Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

Kainer, Tara

78 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
put on the linen pants
sans  the girdle
a new top from the
big lady store
it teases
with a hint of cleavage 
puffed up the hair
slipped on the purple sandals
going shopping today
i will buy you a treat
you deserve it
must get that Extract of Eden
creamy rich
lightly scented
promises to make you look
like Eve
you’re wondering what
Eve looked like
Raphael knew
or was it Caravaggio
no double chin on Eve
no tributary lines on the largest 
organ
did you know skin is an organ?
perhaps Eve had moles
impossible
tags maybe
something to do with 
menopause
or too much calcium
is there calcium in paradise?
GIANNA PATRIARCA
Big Woman Blues
the porous rock thing
will smooth your heels
it comes from the ocean
healing
something about salt
the esthetician  said
you  have lovely skin
you look much younger
than your years
don’t know how she knew 
your years
soap and water
has served you well
time out for coffee
a poem or two
you and Eliot  counting spoons
while women come
and women go
all very slowly
on this Tuesday
afternoon
TARA KAINER
This Yearning
The way you look
at me I can tell
you think I haven’t
noticed. Doesn’t care
Lets herself go
Given up
Those thoughts
flit across your face
like shadows
on stagnant water.
Not Life, I want
to say, Men,
but our relationship
isn’t so intimate as that.
Anyway,
it’s the inexorable struggle
against the role: you know,
2000 years of false images?
But I can tell
by your
gaze
you fancy yourself
a better judge
of what woman is.
This yearning you sense
in my body, this desire,
you read it all wrong:
I long to walk off the stage,
it says, For once
let me be.
Tara Kainer has published poetry in 
literary journals and anthologies, as 
well as essays, articles, interviews and 
book reviews in newspapers, journals, 
and magazines. She lives and works 
in Kingston, Ontario. This poem 
appeared in her poetry collection, 
When I Think on Your Lives 
(Hidden Book Press, 2011). Reprinted 
with permission of the author.Gianna Patriarca’s  prose and poetry appears earlier in this volume.


English

This Yearning

Boucher, Lisa Mae

VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 191
also inherently assume all workers 
begin from a privileged position 
of having their perceived ‘moral 
worth’ intact and unquestioned. 
The reality is that many people 
who occupy marginalized positions 
do not have this luxury as a starting 
point—racialized people, indigenous 
populations, queer people, and those 
with chronic mental health concerns 
and physical disabilities have all 
historically, though differently, had 
their morality treated as suspect. This 
recognition, acknowledged but not 
elaborated upon by the book, further 
complicates debates around previous 
constructions of sex workers.
Given these considerations, the 
reframing called for by Sex Work 
Matters is much needed, and the 
intervention is an important one. 
Although many scholars and activists 
have been contributing to anti-moral-
ity and anti-trafficking discourses for 
some time, there is still a shortage of 
contemporary academic collections 
that reflect current research across a 
variety of disciplines. However, while 
the intent of Sex Work Matters is clear, 
the execution is inconsistent. 
Several pieces in this collection 
build strong foundations from which 
to reimagine scholarly engagement 
with sex work/ers—notably, chapters 
by Laura Augustín, Jo Weldon, and 
Maggie O’Neill and Jane Pitcher 
map out potential alternative frame-
works and methodologies in order 
to ground both the research process 
and results, and engage the lived 
experiences of sex workers in more 
reflective ways. Though each case pre-
sented in this book strives to challenge 
dominant paradigms (disciplinary, 
socio-cultural, legal, discursive), 
some do so only while continuing to 
uphold familiar tropes of sex workers, 
and/or to reinforce hierarchies of the 
nonparticipant researcher and the 
participant researched. 
With the goals of Sex Work Matters 
including a creation of more dialogue 
across research/ers, it seems logical— 
indeed, perhaps imperative—that an 
intersectional approach be fostered. 
Here, a nuanced intersectional ap-
proach must mean more than simply 
looking at interrelating factors of 
race-class-ability-gender-age-sexual-
ity (an equation that is challenging 
enough for some). Intersectionality 
in this case should also encompass 
awareness and understanding of 
various forms of sex work and the 
relationships between and among 
them. While some chapters elucidate 
these linkages, others stay firmly 
rooted in their own cases and do 
not explore broader connections to 
other employment in the sex industry. 
Rather than undermine the collec-
tion, however, these shortfalls actually 
serve to support the editors’ call for 
more dialogue between researchers 
and activists alike. 
Reading from a sex-positive and sex 
work-positive feminist framework, 
Sex Work Matters ultimately leaves 
something to be desired. The analysis 
across chapters is inconsistent, and 
should be pushed further in order to 
better reflect debates and activisms 
that have been occurring outside of 
the mainstream academy for some 
time now. While including different 
viewpoints is important in furthering 
dialogue, editors must pay careful 
attention to the ways in which they 
place differing approaches in conver-
sation with one another. Ditmore, 
Levy and Willman tend to fall back 
onto a human rights discourse that 
glosses over differences in geopolitical 
location in favour of advocating for 
sex workers to “enjoy the same rights 
and conditions as anyone else.” They 
fail to substantially ask the question, 
however, who is this ‘anyone else’? This 
is left as an unmarked (highly priv-
ileged) group that has full access to 
legal, state-sanctioned support—one 
that is, indeed, elusive. 
With that being said, the collection 
offers an important step in the right 
direction, and begins to reframe the 
terms for engaging research on and 
with sex work/ers. It is a good resource 
for those seeking an initial sampling 
of contemporary research on sex work 
that does not rely on narrowed visions 
of trafficking and calls for abolition. 
Readers should bring an open mind to 
alternative methodologies and lines 
of inquiry while keeping a critical eye 
to potential reproduction of research 
inequalities. Ideally, the contribu-
tions made by Sex Work Matters will 
encourage more publications of this 
kind, and will continue to expand 
the field of sex work studies in ways 
that are useful to, and inclusive of, 
sex workers and their demands.
Naomi de Szegheo-Lang is a doctoral 
student in Gender, Feminist, and 
Women’s Studies at York University. 
Her research areas include feminist 
cultural studies, queer theory, sexuality 
studies, and queer cultural production. 
Her current work takes up productive 
tensions between sexual citizenship, 
homonationalisms, affect, and femi-
nist porn.
 
