The end of the Second World War saw a “crisis of white masculinity” brought on by social, political, and economic change. He Thinks He’s Down explores the specific phenomenon of white men appropriating Black masculinities to benefit from what they believed were powerful Black masculinities. It reveals the intricate relationships between racialized gender identities, appropriation, and popular culture during the Civil Rights Era.Drawing on case studies from three genres of popular culture –the literature of Mailer and Kerouac, fashion in Playboy magazine and action narratives in Blaxploitation films – Katharine Bausch untangles the ways in which white male artists took on imagined Black masculinities in their work in order to negotiate what it meant to be a man in America at this time. In so doing, Bausch argues, white men’s use of Black masculinities drained Black men of their political and racial agency and reduced them once more to little more than stereotypes.

Offering fresh insights and raising important questions, this historical exploration of appropriation traces the ways in which gender and race were negotiated through the popular culture of the Civil Rights Era.

“Did you ever go to bed and wonder if your child was getting enough to eat?” For food insecure mothers, the worry is constant, and babies are at risk of going hungry. Through compelling interviews, Lesley Frank answers the breastfeeding paradox: why women who can least afford to buy infant formula are less likely to breastfeed. She reveals that what and how infants are fed is linked to the social and economic status of those who feed them. She exposes the reality of food insecurity for formula-fed babies, the constraints limiting mothers’ ability to breastfeed, and the lengths to which mothers must go to provide for their children. In a country that leaves the problem of food insecurity to charities, public policies are failing to support the most vulnerable populations.Out of Milk calls out the pressing need to establish the economic and social conditions necessary for successful breastfeeding and for accessible and safe formula feeding for families everywhere.

Out of Milk reveals the experiences of mothers struggling to feed their children and the policy gaps that put babies at risk of going hungry in a high-income nation.

Many women who lived through the Second World War believed it heralded new status and opportunities, but scholars have argued that very little changed. How can these interpretations be reconciled? Making the Best of It examines the ways in which gender and other identities intersected to shape the experiences of female Canadians and Newfoundlanders during the war. The contributors to this thoughtful collection consider mainstream and minority populations, girls and women, and different parts of Canada and Newfoundland. They reassess topics such as women in the military and in munitions factories, and tackle entirely new subjects such as wartime girlhood in Quebec.Collectively, these essays broaden the scope of what we know about the changes the war wrought in the lives of Canadian women and girls, and address wider debates about memory, historiography, and feminism.

Making the Best of It examines the ways in which gender and other identities intersected to shape the experiences of female Canadians and Newfoundlanders during the Second World War.

Suffrage in British Columbia – and elsewhere in Canada – is best understood as a continuum: although white settler women achieved the federal vote in 1917, it would take another thirty years before the provincial government would remove race-based restrictions on voting rights.British Columbia is often overlooked in the national story of women’s suffrage. A Great Revolutionary Wave challenges that omission and the portrayal of suffragists as conservative, traditional, and polite. Lara Campbell follows the propaganda campaigns undertaken by suffrage organizations and traces the role of working-class women in the fight for political equality. She demonstrates the connections between British Columbian and British suffragists and examines how racial exclusion and Indigenous dispossession shaped arguments and tactics for enfranchisement. A Great Revolutionary Wave rethinks the complex legacy of suffrage by considering both the successes and limitations of women’s historical fight for political equality. That legacy remains relevant today as Canadians continue to grapple with the meaning of justice, inclusion, and equality.

The first book on the woman’s suffrage movement in British Columbia, A Great Revolutionary Wave traces the history of the fight for the vote from the 1870s to the 1940s against a backdrop of social reform, international social movements, labour politics, and settler colonialism.

Many of Canada’s most famous suffragists – from Nellie McClung and Cora Hind to Emily Murphy and Henrietta Muir Edwards – lived and campaigned in the Prairie provinces, the region that led the way in granting women the right to vote and hold office.In Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice, award-winning author Sarah Carter challenges the myth that grateful male legislators simply handed western settler women the vote in recognition that they were equal partners in the pioneering process. Suffragists worked long and hard to overcome obstacles, persuade doubters, and build allies. But their work also had a dark side. Even as settler suffragists pressured legislatures to grant their sisters the vote, they often approved of that same right being denied to “foreigners” and Indigenous men and women.By situating the suffragists’ struggle in the colonial history of Prairie Canada, this powerful and passionate book shows that the right to vote meant different things to different people – political rights and emancipation for some, domination and democracy denied for others.

This long-overdue account of the suffrage campaigns in the first region to grant women the vote in Canada shatters cherished myths about how the West was won.

“When the history of suffrage is written, the role played by our politicians will cut a sad figure beside that of the women they insulted.” Speaking in 1935, feminist Idola Saint-Jean captured the bitter nature of Quebec women’s fight for enfranchisement, as religious authorities weighed what they stood to gain or lose and politicians showed open disdain during Legislative Assembly debates. Quebec women had to wait until 1940 or longer to cast a ballot. This passionate yet even-handed account is filled with vivid characters and pivotal events on the road to suffrage in the province. It examines Quebec women’s participation in provincial and municipal politics since winning the vote and compares women’s struggle to that in other countries.An astute exploration of suffrage, To Be Equals in Our Own Country treats enfranchisement – and the legal, social, and economic rights that stem from it – as a fundamental question of human rights.

To Be Equals in Our Own Country chronicles the bitter struggle for women’s suffrage in Quebec, the last province to grant Canadian women this fundamental human right.

