Feminism

U of T prof's research and advocacy focuses on land grabbing – and those fighting it

geoff.vendeville — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:59:13 +0000

U of T prof's research and advocacy focuses on land grabbing – and those fighting it

geoff.vendeville Fri, 04/29/2022 - 11:59

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A member of the Garifuna ethnic group holds a sign reading "Garifuna Lives Also Matter" during a protest in front of the Supreme Court of Justice in Tegucigalpa in July, 2020 (photo by Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images)

Tina Adamopoulos

Topic

Global Lens

Black Research Network

Feminism

Geography

U of T Scarborough

Sharlene Mollett studies the relationship between land and culture, as well as how gender and race shape access to natural resources. A feminist political ecologist and cultural geographer at the �ؿ�ζSM Scarborough, she largely focuses on communities displaced by land grabbing in Central America – and the policies that fail to protect them.

Land grabbing refers to the legal or sometimes illegal process of appropriating property – often by fraud or force – by individuals or groups ranging from agricultural companies to tourism operators.

Sharlene Mollett

In some cases, corporations and elites – enabled through state corruption – buy contested lands. But often, powerful elites grab land through loopholes or they take advantage of vague language in the law. Almost always, economically poor small landholders and the landless are dispossessed.

“When we think about land grabbing, we often think of the land itself,” says Mollett, an associate professor in the department of human geography at U of T Scarborough.

“I wanted to think about the relationship between land and [human] bodies, and not only when there is land dispossession. There's an embodied process that is happening to the people who exist on the land.”

Published in The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, Mollett’s latest chapter, “Resistance against the land grab,” traces the lives of Garifuna Defensoras, women who serve as land and community defenders on the north coast of Honduras. The chapter focuses on the tourism industry and criminalization of Garifuna women.

Communities in coastal regions, often prime real estate for tourism corporations, have a constitutional right to communal lands. And yet, Garifuna people – particularly women – are often and mistakenly seen as trespassers while they travel along coastal beaches that have been appropriated by hotels. Often, Garifuna women and girls are harassed by hotel staff and security, and experience sexual harassment by tourists.

In the chapter, Mollett sketches how Garifuna women have long been land defenders in Honduras. “Defenders are not just defending their lands,” Mollett says. “They're also defending their communities from different kinds of embodied violence by those who get to usurp their land.”

Mollett’s work also follows the Miskito peoples, an Indigenous community in the Honduran Mosquitia region, located in the easternmost part of the country.

“These two fields [feminist political ecology and cultural geography] help me tell the story of people in Central America who are struggling to make claims to lands and territories against the Honduran state and elites who seek their dispossession,” Mollett says.

A Miskito woman sits next to a wall with graffiti saying "Settlers Out" in the community of Sangnilaya, Puerto Cabezas, North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region of Nicaragua (photo by Inti Ocon/AFP via Getty Images)

She explains that, although Miskito and Garifuna lands and territories are organized along matriarchal forms of inheritance, the state uses a patrilineal framework for land registration. In discussing land struggles in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, Mollett notes:

“The state is not only appropriating land in the name of biodiversity conservation but using patriarchal and racial ideologies to justify the disruption of matriarchal landforms in the Mosquitia.”

Along with other scholars who focus on Honduras, Mollett serves as an expert witness for North American asylum cases involving Hondurans seeking to flee the country.

“Many of us have contributed our time to writing detailed reports about the situation in Honduras in hopes that it will help asylum claims for Miskito and Garifuna peoples trying to enter North America,” Mollett says.

Back home, the on-the-ground change to which Mollett hopes to contribute comes down to inspiring her students to think critically about the world and systems around them – no matter the field or career they decide to pursue.

“I think teaching is one of the ways that we can really change minds towards more equitable policies shaping development intervention and inspire future generations to take human rights seriously,” she says.

Following #MeToo, U of T law prof makes the case for a 'restorative and transformative model of justice'

geoff.vendeville — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 16:00:58 +0000

Following #MeToo, U of T law prof makes the case for a 'restorative and transformative model of justice'

geoff.vendeville Thu, 04/28/2022 - 12:00

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Brenda Cossman's new book, The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era, revisits the sex wars of the 1970s and 80s and examines their impact on more recent debates around #MeToo (photo courtesy of Brenda Cossman)

Topic

Before #MeToo called attention to the ubiquity of sexual assault and harassment, �ؿ�ζSM Professor Brenda Cossman was charting feminist debates around sex work, revenge porn and sexting, sexual harassment and sexual assault – particularly on college campuses.

“It unleashed a viral eruption of women coming forward globally and saying, ‘Yes, it happened to me too,’” says Cossman, a professor in the Faculty of Law. “Within a few days, Tarana Burke [an activist from the Bronx] was recognized as having started the ‘Me Too’ campaign in 2006 to support Black women and girls who were survivors of sexual violence.” But the movement “took on a life of its own, one that was in fact, quite distinct from Burke's Me Too.”

