Gary Kinsman: The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation

Gary Kinsman is a professor of Sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. He is widely known for his groundbreaking work The Regulation of Desire (1996) and for his three co-edited anthologies including Whose National Security? (2000) and Sociology for Changing the World (2006). Professor Kinsman has also published numerous book chapters and journal articles across a wide range of sociological fields including: social movements, sexuality studies, social theory, political activist ethnography, the social organization and regulation of AIDS organizing in Canada, gender, labour, and the social history of national security. As a queer left activist for over thirty years, he is well-known for his ongoing work across social movements including international solidarity, anti-poverty, socialist, feminist and anti-racist organizing.

Book description:

From the 1950s to the late 1990s, agents of the state spied on, interrogated, and harassed gays and lesbians in Canada, employing social ideologies and other practices to construct their target – people who deviated from the so-called norm – as threats to society and enemies of the state.

Reconstructed from official security regime documents released through the Access to Information Act and interviews with gays, lesbians, civil servants, and high-ranking officials, The Canadian War on Queers offers a passionate, personalised account of a national security campaign that violated peoples civil rights and freedoms in an attempt to regulate their sexual practices. Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile disclose not only the acts of state repression that accompanied the Canadian war on queers but also forms of resistance that raise questions about just whose security was being protected and about national security as an ideological practice.

This path-breaking account of how the state used national security to wage war on its own people offers ways of understanding, and resisting, contemporary ideological conflicts such as the “war on terror.” It is required reading for students, scholars, and social activists in lesbian, gay, and queer studies or anyone interested in the issues of national security, state repression, and human rights.

Professor Kinsman’s lecture will focus on the research undertaken for the book and will address the the contexts and issues it examines. There will be books available for sale at the event, and copies have also been ordered for sale at the Laurier Bookstore.

The talk, including Q and A is on Thursday, March 25th
Book signing 5:00 – 5:30; lecture and discussion 5:30 – 7:00 p.m., BA201 on the Laurier Campus!