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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.
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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?
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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.
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Magazine
Building feminist, anti-racist unions
More strategies for challenging patriarchal white supremacy in labour
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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Magazine
The cost of a T-shirt
In Honduras, women maquila workers are fighting back against the multinational garment companies that they say are endangering their health and safety.
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Magazine
From community organizing to electoral politics
As we stare down a climate crisis and a hard-right political wave, women activists are setting out to transform electoral politics in Canada. But are the parties ready for them?
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Magazine
Our Hair Story
“She doesn’t understand that she was born into a white supremacist society that devalues and underestimates Black women. Instead, she only knows that she doesn’t have ‘good hair.‘” Photography runner-up of the Writing in the Margins contest.
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Magazine
“They take my labour, but not my family”
The federal government is ending the Caregiver Program, which gave migrant caregivers a pathway to permanent residency. But caregivers are fighting back by demanding permanent residency upon arrival.