The Women’s Movement: Inside and 
Outside the State analyses the intersec-
tion between social movements and 
states. Exploring the role of feminist 
activists located within the state 
bureaucracy, Lee Ann Banaszak con-
siders the important contributions 
that feminist insiders made to the 
American women’s movement from 
1960-2000. Although she notes the 
relative weakness of the U.S. women’s 
policy machinery in comparison with 
other liberal democracies, Banaszak 
argues that feminist insiders were 
dispersed across the bureaucracy and 
were often able to develop policies 
and create political opportunities 
which were consistent with move-
ment goals. Critical of scholars who 
argue that insiders are inevitably 
co-opted and committed to limited 
THE WOMEN’S 
MOVEMENT: INSIDE 
AND OUTSIDE THE 
STATE
Lee Ann Banaszak
New York: Cambridge University 
Press, 2010
reviewed by lisa mae 
boucher
CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME192
reformist goals, Banaszak urges us to 
move past binary distinctions which 
create false divisions among activists 
and hinder our understandings of 
social movements.
Through her analysis of archival 
data and in-depth interviews with 
40 feminist insiders, Banaszak de-
velops a theoretical understanding 
of movement-state intersections. 
These intersections develop when 
social movement actors and/or or-
ganizations create networks located 
within the state. Arguing that the 
state is a complex institution repre-
senting multiple and conflicting in-
terests, Banaszak focuses on the in-
dividuals that work within the state 
apparatus and their ability to rep-
resent their own interests. Although 
she recognizes that insiders are lim-
ited by their dual roles as activists 
and bureaucrats, as well as by the 
level of exclusion faced within the 
state, she contends that their insider 
status allows them to create oppor-
tunities for movements in ways that 
those working outside the state are 
unable to. Importantly, Banaszak 
reminds us that movement-state 
intersections are fluid, with oppor-
tunities and constraints varying ac-
cording to the movements in ques-
tion and across time. 
Banaszak explores many im-
portant questions throughout her 
book. For instance, she asks wheth-
er feminist bureaucrats were rep-
resentative of the larger women’s 
movement in terms of their class, 
education, race, and ideology. What 
was their relationship with women’s 
organizations and feminist activists 
outside the state? How did their 
location within the state influence 
the goals and tactics chosen? What 
influence did feminist insiders have 
over policy development and its 
implementation? Finally, she ques-
tions whether feminist insiders were 
able to continue their work under 
hostile administrations, particularly 
under the Reagan and Bush admin-
istrations. 
Banaszak’s study challenges sev-
eral commonly held assumptions in 
the social movement literature. For 
instance, although feminist bureau-
crats tended to be white, mid-
dle-class, and well-educated, they 
were diverse ideologically, ranging 
from Republicans to radical femin-
ists. Furthermore, feminist insiders 
employed a combination of conven-
tional and confrontational tactics 
depending on existing opportun-
ities and constraints. Indeed, many 
of the activists interviewed insisted 
that their insider knowledge of the 
state made them understand more 
clearly the need for outside mobil-
ization, and allowed them to see 
when confrontational tactics would 
be necessary. Banaszak emphasizes 
the importance of the alliances be-
tween feminists working inside and 
outside the state, rejecting claims 
which question feminist bureau-
crats’ commitment to the women’s 
movement. Moreover, she reminds 
us that these groups of activists can-
not be so easily separated as many 
feminist insiders were often simul-
taneously engaged in movement 
activity outside the state.
A central goal of Banaszak’s 
work is to highlight the experien-
ces of feminists working within the 
state. She believes that their stories 
are often neglected or excluded in 
histories of the American women’s 
movement, and she contends that 
this neglect is often the result of 
preconceived ideas about the sep-
aration between movements and 
states. Her case study renders a 
clear division between these two 
concepts false and the data she pro-
vides allows us to see the complex 
ways that states and movements 
intersect. 
Although Banaszak arguably 
places too much emphasis on the 
role of individual agency, her re-
search makes an important contri-
bution to our understandings of 
states, women’s movements, and 
social movements more broadly. 
Supporting her theoretical argu-
ments with rich data, Banaszak 
forces us to re-evaluate our as-
sumptions about state-movement 
relations. Given this, her book is an 
asset to those with an interest in so-
Law and the Borders of Belonging 
discusses the parameters of legal 
inclusion and exclusion during a 
formative phase of American history. 
This book explores how exclusionary 
practices are not unrelated precursors 
to the formation of American society; 
rather, they are “embedded” in the 
notions of personhood and citizen-
ship that comprise America’s legal 
and social history and legacy.
Like many social and political his-
torians, Barbara Young Welke starts 
with the premise that the founding 
of the modern American liberal state 
rests on the concept of individual 
rights and freedoms. By exploring this 
ground through the theoretical frame 
of “belonging,” Welke considers how 
law constructs individual identity and 
liberty, within intersections such as 
race, ethnicity, sex, and ability, in 
order to demarcate and to divide. 
Thus, conceptions of belonging 
require borders—exclusions as much 
as inclusions—in order to operate 
through the law. Welke extends her 
LAW AND THE 
BORDERS OF 
BELONGING IN THE 
LONG NINETEENTH 
CENTURY UNITED 
STATES
Barbara Young Welke
Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2010
reviewed by katharine 
wrobel
cial movements, state feminism or 
the history of women’s movements. 
Lisa Boucher is a Ph.D. student in 
the Women’s Studies department at 
York University. Her research interests 
include women’s movements, feminist 
organizations, state funding, the volun-
tary sector, and women’s unpaid labour.