In her latest book, The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era, Cossman revisits the feminist debates of the 1970s and ’80s and examines their influence on how we think about sexual harm now. Cossman examines tensions between the need for recognition and protection under the law, and what she says is the colossal and ongoing failure of that law to redress historic injustice. The #MeToo movements raises questions about whether justice can be served outside the courtroom, Cossman says.

The so-called sex wars of the 1970s and 80s were highly polarizing over women’s sexuality, especially in regards to porn, she says.

“On one side, you had radical feminists who insisted on sexuality as a site of women's oppression, that women were victims of sexual violence and eventually turned to law to protect women. On the other side were so-called ‘sex radicals’ who saw sexuality, not only as a site of danger, but also pleasure, who insisted that women have sexual agency and who fundamentally oppose the turn to law. These were fierce debates.”

While these debates simmered down by the late 1980s, she says the underlying disagreements have never been resolved – and the outpouring of #MeToo stories began to be met with pushback.

Critics of the movement across the political spectrum claimed “#MeToo was going too far – although what too far meant was really unclear,” Cossman says.

“But there was a very distinctive feminist voice – a feminist version of a critique that emerged first in whispers, then gained traction and eventually erupted into full-fledged feminist war.”

It intensified with the allegation of sexual misconduct leveled against actor-comedian Aziz Ansari by a 23-year-old woman who spoke to Babe.net under the pseudonym, “Grace.” She said Ansari repeatedly tried to pressure her into sex despite her apparent discomfort.

“The story that broke the feminist internet [the Babe.net story] resonated for many women, particularly, but not exclusively young women, while others denounced it as trivializing #MeToo, and #MeToo going too far,” Cossman says.

Soon afterwards, she says #MeToo was framed as “generational” in both the mainstream press and social media: millennial feminists versus second wave feminists.

“And it turned really nasty, really fast,” she adds. “But I saw the same fault lines around sexuality agency and the role of law that had been dividing feminists for decades.”

The law’s role in these debates is complex, notes Cossman.

“#MeToo did not emerge as a legal movement, with a legal agenda. In fact, if anything, #MeToo was a performance of law’s spectacular failure to address sexual violence,” she says, adding that on one side of the issue were people calling for better laws and enforcement, while others appeared more concerned with prosecutorial overreach and the abuse of state power.

Cossman’s book also addresses queer critiques of #MeToo and concludes by noting how we ought to think about these feminist debates – as side by side, rather than in opposition to one another.
“In the final chapters, I try to break out of what is the deep political ‘whiteness’ of #MeToo, and the new sex wars, by centering on the work of Black feminists, particularly abolition feminists, in their critique of the state and mass incarceration in the U.S. and argue for a reparative approach to regulating sexual harm – one that fundamentally de-centers criminal law.”

It is an approach that also re-centers Burke’s Me Too vision.

“I try to build a restorative and transformative model of justice that could do a better job of delivering and promoting accountability and repair,” Cossman says.

The underlying ideological and political divides about sexuality, about women's sexual agency and about the role of law have remained the same for far too long – and it’s time for a change, Cossman argues.

“The regulation of sexual harm means unsticking ourselves from the sex wars binary. It requires new skills, new forms of knowledge, new reading practices, strategies – previously unheeded – and giving the benefit of the doubt to feminists who see things differently by taking that ‘maybe she has a point’ stance and keeping that point in view,” she says.

“#MeToo may have created new space to speak about sexual violence – but its legacy remains in our hands.”

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh catalogues more than 50-year career of feminist activism: Toronto Star

mattimar — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 17:34:30 +0000

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh catalogues more than 50-year career of feminist activism: Toronto Star

mattimar Wed, 01/19/2022 - 12:34

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(Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Mariam Matti

Topic

Our Community

Alumni

Faculty of Arts & Science

Feminism

New College

U of T Libraries

Women and Gender Studies

After five decades in activism, city-building and community planning, �ؿ�ζSM alumna Ceta Ramkhalawansingh has amassed an impressive collection of local history – and she is donating some of it to her alma mater.

So far, Ramkhalawansingh – who co-founded the first women’s studies program at U of T in 1971 and was one of its first lecturers – has shipped off 30 cartons of records to the U of T Archives and 17 boxes of feminist-theory and Caribbean-studies books to the New College library, the Toronto Star reported.

“My big pandemic project has been trying to make that knowledge and information available and not lost,” Ramkhalawansingh told the Star.

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh (centre) at U of T in 1975 (photo by Robert Lansdale/�ؿ�ζSM Archives)

In 2020, 50 years after creating the women’s studies program, Ramkhalawansingh was celebrated for establishing the Ceta Ramkhalawansingh Scholarship to support students in the Women & Gender Studies Institute at U of T. She said at the time that she “never really left U of T” and continues to give back to the community through her current project.

