The Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality, a subcommittee of the Canadian Historical Association, is pleased to offer its Prize for the Best Article on the History of Sexuality in Canada.

We are pleased to announce a call for nominations for our “Prize for Best Article on the History of Sexuality in Canada". Articles published in 2010 or 2011, written in English or French, are eligible. Nominations may be made by faculty, students, editors, publishers, and self-nominations are perfectly acceptable. Please send 3 copies of the nominated article before 1 February 2012 to the Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality, c/o Steven Maynard, Department of History, Watson Hall, Room 212, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6.

For details on the parameters of the prize, please contact Steven Maynard @ stevenmaynard@sympatico.ca.

The prize will be awarded during the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in May 2012.

Past Prize Winners

2010

Patrick Dunae. “Geographies of Sexual Commerce and the Production of Prostitutional Space: Victoria, British Columbia, 1860-1914”. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 19, 1(2008)

The selection committee was particularly impressed by how Dunae deftly contextualized his rich historical study of prostitution in Victoria within the international literature on the ‘spatial turn,’ most evident in Dunae’s use of Henri Lefebvre’s work on the ‘production of space.’ In this way, Dunae’s article extends in a highly productive fashion the commitment to empirical research and theoretical sophistication that have become a hallmark of the historiography of sexuality in Canada.

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2008
Marie-Aimée Cliche (UQAM). "Du péché au tramatisme: l’inceste, vu de la Cour des jeunes délinquants et de la Cour du bien-être social de Montréal, 1912-1965," The Canadian Historical Review, 87 (June 2006)
and
Tamara Myers (UBC).  "Embodying Delinquency: Boys’ Bodies, Sexuality, and Juvenile Justice History in Early-Twentieth-Century Quebec,"  Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 14 (October 2005).

Cliche and Myers make particularly fitting co-winners, for they both focus on the same place and time, employing some of the same sources--early- to mid-twentieth-century Montreal court records--to give us two distinctive takes on the history of sexuality. Drawing on feminism and the work of Ian Hacking, Cliche provides a sensitively negotiated overview of the changing understandings of incestuous relations, underscoring how sexual meanings are subject to historical pressures and can shift dramatically over an even relatively short period of time. Myers deploys sexuality to complicate in useful ways much current thinking on the history of gender and 'juvenile delinquency,' demonstrating that for some boys, like for many girls, the definition of delinquency could be sexual, even if that sexualization played out in highly gendered ways. Cliche and Myers both have made original and substantial contributions to the history of sexuality in Canada, furnishing studies at once empirically rich and historiographically engaged.

Jean Barman, “Aboriginal Women on the Streets of Victoria: Rethinking Transgressive Sexuality During the Colonial Encounter.” Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, edited by Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005).

In selecting the articles, the jury commended Barman for her sensitive recreation of both the sexual conflicts and possibilities experienced by Aboriginal women, and for her nuanced rethinking of the identities and motives of white settler men in their sexual exchanges with First Nations women. Barman’s essay also advances the Canadian historiography by locating the history of sexuality within the context of Canada’s colonial past.

Karen Duder, "Public Acts and Private Languages: Bisexuality and the Multiple Discourses of Constance Grey Swartz", BC Studies, (Winter/hiver 2002/2003).

In selecting this article from a pool of particularly strong nominations, the jury highlighted the essays originality, offering as it does a way to think about the complexity of sexual identity in the past. The jury was also struck by the literary qualities of Constance Swartzs journals, something reflected in Duders own narrative, and which lends to the essay a personal, intimate voice too often lost in studies of sexual regulation.

Becki L. Ross, Bumping and Grinding on the Line: Making Nudity Pay, Labour/Le travail, 46 (Fall/automne 2000).

A wonderfully original examination of the spectacle of striptease which highlights the seldom explored linkage between labour history and the history of sexuality.

Franca Iacovetta, The Sexual Politics of Moral Citizenship and Containing Dangerous Foreign Men in Cold War Canada, 1950s-1960s, Histoire sociale/Social History, 33 (November/novembre 2000).

An important paper which explores postwar Canadian sexual norms within a complex framework that analyzes the intersections of race/ethnicity, class and gender.