The Women’s Movement: Inside and Outside the State

Przybylo, Ela

VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 197
The progressive theme of the life 
course from childbirth, adolescence, 
and womanhood follows a trajectory 
through the text. Vostral’s chapter 
examines American educational films 
targeted at teenaged girls between 
1946 and 1982, demonstrating the 
many contradicting and hegemonic 
messages that their bodies are natu-
ral but must be controlled. Young 
women were expected to uphold the 
national ideal of the rugged individu-
alist by behaving in normative ways. 
Subsequent chapters provide further 
examples that draw out how women 
were expected to manage their bodies 
and behaviour accordingly through 
control of fertility, sexuality, and the 
risk of cancer.
The second half of Gender, Health, 
and Popular Culture examines repre-
sentations of the ideal body. These 
bodies are rendered subversive by 
their refusal to fit into the prescribed 
norm in both illness and health. 
Through a variety of historical 
methods, contributors to this section 
comment on bodies that directly 
challenge dominant ideals of gender, 
sexuality, celebrity, and lifestyle. The 
only missing element here is a discus-
sion on the intersection of racial ideals 
and health; none of the chapters in 
this collection overtly theorize race. 
References to race are indirect, and 
point out only that popular culture 
in the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries represented the ideal body 
as white. Regardless of this neverthe-
less important omission, Krasnick 
Warsh’s collection is an important 
contribution to the conversations on 
health discourse and gender. 
Judith Mintz is a full-time Ph.D. 
student at York University’s Centre 
for Gender, Feminist, and Women’s 
Studies. Her interdisciplinary research 
explores discourses of women’s health 
and creative aging. Judith is also 
an experienced yoga teacher, shiatsu 
therapist, and mother of two young 
daughters.
Stress, burnout, isolation, sleep 
deprivation, exhaustion, feeling over-
worked, stretched thin, emotionally 
drained, and yet “not drowning but 
waving”—this affective tangle is the 
entry point for this volume. Re-
flecting on Stevie Smith’s well-loved 
poem, “Not Waving but Drowning,” 
and stemming from a conference on 
women in the liberal arts that took 
place at the University of Alberta in 
2006, this half-comforting, half-dis-
comforting volume, considers the 
interconnections of the personal and 
political aspects of life in the academy 
for women and feminists. Speaking to 
the difficulties of surviving academe 
as a feminist, this collection is also 
invested with hope, the spirit of 
collaborative scholarship, and with 
the conviction that “feminism is not 
dead yet.”
Not Drowning But Waving is 
structured into four sections: the 
first includes genealogies of women’s 
experiences in the liberal arts and 
the university, often drawing on the 
“personal archive[s]” of the contribu-
tors; the second consists of a creative 
piece by Aritha van Herk; the third 
turns more explicitly to questions 
of feminist history as well as to the 
wave metaphor and generational met-
aphor; and the final section considers 
feminist activism. Together, these 
sections form a diverse collaborative 
effort of the meanings, contexts, and 
pasts of academic feminism in Can-
ada. Acknowledging the immense 
efforts and successes of feminism, 
as well as the continuing need for 
feminist intervention, action, and 
coalition in the university, the pieces 
are permeated with an urgency for 
social and structural change. 
In many ways, the collection can be 
considered alongside recent critiques 
of the corporate university, such as 
for instance, Marc Bousquet’s How 
The University Works (2008), with 
the significant addendum that it is 
women—“that problematic, vari-
ably representative, contested, and 
vulnerable category that plagues 
and yet underwrites the project of 
feminism”—who are pervasively and 
systematically discriminated in the 
Canadian university system. This dis-
crimination of women materializes 
itself, as the authors discuss, through 
women’s lower earnings, inequitable 
hiring and promotional practices, 
and severe underrepresentation in 
the senior professoriate and Canada 
Research Chairs Program. Crucially, 
contributors also offer personalized 
accounts of how this discrimination 
has affected their lives and how they 
have navigated and agitated against 
structural inequalities.
This impassioned collection 
provides inimitable insight into the 
histories and struggles of feminism 
at Canadian universities. Providing 
a dynamic mix of writing styles, the 
authors speak of the past with an eye 
to the present, of the personal with 
insight into the politico-structural, 
and of the university-based with a 
concern for the broader neo-liberal 
context. But for a collection that 
identifies as one of its main goals 
a diversity of perspectives, “a jux-
tapos[ing] [of ] uneven styles and 
voices,” I am struck by the almost 
total absence of perspectives “from 
below,” from the pits of the academic 
pyramid. While the insights on the 
experiences of high-ranking feminist 
academics is indisputably integral to 
an analysis of women in the liberal 
arts, the collection would have been 
strengthened had it included the per-
spectives of those who are ‘drowning’ 
or perhaps ‘being drowned.’ In this 
sense, Not Drowning But Waving, 
while a timely and meaningful vol-
ume, speaks to and for a too narrow 
audience—feminists who have made 
NOT DROWNING BUT 
WAVING: WOMEN, 
FEMINISM, AND THE 
LIBERAL ARTS
Susan Brown, Jeanne Perreault, Jo-
Ann Wallace, and Heather Zwicker, 
Eds.
Edmonton: University of Alberta 
Press, 2011
reviewed by ela przybylo
CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME198
it in the academy. Its relevancy for 
women who have not made it, not 
made it yet, or will never make it, is 
perhaps more ambiguous. 
Ela Przybylo is a Ph.D. student of the 
Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies 
Program at York University, Toronto. 
While her primary research project is 
on the sexual identity of asexuality, 
she has broader interests in feminist 
approaches to sexuality, the body, and 
science. Her work has been published 
and is forthcoming in journals such 
as Sexualities and Feminism and 
Psychology, as well as in a couple of 
book collections on asexuality. Ela is a 
lover of mountains, trees, shrubs, and 
wildflowers.
Due to its anti-sexual attitudes and 
affiliation with radical right-wing 
politics the contemporary anti-por-
nography feminism gained a negative 
reputation of a moral crusader among 
academics and sex workers. However, 
as Carolyn Bronstein demonstrates in 
her chronological account of Ameri-
can activism against violence against 
women, second-wave feminism has 
not always conceptualized pornog-
raphy as inherently evil and harmful 
for women. It also has not always 
promoted its complete abolition. 
In fact, what we know today as the 
anti-pornography activism started 
up with a quite different grassroots 
agenda.
BATTLING 
PORNOGRAPHY: THE 
AMERICAN FEMINIST 
ANTI-PORNOGRAPHY 
MOVEMENT, 1976-1986
Carolyn Bronstein
Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2011
reviewed by darja 
davydova
Battling Pornography is an engag-
ing and nuanced historical book 
addressing the rise and decline of the 
nation-wide American anti-violence 
and anti-pornography movements in 
’70s and ’80s. The book puts feminist 
grassroots activism against pornogra-
phy in the socio-cultural context of 
sexual revolution and proliferation of 
public advertising. It demonstrates 
how the movement arose from 
women’s concerns and dissatisfaction 
with these social changes. While the 
sexual revolution was liberating for 
men, many women found themselves 
being unable to refuse unwanted sex 
and resisted the culture that glori-
fied sexual accessibility of women. 
The emergence of radical feminism 
provided a theoretical grounding 
for these concerns as it maintained 
that there was an innately positive 
female way of life that has potential 
to challenge sexually oppressive pa-
triarchal culture.
Using original archival research, 
Bronstein documents the initiation 
and evolution of three key feminist 
anti-violence movements—the 
Women Against Violence Against 
Women (wavaw), the Women 
Against Violence in Media and Por-
nography (wavmp),  and the Wom-
en Against Pornography (wap). The 
wavaw organized against depiction 
of rape and violence in films, adver-
tisement, and on record covers. Even 
though it opposed pornographic 
horror movies, this movement 
avoided identifying pornography 
as a primary target of anti-violence 
activism. By contrast, wavmp 
saw a causal relationship between 
pornography and female abuse. It 
protested against the porn industry 
and media, seeing advertising that 
used female bodies as inevitably 
pornographic. In the early ’80s, 
the wap, which united specifically 
against pornography, came to dom-
inate the nation-wide anti-violence 
movement due to its strong alliance 
with the state, elite feminism, and 
right-wing, and religious groups. It 
campaigned for legal restrictions of 
pornography and quickly progressed 
towards opposing the depiction of 
any sexual activity in the media. 
Bronstein’s analysis effectively 
demonstrates that for a wide range of 
feminist movements across the coun-
try pornography became a unifying 
issue providing strategy to confront 
patriarchy and sexism permeating 
the image-saturated Western culture. 
However, the focus on pornography 
also turned many feminists away from 
the anti-violence activism, as they 
found it dangerous to invite the state 
to regulate sexual speech and become 
a primary protector of women. In 
conclusion, the book chronicles the 
failure of the movement’s attempts 
to install censorship, sex workers’ 
criticism and campaigns against 
wap, and the technological change 
that made pornography accessible 
to everyone. These challenges led to 
the marginalization and decline of 
pro-censorship feminism.
Bronstein’s description of the tur-
bulent history of anti-pornography 
activism shows how conceptualizing 
pornography as violence against 
women easily leads to campaigning 
for censorship and marginalizing 
non-normative sex. At the same 
time, her analysis challenges our 
understanding of the anti-pornogra-
phy movement as elitist, static, and 
unified. Bronstein does not provide 
an easy answer to the question of 
how to address violence in the media 
and pornography without giving up 
sexual freedoms. However, this book 
contributes not only to the history 
of sexual regulation in the United 
States, but also to the history of social 
movements, as it demonstrates that 
they always consist of differently 
organized groups, subcultures, and 
individuals who share a common 
recognition of a social problem, but 
differ regarding desirable solutions.
Darja Davydova is a Ph.D. student 
in Women’s Studies at York University. 
She has previously conducted ethno-
graphic research on homophobia and 
nationalist activism in Lithuania. 
Her current interests include sexual 
politics, sex work, social movements, 
and nationalism
 