“If I could make a contribution to increasing that knowledge,” she told the Star, “I’m more than happy to spend the time doing it.”

Read the story in the Toronto Star

Sex, race and discrimination: U of T researcher's book applies an intersectional lens to the Indian Act

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 15:26:47 +0000

Sex, race and discrimination: U of T researcher's book applies an intersectional lens to the Indian Act

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 03/02/2020 - 10:26

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Martin Cannon's book, Men, Masculinity and the Indian Act, explores over four decades of case law calling attention to the inability – if not refusal – of courts to connect sexism with racialization (photo by Perry King)

Topic

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Women

For decades, Martin Cannon had wanted to write a book that seeks to better understand the Indian Act’s effect on both Indigenous women and men “with an eye toward restoring gender balance and complementarity.”

A member of the Oneida Nation of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Cannon says Men, Masculinity and the Indian Act, published last year by UBC Press, is inspired by feminist theory and Indigenous women’s writings about sexism and racism that he read in the 1980s and during work on his master’s thesis in the 1990s.

“In the book, I am committed to seeing a change in the consciousness and minds of Indigenous Peoples about sexism and its impact on Indigenous nationhood,” says Cannon, an associate professor in OISE’s department of social justice education whose teaching and research interests include Indigenous-settler relationships, rejuvenation, racism and settler colonization and nation-building.

“In all the work I do, I’m really wanting to encourage students to not just acquire facts and information or histories, but to also understand that knowledge in order to resolve those histories.”

Men, Masculinity and the Indian Act explores over four decades of case law calling attention to the inability – if not refusal – of the courts to connect sexism with racialization and to acknowledge Indigenous Peoples as sovereign nations.

“I contemplate how courts, Parliament and even some status Indian organizations, in seeing the matters before them as discrimination involving only sexism, ignored the matter of Indian-ness – in turn re-telling a ‘raceless story of sexism,’” says Cannon.

Cannon’s publisher nominated the book for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, an honour awarded by the Writer’s Trust of Canada.

“The attention to [the book] is just as important as anything else,” says Cannon of the nomination. “When I’m thinking about what my book will look like to the public, I just hope the connections I am making about racialization being inseparable from sexism are talked about and recognized.”

Cannon says sexism within the Indian Act affects all Indigenous Peoples and undermines the collective rights of nations by determining who gets to belong and who doesn’t. For example, sexism in the act enshrined the structure of band councils, which were historically all male – including the Haudenosaunee, who have been traditionally matrilineal.

Citing arguments from his friend and co-author Lina Sunseri, an associate professor of sociology at Brescia University College, and other Indigenous women like the late Patricia Monture, Mary Ellen Turpel, Jennifer Denetdale, Joanne Barker, and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, he argues that sexism is always intertwined with racialized discrimination.

“What [these scholars] suggest to me is that sexism is a tool. It’s the precise tool that’s used to exact and mobilize settler colonialism and lands dispossession – and, for the longest time, before Canada only recently amended the Indian Act, it furthered our legislative and sometimes physical elimination as people,” Cannon says.

His book explores what sexism has meant for Indigenous men – challenging an assumption that the act has affected Indigenous Peoples as either “women” or “Indians,” but not both. It is here that Cannon sought to approach this book with an intersectional lens.

“The book belongs to a grand tradition of feminist intersectional theorizing that’s primarily been written by Indigenous and Black women,” says Cannon, who eventually hopes to see constructive criticism from trans, two-spirited, and/or queer Indigenous perspectives.

He calls on Indigenous men and male-dominated leadership groups to acknowledge the Indian Act as a tool of both patriarchal and racialized subordination.

Ultimately, Cannon wants the Indian Act to undergo “a slow death by amendment” – not simply for Canada to address sex discrimination, but also to address the category “Indian” and to restore First Nations sovereignty and jurisdiction over citizenship.

Citing Douglas Sanderson, an associate professor at U of T’s Faculty of Law, Cannon says that “Canada, through its parliament, and with Indigenous Peoples needs to work together to identify specific sections of the Indian Act that no longer serve a legitimate purpose – whose elimination from the Indian Act would work to restore autonomy, property rights, and freedoms.”

MENA Women conference: From street protest to online activism

Romi Levine — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:27:26 +0000

MENA Women conference: From street protest to online activism

Romi Levine Tue, 03/20/2018 - 09:27

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Above: activists in Tunisia; the interdisciplinary conference at U of T will bring together leading international researchers, feminists, activists, gender rights advocates, artists, public intellectuals and media (photo courtesy MENA)

Topic

Women and Gender Studies

International activists and scholars are gathering at the �ؿ�ζSM this week to explore how women are using new media and social media networks to effect political change in the Middle East and North Africa.

