• Magazine

    Fighting fascism in feminism

    Five trans feminists on the rise of fascist feminism and how to fight back.

  • A person sits, kneeling in water, surrounded by mountains and a purple moon. They have a fire in their belly, and long wavy hair with four heads - each one feeing a different emotion (sad, calm, enraged, and nervous).
    Magazine

    Birth control and reproductive justice

    Hormonal birth control has long been a feminist symbol of choice, but without other options, is it truly a choice?

  • Online-only

    Women Winning Office: The limits of electoral strategy

    In her new book “Women Winning Office,” Peggy Nash argues that it’s critical for women to hold positions of power. But as Misha Falk writes, representation doesn’t equate to a more just society.

  • Magazine

    反人口贩卖政策运动的剖析

    在过去的一年里,新市的低收入亚裔女性一直在与镇议会进行激烈的斗争。议会一直努力关闭她们的按摩业务,声称这些工人既是不光彩的罪犯,又是性交易人口贩卖的受害者。

  • A group of Asian community members wearing masks and holding up signs in multiple languages with anti-trafficking messages written on them.
    Magazine

    Anatomy of an anti-trafficking policy campaign

    In Newmarket, Asian massage workers have been engaged in a battle with the town council, which is intent on shutting down their businesses by claiming that the workers are both disreputable criminals and sex trafficking victims.

  • Magazine

    The birds shall return: Imagining Palestinian feminist futurities

    Envisioning a liberated Palestine means imagining liberated Palestinian women. What is a Palestinian feminist future, and how do we get there?

  • Magazine

    The right to return to work

    At the beginning of the pandemic, the Pacific Gateway and Hilton Metrotown hotels laid off their workers – then refused to hire them back. Hotel workers are fighting for their jobs, and for the future of the hotel industry after the pandemic.

  • Magazine

    Building feminist, anti-racist unions

    More strategies for challenging patriarchal white supremacy in labour

  • Magazine

    Feminist imagination

    Mainstream feminism’s wildest dreams involve women being represented at the top of their fields. It’s a depressingly bland and narrow dream. This issue of Briarpatch thinks bigger, asking: how can we ensure all women are safe, healthy, cared for, and free?

  • Magazine

    Demanding reproductive justice for trans women

    If we could reimagine our world in order to put trans women’s well-being at its centre, maybe we could make the system more equitable and safe for all parents and children. 

  • Magazine

    “Do not ever get used to it”

    Union members and staff say that sexism, anti-Black racism, and other oppressive attitudes are deeply entrenched in many unions. Drawing on a history of women, trans, and racialized workers fighting for their place in the labour movement, trade unionists share ideas to transform unions today.

  • Magazine

    COVID and sexism in a women’s prison

    Women have struggled to get what little we have in prison – but the COVID pandemic has stripped even that away.

  • Magazine

    Baby book: Documenting undocumented motherhood

    A note from Briarpatch’s editor, clarifying four factual inaccuracies that existed in the baby book, and how they came to be published. 

  • Online-only

    In Canada’s federal women’s prisons, reproductive rights are under threat

    In a new report, people inside women’s prisons explain how incarceration has impacted their reproductive health – from limiting health care access, to verbal and physical abuse, to destroying family connections.

  • Online-only

    Finally, New Brunswick is being sued for unlawful restrictions on abortion access

    New Brunswick’s refusal to fund clinic-based abortions is discriminatory, partisan, and simply harmful to health. A new lawsuit by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is a last-ditch effort to lift the restriction and save a Fredericton abortion clinic.

  • Magazine

    What is Gender-Based Environmental Violence?

    When humans degrade the land, Indigenous women, girls, and trans and Two-Spirit people are the most severely affected. This isn’t an accident; it’s an integral part of settler-colonialism.

  • Magazine

    Feminism that’s ready for a fight

    In her new book, Nora Loreto tracks the rise and fall of Canada’s organized feminist movement, and observes how formal organizations were replaced with a mix of online personalities, bloggers, and service organizations. How do we once again build a feminist movement that can pose a serious challenge to neoliberal austerity and misogyny?

  • Magazine

    Working while Black

    Amid COVID-19 and a global uprising against police brutality, the already intense demands and pressures that Black women face at work have become crushing. Hawa Mire convened a roundtable on Black women’s labour during these times

  • Magazine

    Feminism against resource extraction

    By remaining silent during the invasion of Wet’suwet’en land, settler feminists in Canada have risked both complicity in this violence and irrelevance in a women’s movement that is global in scope.

  • Magazine

    unhaunted

    “you bear their names like heavy robes. say it. / bind your waist in white ribbon. history’s seams / are tearing. you learned violence as the sweetest love / but you learned from the wrong people.“ Poetry winner of the Writing in the Margins contest.