Not Drowning but Waving: Women, Feminism, and the Liberal Arts

de Bosset, Farideh

18 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
about the guest editors…
Susan Braedley is an Assistant Professor in the School 
of Social Work at Carleton University. She is the 
author of a number of articles and co-editor of Ne-
oliberalism and Everyday Life (2010, McGill Queens 
University Press).
Jacinthe Michaud est professeure agrégée à l’École de 
Genre, d’études sur la sexualité et d’études des femmes/
School of Gender, Sexuality Studies and Women’s 
Studies de l’Université York. Elle est l’auteure de 
plusieurs publications dont, Conscience subalterne, con-
science identitaire : la voix des femmes assitées au sein des 
organisations féministes et communautaires, aux Presses 
de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2005 ; « La représentation 
des besoins et l’obstacle de la double loyauté dans la 
recherche féministe : essai d’épistémologie autour de 
l’‘informatrice autochtone’ de Gayatri Chakravorty 
Spivak », Revue Canadienne de Politique Sociale, no. 
62, 2009 ainsi que « La reconnaissance des apports 
théoriques du féminisme dans la presse alternative de 
gauche : le cas du Temps fou », Politique et Sociétés, 
vol. 29, no.2, 2010
Leah F. Vosko is Professor of Political Science and 
Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of 
Gender &Work, York University. She is the author 
and editor of a number of books and articles includ-
ing, most recently, Managing the Margins: Gender, 
Citizenship and the International Regulation of Pre-
carious Employment (2010), published with Oxford 
University Press.
My mom in her white dress with ruffles.
Looking at the camera. Smiling – 
It seems an ordinary picture, except
this photograph was taken in July
six years after Expo 1967
at the time of three little daughters,
before my brother.
Leather furniture, Tiffany, tapestries.
Lilac. Apple trees.
I am in first grade Tara Hall School.
Wearing crocheted poncho. Red sandals.
Metal lunch box. Yellow bus.
How can I go to class?
This morning father hit mother.
My childhood house in Anjou –
Searching for red needle cushion,
my mother sewed this dress herself.
She is cutting a Vogue pattern.
I have been sorting some boxes
my own daughter and I taking sewing lessons.
Painting, cooking, baking blueberry pies.
My mom in her white dress with ruffles.
Looking at the camera. Smiling.
Tell her, “I am happy with my husband.
Don’t talk about the past!”
Digging up wild roses.
Ilona Martonfi is the author of two poetry books, Blue Poppy 
(2009), and Black Grass (2012). Ilona has published in 
Vallum, Accenti, The Fiddlhead, and Serai. She is the 
founder/producer of The Yellow Door and Visual Arts Centre 
Readings, and the co-founder of Lovers and Others. She 
is also the recipient of the qwf 2010 Community Award.
ILONA MARTONFI
The White Ruffle Dress (Daughter)
FARIDEH DE BOSSET
The world
The world is understood
only by the eternals;
water, fire
wind
and sand,
patiently recording.
Farideh de Boset was born in Tehran, Iran, where poet-
ry is a part of everyday life and conversation. Her first 
collection of poetry, A Tilt, was published by Inanna 
Publications in 2012. She lives in Toronto. Her website 
can be found at <www.faridehdebosset.ca>.


The World

Sutherland, Patsy

Traditional Healing and Spirituality Among Grenadian Women: A Source of Resistance and Empowerment

