationship between sexual identity and legal equality

rasbachn Wed, 09/27/2017 - 13:00

Cutline

Julie Moreau says Toronto��s reputation as a ��global queer city�� was also attractive, given her strong focus on activist groups in LGBTQI social movements (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Peter Boisseau

Author legacy

Peter Boisseau

Topic

City & Culture

University College

There is a long list of reasons why Julie Moreau chose to join the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto.

The university��s reputation for excellence and the fact that U of T is financially accessible to students from all walks of life were important considerations, as was the opportunity to work in a public institution and serve the public good.

��That��s all very much in line with my politics personally,�� says Moreau, an assistant professor of political science and sexual diversity studies who recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington in St. Louis.

Toronto��s reputation as a ��global queer city�� was also attractive, given her strong focus on activist groups in LGBTQI social movements.

��There are many organizations doing great work here, and it��s interesting to think about the different types of research projects I can develop based in Toronto,�� says Moreau, who was born in Philadelphia and did her PhD at McGill University before teaching at Northern Arizona University for two years.

As an educator who stresses the value of collaboration to her students, Moreau was equally intrigued that her position was a cross-appointment between the department of political science and U of T's Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.

��The political science department gives me the opportunity to work with something like 80 colleagues who are all doing fascinating and diverse research, so there is no shortage of folks to talk to and collaborate with,�� she says.

��And the centre is interdisciplinary, so I get to work in a rich intellectual environment and work with scholars in many fields.��

This fall, Moreau is teaching a third-year political science course called Sex in the State, and a fourth-year course, Global Sexualities. In the spring, she��ll teach courses on sexual diversity politics and the politics of sexuality in Latin America.

The courses connect to Moreau��s research on politics and sexuality in the global south, particularly the expansion of rights to LGBTQI citizens. Her book manuscript, After Equality: Organizing Lesbian Citizenship in South Africa & Argentina, draws on her field research in Buenos Aires and Cape Town examining sexual identities within the context of legal equality.

Another project she is working on examines the diffusion of same-sex marriage norms in Latin America, and she is also part of a collaboration that looks into LGBTQI Latinx political participation in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

While Canada prides itself on its sexual diversity policies, Moreau says her students are often surprised to hear about inclusive legislation in South Africa and Argentina. South Africa legalized same-sex marriage shortly after Canada did and Argentina has arguably the most inclusive gender identity laws of any country in the world.

But inclusion goes beyond sexuality and gender.

��In order to understand the demands groups are making, or what the consequences of political inclusion are going to be, we can��t just look at sexual and gender identities,�� says Moreau.

��We need to be looking at other factors, like race, class and religion. No one bears just one identity at any given time.��

She cites the example of the recent so-called ��Nashville Statement�� by evangelical Christian leaders laying out their opposition to such things as same-sex marriage, a position that ignores the existence of Christians who are also members of the LGBTQI community.

Moreau says she feels proud when students tell her she has taught them to think critically about issues they previously took for granted, and say they can share their insights in class and feel respected.

Noting that it is important for academics to listen to other voices, Moreau says she has deep respect for the activist groups whose work she studies.

��These are people who do astute social and political analysis of issues and take action to make the world a better place, and I feel very lucky to be part of that.��

Decolonizing sexuality: U of T recognizes Indigenous educators and advocates for sexual diversity

hjames — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 21:00:37 +0000

Decolonizing sexuality: U of T recognizes Indigenous educators and advocates for sexual diversity

hjames Wed, 04/26/2017 - 17:00

Cutline

Feminist Mi'kmaw comic, Candy Palmater, is among those honoured at the Sexual Diversity Awards (photo courtesy of Chris Reardon)

Hannah James

Author legacy

Hannah James

Topic