
Engendering emancipation
With patterns of domination so deeply entrenched in our social, sexual and political relationships, how do we confront oppression on both a personal and political level? How do we practice feminist solidarity across lines of gender, sexuality, race, ability, class, nationality and citizenship? This issue draws attention to the importance of intersectionality in our struggle to engender a broad-based emancipation for all marginalized peoples.
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Magazine
From the ground up
On the West Coast, agriculture has always taken a back seat to logging, which has generated a lot of money for folks in these company towns. Now, as the export-the-trees-and-import-everything-else economy seems to be running out of steam, there’s renewed interest in small-scale farming as both a way to make a living and as a community resource. And in contrast to the decades of focus on the male-dominated forest industry, this movement is in many cases being led by women.
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Letter from the editor
The first step toward emancipation must be recognition of the shared struggle between all those considered less valuable by our state and social structures. Liberation can only happen collectively and across all communities simultaneously. Freedom at the expense of others’ freedom is not freedom at all, but a different and twisted kind of enslavement.
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Hierarchies of worthiness
In news coverage of violence, women are almost always portrayed as victims. Whether they are worthy, innocent victims in need of rescue (“virgins”), as in the case of Afghan women post-9/11, or unworthy, culpable victims to be ignored or incarcerated (“vamps”), as with Indigenous women in Canada, depends on their strategic value to the forces in power.
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Lives less livable
Butler’s theory of gender-as-performance remains her best-known contribution to academia, but for the last decade her attention has gradually shifted from gender to the politics of war. Now she’s struggling with questions like, whose deaths matter, and why are some deaths grievable but others not?
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Safer sex work
“In my view the law plays a sufficient contributory role in preventing a prostitute from taking steps that could reduce the risk of such violence.” With these concluding remarks by Justice Susan Himel, the laws that kept sex work illegal in Ontario were struck down in November 2010. The ruling, however, has been stayed, pending an appeal by the federal government that’s scheduled to begin in June, 2011.
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Queer, undocumented and unafraid
If passed, the DREAM Act would grant conditional permanent residency and a path to citizenship to undocumented students who arrived in the U.S. as minors. This article chronicles the lives of three queer undocumented activists who have risked deportation to fight for its passage.
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Sanitizing Pride
With Toronto’s 31st annual Pride Parade fast approaching, the legacy of last year’s controversial attempted banning of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from the Parade continues to resonate today.
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Intervening in violence
Mimi Kim is a second-generation Korean American and long-time organizer against domestic and sexual violence, racism and imperialism. Her pragmatic approach to defending the safety and integrity of women stems from years of work on the ground with women of colour and others who have been marginalized from the mainstream anti-violence movement. We caught up with her to learn more about her perspective on the relationship between interpersonal and state violence, the criminal justice system, and community accountability.
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Witch hunts past and present
In the classic zine Witches, Midwives & Nurses: A History of Women Healers, republished as a book with a new introduction in 2010, authors Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich provide an overview of the repression and exclusion of women lay healers in Europe and the United States. The authors explore the connection between the witch hunts in Europe and attempts to eliminate and discredit women healers, as well as the rise of an elitist and male-dominated medical establishment in the United States.
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Fashioning a familiar feminism
I remember the exact moment I realized I had just spent the last five years of my life building the wrong type of *F*eminism. I was on a conference call with my fellow women-of-colour organizers when my 10-year-old daughter interrupted me to declare that she had friends who were “hooking up” with older boys and men online.