Cooper, Danielle

VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 189
Awfully Devoted Women examines 
lesbian history in Canada from 
1900-1965. The book is neatly di-
vided between two distinct temporal 
periods, with an underlying goal to 
render visible previously ignored 
groups of same-sex desiring women. 
The first part, “Awfully Devoted Odd 
Women,” focuses on upper-middle 
class women in the early twentieth 
century. Drawing from five col-
lections of personal papers, Duder 
examines how women who desired 
other women located others like 
themselves in an era prior to lesbian 
visibility. Duder convincingly argues 
that these relationships are locat-
able within the history of same-sex 
relationships because: they existed 
outside of heteronormative bounds, 
had erotic undertones, and repre-
sented long-lasting partnerships. 
His choice to devote considerable 
content to “physical sexuality” as a 
way to move beyond tired debates 
about proving “genital sexuality” 
is particularly provocative. Duder 
also effectively situates his research 
within the larger debate surrounding 
romantic friendship. Most notably, 
his source material suggests that 
romantic friendship underwent a 
period of transition, but still persisted 
into the twentieth century, incorpo-
rating distinctly erotic subject matter 
and the newer medicalized discourse 
on sexuality.
The second part, “Lesbian Lives 
After the Second World War,” draws 
on 32 semi-structured interviews of 
women who experienced same-sex 
desire between 1950 and 1965. 
This section’s focus is a deliberate 
departure from the emphasis on 
working class butch/femme bar cul-
AWFULLY DEVOTED 
WOMEN
Cameron Duder
Vancouver: ubc Press, 2010
reviewed by danielle 
cooper
ture and the homophile movement 
that dominates mid-twentieth-cen-
tury lesbian histories. In order to so, 
Duder draws on interviews of lower 
middle-class women from the peri-
od just prior to homophile organiz-
ing in Canada. Due to their lower 
middle-class status, these women 
were either unaware or unwilling 
to participate in working class bar 
culture. Themes addressed include: 
childhood experiences, informa-
tion about sexuality imparted as 
children and young adults, same-
sex sexual practices and relation-
ships, and community. In doing so, 
Duder not only addresses a previ-
ously underrepresented group of 
same-sex desiring women, but also 
challenges common conceptions 
that this generation was more sex-
ually aware than their predecessors. 
Duder’s informants reveal that for 
lower middle-class women in the 
mid-twentieth century, same-sex 
desire remained a largely unknown 
topic with experience acquired 
primarily through personal experi-
mentation.
Awfully Devoted Women includes 
discussion from two distinct class 
groups and time periods while 
operating under the premise that 
these discussions share the un-
derlying argument that women’s 
same-sex desire included erotic and 
physical elements in eras lacking 
lesbian identity and an accessible 
lesbian community. Although this 
argument is dutifully addressed 
throughout book, it remains an in-
sufficient justification for the book’s 
sharply divided focus. The book’s 
artificial division is exacerbated by 
the differences in source material 
drawn upon in each section (archi-
val documents versus interviews), 
which results in distinctly different 
narrative structures and topics ad-
dressed.
Awfully Devoted Women’s appeal 
ultimately remains in the details: a 
reader can easily get lost in the first-
hand accounts, the tender excerpts 
from love letters and twentieth-cen-
tury photographs (particularly of 
the dreamy Dr. Freida Fraser). Un-
fortunately, these details do not add 
up because Duder situates the book 
within a number of the major de-
bates within lesbian historiography 
with mixed success. For example, 
he argues against lesbian history’s 
tendency to be too abstract, and by 
extension, that focusing on bodily 
contact is important because “lesbi-
an history is about real people with 
real bodies and real desires.” Yet, his 
explicit refusal to engage with les-
bian identity debates significantly 
weakens his choice to use the term 
“lesbian” to describe women who 
did not self-identify as such.
Danielle Cooper is a doctoral student 
at the School of Gender, Feminist, and 
Women’s Studies at York University. Her 
research focuses on lgbtq grassroots 
information organization and the 
queer activities found therein.
“What is trafficking in women?” 
asks Jo Doezema in the opening 
line of her new book, Sex Slaves and 
Discourse Masters: The Construction of 
Trafficking, a question that becomes 
the central thesis of her pioneering 
new text. In it, Doezema proceeds 
to challenge much of what we have 
been told about trafficking in women. 
With an analysis that employs the 
concepts of myth and consent, her 
text draws a genealogical relationship 
between historical debates on white 
slavery and what she argues is its 
SEx SLAVES AND 
DISCOURSE MASTERS: 
THE CONSTRUCTION 
OF TRAFFICKING
Jo Doezema
New York: Zed Books, 2010
reviewed by elya m. 
durisin and emily van 
der meulen