The two-day MENA Women: From Street Protest to Online Activism conference will take place March 22 and 23 on the downtown Toronto campus and at U of T Mississauga. Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani, an assistant professor of women and gender studies at U of T Mississauga, organized the event.

“We will explore how women and activist feminists use online space and transform it to become feminist sites of struggle,” she says.

“This is a burgeoning field. European and North American feminism doesn’t speak to the experiences, priorities, historical contexts and lived experiences of Middle Eastern and North African women. These scholars have something important to contribute to feminist modes of theorizing, to feminist struggle, and to new media and transnational studies.”

The conference features well-known scholars in the field of women and digital activism, including German Muslim journalist Kübra Gümüşay, who will discuss her experiences as the country’s first hijab-wearing columnist and how online hate affects activists, social movements and societies.

U of T iSchool doctoral student Mariam Karim will present her study of how Saudi cyberfeminists use Twitter hashtag campaigns in feminist organizing and solidarity and Harvard University scholar and human rights lawyer Simin Kargar will discuss her study of harmful online speech, gendered persecution and propaganda.

Sima Shakhsari, a University of Minnesota scholar of gender, women and sexuality studies, will discuss the influence and challenges of women bloggers in Iranian politics.

Cyberpolitics and digital activism played an important role in Iran’s Green Movement and the Arab Spring uprisings, says Tahmasebi-Birgani.

“The dissidents used Twitter, which became a vital mode of communication for protestors, causing the Iranian regime to block it. The Arab uprisings started on Facebook and became instrumental in telling people where to go, how to organize, and letting people know about arrests and other news as it unfolded.”

Since that time, the digital realm has changed and grown as citizens look for new ways to push back against oppressive political regimes.

“Digital spaces offered women a new way to organize and learn from each other,” Tahmasebi-Birgani says. “They started campaigns, writing blogs and, increasingly, using social media to create campaigns and networks.”

She points to activist Facebook pages like My Stealthy Freedom, which features photos submitted by bare-headed Iranian women defiantly flouting the state’s compulsory hijab laws.

“It has one million followers and has become a hub for all sorts of activities, dialog and conversation – women post their stories, testimonies and videos,” she says. “These actions contribute to women’s awareness, and gives them courage – when you share stories and read other women’s stories, you feel you can do it, too.”

The event is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, the New College Initiative Fund and the UTM Dean’s Graduate Expansion Fund, with additional support from U of T Mississauga's department of historical studies, U of T Mississauga’s women and Gender studies program, and U of T’s Women and Gender Studies Institute. The conference, which is open to the public, wraps up with a public reception on March 23 at U of T Mississauga from 6 to 9 p.m.

Follow the conference on social media using the conference hashtag #MENAWomen18, on Twitter at @MenaWomenConfer or on Facebook at MENA Women: From Street Protest to Online Activism.

At U of T, lawyer Marie Henein calls #MeToo a 'necessary social awakening'

geoff.vendeville — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 05:00:00 +0000

At U of T, lawyer Marie Henein calls #MeToo a 'necessary social awakening'

geoff.vendeville Fri, 02/16/2018 - 00:00

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"I expect that many of you assume that I am somehow opposed to the #MeToo movement,” said criminal lawyer Marie Henein at Hart House. “You could not be more wrong” (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Topic

To some, criminal lawyer Marie Henein may seem an unlikely ally of the #MeToo movement.

The senior partner at Henein, Hutchinson LLP was herself the subject of much discussion when she successfully defended Jian Ghomeshi on charges of sexual assault in one of the most talked-about trials of the last decade.

Some accused her of betraying women for aggressively questioning and attacking the credibility of women who claimed to have been abused by Ghomeshi.

Others saw her as a role model, a woman at the top of a competitive field – “not just a boss, but the boss,” in the words of one columnist.

It was no surprise that spectators filled Hart House's Great Hall on Feb. 14 to hear Henein's thoughts on the #MeToo movement in a lecture organized by the Hart House Debates and Dialogue Committee.

Henein said she had avoided talking publicly about this topic out of fear that she would be misunderstood. “Now, I expect that many of you assume that I am somehow opposed to the #MeToo movement,” she said. “You could not be more wrong.”

She called the movement “a necessary social awakening” and a reminder of the ground that has yet to be made up to achieve equality for women.

After her remarks, lawyer and U of T alumna Kim Stanton of Goldblatt Partners LLP joined her on stage for a question-and-answer period.

It was a homecoming of sorts for Henein, who went to U of T's St. Michael's College and studied English from 1984 to 1986, before attending law school at Osgoode Hall and Columbia University.

She told U of T News that as a student, she used to hang out at Hart House and the Sigmund Samuel Library (now the Gerstein Science Information Centre).