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau told reporters. He was making the case for the most controversial of his proposed reforms to the Criminal Code, those concerning homosexuality, birth control, and abortion. In No Place for the State, contributors offer complex and often contrasting perspectives as they assess how the 1969 Omnibus Bill helped shape sexual and moral politics in Canada by examining the bill’s origins, social implications, and repercussions. The new legal regime had significant consequences for matters like adoption, divorce, and suicide. After the bill passed, a great many Canadians continued to challenge how sexual behaviour was governed, demanding much more exhaustive changes to the law. Fifty years later, the origins and legacies of the bill are equivocal and the state still seems interested in the bedrooms of the nation. This incisive study explains why that matters.

No Place for the State is an incisive study that offers complex and often contrasting perspectives on the Trudeau government’s 1969 Omnibus Bill and its impact on sexual and moral politics in Canada.

Political representation matters. And representation requires participation: voting, joining political parties, running as candidates, acting as politicians. Yet the election of openly LGBTQ people is a relatively recent phenomenon in the West.Queering Representation explores long-ignored issues relating to LGBTQ voters and politicians in Canada. What are the LGBTQ electorate’s characteristics and voting behaviours, and what empowerment has it achieved through electoral systems? How do straight voters view out LGBTQ politicians, and what part do the media play in framing these perceptions? What pathways to power do LGBTQ politicians follow? Do they represent LGBTQ people and communities in particular, and, if so, how is this role articulated? And finally, how do Canadian party ideologies shape LGBTQ representation?The contributors to Queering Representation address these questions by offering diverse, nuanced readings of political representation, shining a spotlight on relations between electoral processes and LGBTQ communities.

Queering Representation explores what happens when LGBTQ people move out of the closet and into the political arena.

Hundreds of years of ridicule, persecution, erasure, misunderstanding, and institutionalization could put anyone in a bad mood. Killjoy invites you into her kastle for a queer exorcism and celebration of the past.Lesbian feminist histories can have a haunting effect on the present. This book explores the making and experience of Killjoy’s Kastle, an immersive walk-through installation and performance artwork (by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue) that materializes the frightfully acrimonious past for today. Inspired by Evangelical Christian hell houses, the exhibition has been staged in four cities so far – Toronto, London, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia – inviting visitors to interact with humorous and frightening manifestations of the spirits that haunt feminist and queer history.Whereas traditional hell houses set out to scare and convert, Killjoy’s Kastle cheekily aims to provoke and pervert, giving expression to old and new anxieties and creating a space for critique, affect, and discussion. Inside Killjoy’s Kastle fills this space by exploring the kastle’s theoretical and political legacies in chapters by queer and feminist scholars and in vignettes by artists who participated in the project. The many colourful photos in the book also bring Killjoy’s Kastle to life, offering an important visual context. By taking the kastle as a starting point, the contributors consider the role of lesbian feminist histories and direct-action aesthetics in contemporary communities, particularly the ways in which political artwork can produce new ways of knowing about the past.

Exploring the making and experience of a lesbian feminist haunted house, this book reframes and reclaims queer feminist histories with humour, provocation, and theoretical sophistication.

In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as “indifferent” to high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true. Invested Indifference offers a divergent perspective by examining practices during three different periods in the place we now call Edmonton, juxtaposing early settler texts, documents concerning the former Charles Camsell Indian Hospital, and contemporary online police materials. Kara Granzow reaches a startling conclusion: that what we see as societal indifference doesn’t come from an absence of feeling but from a deep-rooted and affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable. Granzow demonstrates that through mechanisms such as the law, medicine, and control of land and space, violence against Indigenous peoples has become symbolically and politically ensconced in the social construction of Canadian nationhood.

Invested Indifference exposes the tenacity of violence against Indigenous people, arguing that some lives are made to matter – or not – depending on their relation to the settler-colonial nation state.

Established narratives portray Indigenous unity as emerging solely in response to the political agenda of the settler state. But the concept of unity has long shaped the modern Indigenous political movement. With Indigenous perspectives and frameworks in the foreground, Assembling Unity explores the relationship between global political ideologies and pan-Indigenous politics in British Columbia through the history of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC). Sarah Nickel demonstrates that while unity has been an enduring goal for BC Indigenous peoples, its expression was heavily negotiated between UBCIC members, grassroots constituents, and Indigenous women’s organizations. Nickel draws on oral interviews, newspaper articles, government documents, and UBCIC records to expose the uniquely gendered nature of political work, as well as the economic and emotional sacrifices that activists make. This incisive work unsettles dominant Western and patriarchal political ideals that cast Indigenous men as reactive and Indigenous women as invisible and apolitical.

Assembling Unity traces the history of pan-Indigenous unity in British Columbia through political negotiations, gendered activism, and the balance and exercise of power.

Canada’s Indian Act is infamously sexist. Through many iterations of the legislation a woman’s status rights flowed from her husband, and even once it was amended to reinstate rights lost through marriage or widowhood, First Nations women could not necessarily pass status on to their descendants. That injustice has rightly been subject to much scrutiny, but what has it meant for First Nations men? Martin J. Cannon challenges the decades-long assumption of case law and politics that the act has affected Indigenous people as either “women” or “Indians” – but not both. He argues that sexism and racialization within the law must instead be understood as interlocking forms of discrimination that have also undercut the identities of Indigenous men through their female forebears. By restorying historically patriarchal legislation and Indigenous masculinity, Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act makes a significant contribution to a transformative discussion of Indigenous nationhood, citizenship, and reconciliation.

Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act reverses conventional thinking to argue that the sexism directed at women within the act in fact undermines the well-being of all Indigenous people, proposing that Indigenous nationhood cannot be realized or reinvigorated until this broader injustice is understood.