Awfully Devoted Women

Bond, Joan

when i’m alone and senior

Abdillahi, Ifrah

VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 195
Because I am a Girl is an anthology of 
work by various authors enlisted by 
Plan International, a child-centered 
development organization, in order 
to convey the difficulties young 
girls experience around the world. 
Each of the seven stories is written 
by a different author and expresses 
their impressions and interpretations 
of the lives and struggles faced by 
young women in Togo, Sierra Leone, 
Ghana, Brazil, Cambodia, Uganda, 
and the Dominican Republic. The 
collection as a whole is a hit and miss 
as far as accomplishing the intended 
quent sexist attitudes to intellectual 
women that, for instance, Byron, 
Wordsworth, and Hazlitt exhibit. She 
also blames common but simplistic 
scholarly dichotomies that oppose 
the Enlightenment to Romanticism 
in alignment with reason versus imag-
ination and feeling, and therefore 
exclude women from Romanticism. 
The subjects of her case study are 
Anna Barbauld, a sometime member 
of the original bluestocking circle, 
and her niece and pupil Lucy Aikin, 
both of whom combined reason and 
sympathetic imagination in their 
educational writings. Eger argues 
that Barbauld’s books for children 
nurtured the mass readership for 
Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. In her 
Epistles on Women (1810), on the four 
stages of civilization, Aikin proposed 
continued progress for women, but 
circumscribed and dependent on 
men’s help. In contrast, Barbauld 
imagined a dystopian future for 
British culture, where London has 
become a mere tourist attraction, 
like the ruins of classical antiquity. As 
though to prove her point, savage mi-
sogynist attacks were directed against 
her. Eger concludes her book with the 
reaction, illustrated by Rowlandson’s 
caricature, to the bluestockings’ eco-
nomic success and cultural visibility. 
She remarks that feminist history is 
divided in its impulse both to cele-
brate exceptional role models and to 
deplore the political status of women 
qua class. In support, she quotes Mary 
Wollstonecraft’s much-cited dictum: 
“I wish to see women neither heroines 
nor brutes; but reasonable creatures.”
When Eger suggests that the sev-
eral bluestockings who were named 
Elizabeth—Montagu, Carter, and 
Griffith—would have connected 
their aspirations with their royal 
namesake, she is silent on her own 
connection, a further link in the 
“mutual relationship between writ-
ing about women and writing by 
women.” Her book complements her 
predecessor Myers’s group biography. 
Eger adds a substantial use of Mon-
tagu’s unpublished letters, especially 
for her account of the friendship 
between Montagu and Carter. She 
also adds contemporary literary and 
visual material to illustrate the chang-
ing reception of the bluestockings. 
Her book is more thesis-driven than 
Myers’s, which results in redundant 
repetition of her main arguments 
with every new aspect of bluestocking 
activities. Overly anxious citation of 
other critics clutters the text (instead 
of notes), and quotations tend to be 
followed by unnecessary and some-
times flat explications. However, her 
concluding point is well earned and 
well taken: “One of the costs of rec-
ognizing the bluestockings’ success is 
to lose any simple sense of the history 
of feminism as a story of progress.”
Gisela Argyle, Senior Scholar of Hu-
manities at York University in Toronto, 
has published Germany as Model 
and Monster: Allusions in English 
Fiction, 1830s-1930s (Montreal: Mc-
Gill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 
another book and articles on Victorian 
literature and comparative literature, 
as well as literary translations from 
German into English and the converse.
BECAUSE I AM A GIRL
Tim Butcher, Joanne Harris, Xiaolu 
Guo, Kathy Lette, Deborah Mog-
gach, Marie Phillips, Irvine Welsh
London: Vintage, 2010
reviewed by ifrah 
abdillahi
objective stated by Marie Staunton, 
Chief Executive of Plan UK to “make 
girls visible in a way that reports and 
statistics cannot.” Some stories such 
as the one by acclaimed writer Kathy 
Lette on her visit to Brazil come across 
as offensive and insulting in their 
criticism of the country and its inhab-
itants. Lette, in an overly simplistic 
analysis, describes the young girls she 
encounters as “little more than a life 
support to their ovaries—reduced, 
by lack of contraception and lack 
of access to abortion, into breeding 
cows.” In a country gripped by ex-
treme poverty and a fierce doctrine 
of Catholic values, in which abortion 
is illegal but paedophile tourism is 
endemic, this contributor’s chapter, 
entitled Ovarian Roulette, is at times 
difficult to read due to a narrative 
steeped in condescension. Other 
chapters, such as the one offered by 
filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo, 
are of a fictional nature, this one in 
particular accounting the life of a 
Cambodian police officer who grew 
up as an orphan and soldier. Her 
story of a man who later in life gets 
married and has a daughter whom 
he loves but goes missing, while 
interesting, is somewhat difficult 
to understand and leaves the reader 
puzzled us to how young girls factor 
into the story or what the overall 
message regarding their circumstance 
is. Still, others such as the piece by 
Irvine Welsh, broach the theme of mi-
gration and prostitution in a unique 
and insightful manner. His chapter 
“Remittances” is through a narration 
by two sisters whose opportunities 
and outcomes in life vary drastically 
despite having been raised within 
the same household. His protagonist 
offers a nuanced account and insight 
into the complexities of women’s lives 
in the Dominican Republic, and the 