“The one recollection I have is feeling overwhelmed at the sheer magnitude of the place,” she said. “I wish I was there now. I would've definitely joined the Hart House Debates and Dialogue Committee and the million other opportunities that are available at the university.

“Instead, I will have to settle for being inviting back from time to time.”

U of T News transcribed an excerpt of her speech.

I truly don't know where to begin. I've been struggling with the things I want to say to you tonight. And I'm very conscious of the moment in which I am saying them.

And I wonder: Am I here, was I invited as Marie Henein the defence lawyer or the business person or the feminist? Do I have to publicly reconcile those things when, in my mind, they are not inconsistent nor irreconcilable, nor inexplicable, nor incongruous?

Then it occurred to me. That's actually part of the problem, isn't it? That we women are never quite right, never quite whole. That some aspect or other of us needs explaining and reconciling, and none of that is particularly conducive to 140 characters or an 800-word newspaper article.

A full house in Hart House's Great Hall listened to Marie Henein's talk on the #MeToo movement (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Rather than look at things as a whole or in context, we are unfortunately prone to compartmentalizing and dichotomizing. And that's really the problem in the current climate and with the discussions around this movement. I think we are conflating discussions and issues. We assume things are mutually exclusive when they are not, when they can and need to coexist together, and even more when those things, those concepts, are actually symbiotic.

There is so extensive a conflation of issues when it comes to discussion of this movement that I think we have to start by trying to untangle it a little bit.

I know many of you have heard and read the criticisms. On one hand, there are those who argue that this movement has had the effect of unnecessarily victimizing men, that it does away with concepts of due process or that sexual dynamics will forever be negatively impacted, that it's sexually puritanical in its approach. When people make these sorts of arguments in court, we call these types of the sky-is-falling arguments in terrorem arguments. And they are rarely persuasive to a court.

There is another side, and the other side is that this is a necessary moment, that it is an essential moment, that it is a bit of a new order and that it is emblematic of the fifth or sixth or seventh wave of feminism. I'm drowning in the number of feminist waves; I actually like plain old “feminist.”

So let's stop for a moment and try to untangle this and take these various things apart. And let's really start with the very first question we see a lot being written about and a lot of talking heads having opinions. And that is: Is the #MeToo movement a good thing or a bad thing?

That's a simplistic question but it does seem to be at the heart of what many people want to talk about.

Look at all the hand-wringing over the Aziz Ansari story. How we had somehow reached a tipping point, people wrote. How this was outrageous. And it all, in my view, missed the point.

There will be stories that you choose to believe. Some that you do not. There will be some experiences that you find compelling and others that you do not. Some that you think are very clear as day, and others that when you look at them personally you find are grey.

But those are personal judgments on the quality of the information that you are receiving. Those are judgments about how helpful or meaningful you personally find someone else's story. But none of that – none of that – implicates or undermines the purpose of this moment or this movement.

Now I expect that many of you assume that I am somehow opposed to the #MeToo movement. You could not be more wrong. And if you think that it is because of the fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a lawyer in the criminal justice system, and the assumption that it is somehow inconsistent with being a female.

It is no different to me then asking me how can I be a mother and defend a person charged with child neglect. A lawyer defends a client. They do not defend the crime. I've acted on murder cases. That doesn't mean I am a proponent, supporter or facilitator of murder.

Henein says movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter are "a reminder that as a society we cannot afford to be complacent because we have miles to go” (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

I've acted for people charged with sexual assault. That does not mean I am a proponent, supporter or facilitator of sexual assault. That is the job of a criminal defence lawyer, even one who happens to be female.

The #MeToo movement is, in my view, a necessary social awakening. It is one of the many things that it is reflecting an inescapable measure of where women's equality is at this point in North American society. In the same way that Black Lives Matter revealed and continues to reveal a very ugly reality, these movements are a necessary barometer.

Think of it is as a social gut check. In Black Lives Matter, people involved in the criminal justice system, in particular, were keenly aware of the disproportionate representation of the Black community in jails.

The abuse of public authorities directed at this particular community. And in Canada, that overrepresentation in prison populations relates substantially to minorities and particularly to the Indigenous community. The one unifying thread here is the overrepresentation of marginalized communities in the criminal justice system and that they are dealt with differentially by the state.

For years, writers and activists and people engaged in the legal system were saying there's something fundamentally wrong. But it was swept under the rug.

"Look how far we've come" was the answer but the problem is that it is not a particularly concerning statistic or indeed demographic to many people in positions of power.

But the problem is that it's not a particularly concerning statistic or indeed demographic to many people in positions of power. And that actually is true across political stripes.

In the United States, for example, it was Bill Clinton who was responsible for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which was the largest crime bill in U.S. history.

