Abstract
Peter Knegt, About Canada: Queer Rights, Fernwood: Halifax and Winnipeg, 2011; 143 pp.: ISBN 978 1 55266 456 8, $17.95 CAD (hbk), ISBN 978 1 55266 437 7 (pbk)
About Canada: Queer Rights provides a short, accessibly written account that seeks to educate readers about Canadian queer history. Its opening chapter asks an important question: ‘What does our progress mean?’ and invites readers to become aware and informed ‘of how one of Canada’s greatest social movements came to be and of how much work is left to be done’ (p. 10). The book is neither an exhaustive nor inclusive detailing of Canadian queer histories. Instead, the author maps key events and achievements in queer organizing at local, provincial and federal levels.
In laying claim to Canada as ‘one of the most progressive countries in the world’ with respect to formal equality for lesbians and gay men, Knegt asks whether this queer-friendly designation is justified (p. 5). Prioritized throughout the book as ‘dominant villains’ (p. 9), the author points to multiple instances of systemic heterosexism and homophobia that exist alongside important social and legal achievements. Chapters 2 through 6, for example, highlight the ongoing sexual regulation of queers in diverse arenas such as health and education, culture, queer parenting, law, religion, and the police and military. The narrative thread of incomplete victories and unfinished struggles enables the author to achieve his central goal, which is to dislodge the myth of a ‘queer utopia’ engendered by the legal victory of same-sex marriage in 2005 (p. 9). In so doing, the book effectively articulates the tension between what queer activisms have accomplished and what remains to be done.
The author asks, ‘To the extent that there has been change, how deep are those changes and how diverse are the constituencies affected by them?’(p. 6) Given that the audience for the book is likely to be junior undergraduate courses in Sexuality Studies, Sociology, and Women and Gender Studies, this is an important analytic question. The author self-consciously admits the virtual impossibility of discussing a singular ‘queer community’ given that ‘[w]e are a vast and complex bunch’ (p. 9). It is in this recognition of diversity, however, that the book unravels, becoming undone by its own commitments to inclusion. This is nowhere more evident than in the penultimate chapter entitled ‘Difference and Privilege’. The focus of this chapter is on lesbians; two-spirited people; queers of colour; and immigrants/refugees, respectively. Although referenced occasionally in previous chapters, it is here they/we most visibly appear as taxonomic signifiers of the ‘vast and complex’ Canadian queer community. Unfortunately, the chapter feels like the guest at the table of queer rights. Indeed, appearing under the umbrella of difference begs the question: different from whom?
In keeping with the book’s educational mandate, the author writes that it is ‘crucial to understand the battles that have defined the less visible segments of queer sexuality in Canada’ (p. 108). The chapter describes community building within various queer constituencies and documents some of the struggles to confront sexism and racism within the mainstream ‘queer community’. In the book’s analysis, these ‘less visible segments’ were not the dominant forces behind human rights legislation or same-sex marriage, ‘but they are the people largely left behind in its wake’ (pp. 108–109). Being ‘left behind’ reads strangely like a failure to integrate into dominant structures. Such a contention would acquire much more analytic substance if it attended to how and why legal victories such as spousal recognition or same-sex marriage continue to perpetuate various social hierarchies within queer communities; to how and why queer rights are part of the ongoing project of settler colonialism; and to how and why queer rights often work to reinforce dominant discourses of the cultural ‘backwardness’ of immigrant Others. Insofar as it gestures to inclusivity in assessing ‘our progress’, this chapter ultimately exposes the book’s core as orientated around (male) gay/queer whiteness; one sustained by a troubling developmental narrative where ‘we’ (the white, gay male core) have what ‘they’, who have been left behind, still need.
This book needs to be approached with caution as an educational text because it produces a gaze more than it does an understanding. Rather than being posited as relations of power, ‘difference’ and ‘privilege’ stand in as markers of identity where good white people can be heroes by resisting privilege (p. 125), and where the ‘greatest hope’ for queer futures lies in the depoliticized solutions of ‘understand[ing] one another’ (p. 125) and ‘simply becoming informed’ (p. 129). The book clearly states from the outset that it is meant to be neither comprehensive nor encyclopaedic in nature. Yet our historical present surely requires that even a descriptive account of the nature of ‘queer progress’ necessitates much thicker and critical analyses. Otherwise, what results is the repetition of whiteness disguised as inclusion.