negotiations necessary in their roles 
as mothers, daughters, providers, 
and prostitutes. By far, however, the 
most impactful and moving account 
is offered by literary newcomer Marie 
Phillips. Phillips travels to Uganda for 
six days on a visit to the Plan regional 
offices and tours their programs 
within the country. Having been 
CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME196
sent brochures with photographs 
of happy kids with the captions 
reading ‘Children are our future’, 
she is immediately shocked when 
instead she encounters “a tent full 
of angry—and adult—prostitutes” 
stating that “if this was the reality of 
Africa, it was also the reality of ngo 
work.” Phillipsgives a biting critique 
of Plan’s development work, exposing 
the glaring inconsistency between 
what they claim to be doing in their 
programs and the reality of Plan’s 
organizational bureaucracy which has 
yet to benefit most children within 
the region. When her frustration 
boils over, she ends up telling one 
Plan employee, “you can pay for an 
author to come over from London to 
write a piece for an anthology which 
will make people think that if they 
donate it will go to the people… 
only it’s not going to go to them 
because of the culture of bullshit.” 
Overall, the collection does address 
the subject of child abuse, domestic 
violence, trafficking of women and 
children, as well as a host of other 
issues related to globalization. The 
extent to which each contributor 
captures the true stories behind the 
young girl’s plight depends greatly 
however, on the varying degrees of 
competence by their authors.
Ifrah Abdillahi is enrolled in the 
Women’s Studies graduate program 
at York University, and specializes in 
refugees and migration. She is currently 
researching famine and politics through 
a feminist lens, and has additional 
research interest in translational fem-
inisms, international relations, and 
political geography. In committing her 
career to advocating for social justice, 
she hopes to contribute change through 
research as a form of resistance.
Feminist scholars have been ex-
ploring medical history for over 20 
years. Notable monographs include 
Cheryl Krasnick Warsh’s Prescribed 
Norms: Women and Health in Cana-
da and the United States Since 1800 
(2010), and Wendy Mitchinson’s 
two feminist history books on the 
medicalization and social control 
of women’s bodies (1991; 2002). 
While much of English-speaking 
women’s medical history has focused 
on social constructionist analyses of 
reproduction and the medicalization 
of women’s bodies as a response to bi-
ological determinist arguments about 
women and their experiences, there 
has been a lack of cohesive historical 
writing about gender and health and 
how these are represented through 
popular culture. Krasnick Warsh’s 
collection of 12 essays fills this void, 
and accurately reflects the current 
academic shift in several university 
departmental names from “women’s 
studies” to “gender, feminist, and 
women’s studies” by including writ-
ing that examines masculinities, as 
well as sexuality. 
The chapters in Gender, Health, 
and Popular Culture are uniformly 
rigorously researched according to 
history disciplinary practice. The 
wide range of sources for analysis 
are not only interesting but also 
cover a century of historical doc-
uments that reflect the varieties of 
women’s (and men’s) experiences, 
as well as their representations of 
health through accessible media 
ranging from advice manuals to 
performance. Many of the chapters 
in Gender, Health, and Popular Cul-
ture include footnotes that readers 
will find helpful. Krasnick Warsh’s 
robust bibliography, which includes 
both primary and secondary sources 
that integrate all of the contribut-
ing authors’ reference materials, is 
impressive. Mid- and upper-level 
history, women and gender stud-
ies, and health policy students and 
academics will find Gender, Health, 
and Popular Culture a useful resource 
that frequently uses Foucauldian 
analyses of women and men’s bod-
ies as both morally and physically 
regulated by the state and so-called 
medical authorities. 
Krasnick Warsh has skillfully cu-
rated the chapters in Gender, Health, 
and Popular Culture as a conversation 
between contributors. This cross-ref-
erencing of each other’s work makes 
the collection cohesive, and essays can 
be read together or separately. What 
emerges is a feminist argument that 
points out the dialectical nature of 
popular culture’s messages to wom-
en and girls. The first two chapters 
examine Australian and American 
discourses around pregnancy and 
childbirth in the nineteenth and 
early-twentieth centuries. Feath-
erstone illustrates Australian state 
attempts to govern white women’s 
pregnancies and childbirth, while 
Forman Cody examines American 
prenatal nutrition advice given to 
women between 1850 and 1950. 
The difference between national 
identity contexts is less important 
than the point of understanding the 
gendered imagining of woman as 
biological, cultural, and symbolic 
reproducers of the nation (Yuval 
Davis and Stoetzler 2002). Many 
other feminist historians have drawn 
links between gender and national 
identity production, pointing out 
the biological essentialist notions of 
women’s bodies as mothers of the 
nation, as well as maker and keeper of 
home spaces from which the nation’s 
warriors may emerge (Arnup 1994; 
Comacchio 1993). The notion of 
women as producers of social citizens 
underpins the first half of Gender, 
Health, and Popular Culture.
GENDER, HEALTH, 
AND POPULAR 
CULTURE: HISTORICAL 
PERSPECTIVES
Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, Ed. 
Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 
2011
reviewed by judith 
mintz