Here's the part you need to pay attention to: It had bipartisan support. It included increasing prisons, expanding the federal death penalty to cover about 60 offences, creating the three-strikes rule, which has imposed mandatory life imprisonment without possibility of parole for federal offenders. It doubled the maximum term of imprisonment on repeat sex offenders. It created new crimes and enhanced penalties and provided stronger penalties for violent crimes and drug trafficking crimes by gang members.

That was the Democratic legacy on criminal law. How else would you could you convince the public that you are not a bleeding-heart liberal? Sacrifice the poor, the marginalized, the rejected in society, the unpopular, the ones whose vote you don't really care a whole lot about and you don't need.

So I want to go back to this idea of the importance of social movements. What these social movements were, what Black Lives Matter was, what #MeToo is, are a wake-up call. A report card for us on the state of play. A reminder that as a society we cannot afford to be complacent because we have miles to go.

And that is true of this particular movement. When you look at the context and history of women, from the suffragettes to the civil rights movement in the '60s to our sexual liberation in the '70s, I really think that some people thought we were all good in North America, it was all done. But the inequality was there, and it always has been. And once again, in this time in history, the barometer, the report card is not as good as we thought.

The most important contribution in my view of #MeToo is to shake us out of our complacency and to reveal the true state of affairs. That has been done in a number of ways.

But the #MeToo movement falls on the heels of a number of events. It started actually before.

We knew where we were when Hillary Clinton – as qualified a candidate as ever – had run in a presidential election and was criticized in every conceivable way. She was too harsh. Insufficiently warm and fuzzy. Untrustworthy. Her hair wasn't right. Her clothing wasn't right. Her tone of voice was grating. She stood by her husband. She didn't stand by her husband. She was just too ambitious.

Compare it to the opposition: a person with no experience and the archetype of male entitlement. Compare the things he said and got away with and the things he did. This isn't about political stripes. It's about looking at how she was dealt with publicly as a woman. That's the lesson there.

Now she may not have shattered the glass ceiling, but she certainly shone a light on it. You couldn't ignore it. And here in Canada, as we seek comfort, as we often do, in our inherent politeness and decency, we should not forget that in this country, other than for a brief stint, we have never had a female prime minister.

Feminist male leaders are fine, but female leaders are even better. I just wish rather than telling us how in touch they were with their feminist side, they would step aside. Just clear the road a little bit, and give up the power that you've held on for so long.

Kim Stanton and Henein share the stage for a question-and-answer session after Henein's prepared remarks (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

So in between this and the last American election and the subsequent march, something else happens. Women in positions of power, often in Hollywood, start unveiling what has long been a sexist culture. The breadth of the harassment that a woman faces, the inability to literally attend a work interview or to go to work and earn a living without being subjected to harassment or assault was put under the spotlight. It's ugly, not just the fact of it, the sheer breadth of it.

This moment has exposed that reality.

And the sheer breadth of it requires us as a society to rethink what normal is, what human interaction is tolerable and intolerable. This doesn't even require us to get into the hard questions because whatever the movement, whatever the issue, there's always going to be hard questions. And struggles about line drawing. There will always be factual situations that are grey. But the import of this movement doesn't rise and fall on any one event, or any one experience, or any one story. Some will be truthful, others not. None of this undermines, in my view, the essential purpose of this movement. That is that the baseline must be changed.

At its most basic, most fundamental, the one thing that no reasonable human being could conceivably disagree with is that women, half the population, must be entitled to go to work, to earn a living and to walk down the street without being sexualized.

[Henein goes on to address the oft-stated criticism of #MeToo, that the movement denies due process to those who are accused. She explains rights in a criminal court, and adds there is no due process in a court of public opinion “because this is no court at all”]

So where does the complaint about the failure to give due process really belong? At institutions.

There are ways, for example, that an employer can choose to conduct an investigation when a complaint is levelled. A government or a political party can choose to conduct an investigation. But what happens if you take a pause and you respond in a meaningful and rational way, and not immediately send someone to the guillotine?

It means you may have to withstand some criticism, some nasty tweets, and potentially some disapproval.

Henein stayed behind after the event to speak with U of T students and autograph a few books (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

But that's where the fault lies: the failures of employers, of governments, of institutions to say, "We hear this. We have it. We will investigate it, and we will come back to you and we will act in a measured and appropriate way."

Fault doesn't lie with the movement that exposes these things that need to be investigated, that need to be looked at, that require thought and consideration. The fault lies with the people failing to give it the requisite thought or consideration.

So none of you get seduced by or gratified by the ‘off with his head’ response as though these are isolated single bad actors and now the cancer has been cut out and we can all go on our merry way. This is a ruse that has been used and pulled for a very long time. Do not fall for it. It is expeditious, easy and profoundly unfair.

