[van-announce] Book Launch: The Canadian War on Queers- Sun Aug 28th, Little Sisters, 2:00 pm

[caelie]

Vancouver Book Talk and Signing: The Canadian War on Queers: National
Security as Sexual Regulation

With authors Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile

Join us on Sunday, August 28th, at 2 pm at Little Sister's Book & Art
Emporium (1238 Davie St) for a book talk and signing for The Canadian War
on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation. Authors Gary Kinsman
and Patrizia Gentile will present the book. They will be joined by Brian
Waite one of the organizers of the 1971 We Demand demonstration on
Parliament Hill.

Books will be available for purchase.

Selected for the 2011 Over the Rainbow Book List, The Canadian War on
Queers explores how from the 1950s to the late 1990s, agents of the state
spied on, interrogated, and harassed gays and lesbians in Canada,
employing social ideologies and other practices to construct their target
-- people who deviated from the so-called norm -- as threats to society
and enemies
of the state. The Canadian War on Queers offers a passionate, personalized
account of a national security campaign that violated people’s civil
rights and freedoms in an attempt to regulate their sexual practices. Gary
Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile disclose not only the acts of state
repression that accompanied the Canadian war on queers but also forms of
resistance that raise questions about just whose security was being
protected and about national security as an ideological practice.

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