Because I Am a Girl

Gereighty, Deni Ann

70 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
Ministère des affaires sociales. Un 
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Mui, A. “Caring for Frail Elderly 
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Stadnyk, R., S. Fletcher, J. Eales, 
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DENI ANN GEREIGHTY
Moon
The radiant full moon startles me tonight.
Her shocking brilliance peeks through the evergreens
nearly lands my car in a ditch.
This huge, golden-white orb, luxuriant in her maturity
grows from nothing to enormous size
takes all her space without apology or embarrassment
unlike me for most of my life.
My grandmother loved to tell the story of the night I was born.
The nurse delivered me during an eclipse of the full harvest 
moon,
which the doctor was outside watching.
Tonight’s moon reminds me of how I have lived eclipsed
bound by my fears and insecurities over my own size
drawn to my size-positive sisters
I hesitantly plunge into the glow of self-acceptance.
Substantial, complete within myself, commanding attention
I am growing into my fullest self.
Bountiful, taking ample space, I have learned,
I am beautiful as the moon.
I am disabled. I miss being a L&D RN, but helped with my sister’s labor. 
I am blessed with young three nieces. I have two feline companions, Zoe 
and Nikki. I rescued them as kittens after surviving my 12.5 hour cancer 
surgery. They have watched over me as guardians through five years of mrsa 
infections and surgeries, while I healed, and now keep me going and loved.


Moon

Swiss, Margo

60 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
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53.2 (2004): 87–98. Print. 
MARGO SWISS
Women Tell
Women tell of their babies that died:
ones born black as your boot, grey or blue
ones that lived just a day or two
ones that slept with death in their cribs
ones that were spindly and could never suck
ones that were taken before they wore clothes.
Women tell of the nurseries they made:
linens and lamps, assorted notions of joy,
the patient passing of nine months gone
as on a long trip, heavy with love for the unexpected
to be finally rejected by somebody special
who never arrived, a door slammed in the face,
the place they came to a vacant space,
a house abandoned and all swept clean
with only a simple sign on the door,
no body lives here any more.
Margo Swiss’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.
ILONA MARTONFI
Father’s Wake
“Tomorrow is the funeral,” she said.
She talked and talked, and consoled me with her voice.
Mother talked about her duties to him: how she had filled
the vials for his injections. Now she didn’t have to do it
anymore. She prepared his Sunday suit, his shirt, his tie,
and shoes, to take to the Verhoeve Funeral Home.
“Death roamed the house for weeks,” my father had said.
Ilona Martonfi’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.


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