This is what Hollywood's response has largely been. The denunciation or removal of the actor or manager. But that doesn't address the bigger question: How is this allowed to go on and why? It's not only a question of complicity, but also of understanding the root of the problem and making meaningful changes.

But every large studio, every casting agency has been largely silent when it comes to answering the question: What institutional or corporate change is necessary?

The issue is how and why these things are allowed to happen. How has the casting couch somehow become an acceptable term of art? So off with his head does nothing except perhaps satisfy a few people and a few angry tweeters. It doesn't ever advance a revolution to cut the king's head off – unless you have something to replace it with.

It has to always be accompanied with meaningful inquiry and change. And that sadly has not happened.

Women’s March on Washington D.C.: U of T expert on the protest

Romi Levine — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 21:11:13 +0000

Women’s March on Washington D.C.: U of T expert on the protest

Romi Levine Fri, 01/20/2017 - 16:11

Cutline

Women's March merchandise on sale outside the White House in Washington, D.C. (photo by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty)

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

Global Lens

Political Science

Faculty of Arts & Science

Trump

U.S.

Feminism

Subheadline

“Concern about the United States going into a period of darkness in terms of human rights is something that will energize people around the world“

With U.S. President Donald Trump now in office, more than 200,000 people are expected to attend the Women’s March on Washington D.C. on Saturday.

Organizers say another 2 million people are set to attend 616 marches across the United States and globally, including Toronto.

U of T News spoke with Sylvia Bashevkin, a political science professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science, about the marches and the issues driving them.

What is the significance of a march on Washington?

The effort is to try and get back some of the momentum that came out of the march that this particular initiative is based on and that is the Civil Rights movement from the 1960s. In the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. If you look at the history of social movements, you see that particular event and the international media coverage that it stirred set a major threshold for the idea that Americans are interested in political change, that they want to see major reforms in voting rights and other civil rights.

I think this is an effort to capture that momentum of positive change and in this case to talk about the consequences of many of those progressive social movements from the 1960s being set backwards.

Why are people marching on Saturday?

You have everything, starting with core women's rights on reproductive choice – which is why Planned Parenthood is deeply involved. We know that President Trump said in the third presidential debate that he would appoint judges to the U.S. Supreme Court who would effectively overturn Roe v. Wade, which is an important judicial precedent on women's right to choose.

Trump is also likely to emulate what other Republican presidents have done, which is to deny all U.S. foreign aid to NGOs outside the U.S. that provide or promote family planning activities. These actions have enormous consequences.

And then you have a very, very large number of other concerns that are central to the women's movement historically, including violence against women, sexual harassment, opportunities in employment and education for women.

And then you have questions about the erosion of civil rights, environmental issues, LGBTQ rights, concerns about U.S. foreign policy and the tendency towards isolationism.

There's a huge basket of concerns, which is why you have such a large umbrella coalition of groups that are supporting the march tomorrow and have created spinoff marches around the world and in cities around the U.S.

What draws people outside of the U.S. to attend a Women's March in their own cities?

We know that many Americans living in Canada are capital ‘D’ Democrats, and concerns about the direction of the country are of vital concern to them. Americans who live around the world have to file taxes every year with the United States.

We also know that the U.S. civil rights movements of the 1960s inspired many protest movements around the world in the decades since. The songs of civil rights were sung in Tiananmen Square during protests in China in 1989.

The ripple effects from the event on which this series of marches would be modelled have been inspiring for progressive people around the world. So the concern about the United States going into a period of darkness in terms of human rights is something that will energize people around the world.

Are there concerns that if the U.S. goes backwards on human rights that other countries will follow suit?

There are women around the world who are watching the inspiration that comes from U.S. social movements, now being eclipsed by a movement in a much more conservative direction. There's also the real-world consequences to changes to U.S. international aid.

We know under Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, under John Kerry and generally under Democratic presidents since Bill Clinton, there's been a huge amount of attention on the education of women and girls in the developing world.

There's been a lot of focus on improving health opportunities, health outcomes and access to education – there are all kinds of ripple effects that can be very negative with a change in government from Democratic to Republican. That's not saying anything about the extent to which Donald Trump and Mike Pence are more radically socially conservative than many other Republicans.

Will tomorrow's marches change the Trump administration's policies? Or are they simply acts of solidarity?

It's hard to know early on except that we do know that some of Trump's cabinet appointees have been much more moderate in their comments to congress than Trump was on the election trail.

It's possible that if there's enough push back, there may be some moderation. For example, some of Trump's nominees, contrary to his argument that climate change was a hoax propagated by China, have said that climate change is a reality and at least part of it is caused by humans.

That's an indication that those individuals are somewhat more moderate in their views than Trump, or that Trump has decided he doesn't want to be as polarizing in office as he was on the campaign trail.

I would imagine one of the hopes for organizers who are concerned about the direction of U.S. policy is simply to stake out the size of their grassroots base. While Trump believes he has an overwhelming mandate, in fact the U.S. public is extremely divided. His margin of victory in important states was very narrow and certainly [some people will] point out the difference between how many people have come to the inauguration today and how many people will be protesting tomorrow.

It's an effort to talk about the powers of numbers in a representative democracy, and if there is a distortion from votes to outcomes, one of the ways to make that case – if you're not a political scientist – is to get people in the streets to talk about how this president has a very compromised mandate simply based on numbers.

Part of this is about how much Trump is going to pay attention to that roughly 50 per cent of Americans who profoundly disagree with him, want their voices to be heard and want the fact that his victory is a compromised one to be remembered the day after the inauguration.

In Memoriam: University Professor Emerita Ursula Franklin

lanthierj — Sun, 24 Jul 2016 18:49:44 +0000

In Memoriam: University Professor Emerita Ursula Franklin

lanthierj Sun, 07/24/2016 - 14:49

Cutline

(Mark Neil Balson photo)

Romi Levine

Jennifer Lanthier

Author legacy

Romi Levine and Jennifer Lanthier

Topic

Global Lens

Read a U of T News interview with Ursula Franklin

Listen to a CBC interview with Franklin

Read her interview with The Atlantic

Franklin pioneered the field of archaeometry, applying modern materials science to the dating of archaeological artefacts. In 1984, Franklin became the first woman to receive the title of University Professor, the highest academic rank at U of T. She delivered the Massey Lectures in 1989 and holds more than 40 honorary doctorates. In recognition of her humanitarian work, Franklin received the United Nations Association’s Pearson Peace Medal in 2002.

She was also a resident and senior fellow at Massey College. Hugh Segal, the Master of Massey College, described her as “one of Canada's and the world's most important interdisciplinary scholars. With a background in the sciences, engineering and physics, a strong scholarly engagement and achievement in philosophy and remarkable lifelong advocacy for peace, humanism, and the human priorities for technology, Dr Franklin's work will live on for centuries to come. Her presence at Massey, and her mentoring of Junior Fellows, was always of huge importance.”

In honour of Franklin, the �ؿ�ζSM flag will be flown at half-mast across the three campuses on Tuesday, as well as at Massey College. There is no public funeral planned.

U of T News reporter Romi Levine spoke with Karen Suurtamm, an archivist at �ؿ�ζSM Archives & Records Management Services. Suurtamm, who assisted Ursula Franklin in archiving her records, notes that the records are available to researchers (go to http://utarms.library.utoronto.ca/dr-ursula-franklin%E2%80%99s-archival-papers-now-open-researchers for more information.

On working with Franklin

About 18 months ago we got in touch with [Franklin] to talk about acquiring the rest of her collection. In 1996, she donated a lot of her materials that she accumulated up until then. So we wanted to complete the collection.

I met with her several times and then worked with her assistant to pack up her records that were at Massey College and in her home and in a storage facility.

And then I met with her to talk about her life and what kinds of materials she had and what was important to her.

On Franklin’s legacy

She’s a remarkable woman. What I find so fascinating about her even just in reading through her materials – her correspondence and papers – she was involved in so many things. She was so accomplished as a physicist and engineer, a scientist, and then she extended that into her work into social responsibility as a scientist.

On top of that she’s a Quaker and pacifist and a feminist and an active member of Voice of Women (now the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace). So she’s doing all this stuff on top of being a mother as well.

As she’s juggling all of this, she has this amazing clarity of purpose and clarity of thought. She never really seemed frazzled, she always seemed to know what she was doing and why and what was important to focus on. That’s what really stood out to me about her and what really inspired me.

On fighting for women

A woman in engineering at that time – you can imagine – it’s not the most welcoming climate.

I think for her she has such a focus and vision that she just carried on. She always fought for women in science. You see in her correspondence she’s always trying to leverage other women and promote other women – the people she was mentoring. Once she became more well-known and everybody was contacting her to give her awards or honorary degrees or have her speak she would always try to push them toward other people she was mentoring that were up and coming to promote other women in the field. She was very outspoken about that as well – making sure there’s a real place for women.

On the scope of the collection

It’s about 150 boxes and that includes textual records – handwritten and typewritten correspondence and articles. It includes photographs, posters, artifacts - there’s about 150 tape recordings, audio cassette recordings of her talk.

That’s preserved here in the U of T archives and it’s open and available to researchers who want to access it.

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Women’s March on Washington D.C.: U of T expert on the protest

In Memoriam: University Professor Emerita Ursula Franklin

Read a U of T News interview with Ursula Franklin

Listen to a CBC interview with Franklin

Read her interview with The Atlantic

CBC Radio's Matt Galloway talks with Roberta Bondar about Franklin