Ambreen Dandiwall (Surrey Women’s Centre); Oreofeoluwa Adeyonu; Megan Bobetsis; Ranjani Jagannath; Spencer Lee; and Yasmin Vejs Simsek (all SFU MA students in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies).
In September 2021 NEVR, on behalf of the Surrey Women’s Centre, commissioned 5 masters students in Professor Jen Marchbank’s class GSWS 824 Gender, Violence and Resistance at Simon Fraser University.
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
Helen Hok-Sze Leung (2017) Our city of colours: queer/Asian publics in transpacific Vancouver, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 18:4, 482-497, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2017.1387091
In 2014, the Vancouver School Board hosted a series of public consultations on proposed revisions to its policy on “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identities,” a move that paved the way for future initiatives around SOGI in subsequent years. The highly visible presence of parents from Chinese-speaking communities during these consultations presented a conundrum for LGBTQ activists and advocates. The parents spoke vehemently against the policy updates and demanded recognition as an ethnic minority defending their cultural right. How to address homophobia and transphobia in migrant communities without inviting racist stereotyping? How to defend one minority’s assertion of rights against that of another? In this piece, I offer a new approach for engaging these questions. I first analyse the rights-seeking discourse used by both the parents and LGBTQ activists. I then trace the influence of Christian theology on Asian migrant communities in Vancouver and uncover rich veins of Queer Asian cultural activism in the city’s LGBTQ history. I conclude by exploring a surprisingly commensurable language of love from these seemingly irreconcilable communities that may provide a starting point for mutual engagement. In our current climate of heightened polarisation, I hope the article will facilitate reconciliation rather than remonstrance and inspire conversation rather than conflict.
Tiffany Muller Myrdahl
Plan Canada, Spring 2021
I was honoured to be invited by editors Amina Yasin and Daniella Fergusson to contribute to a special issue of Plan Canada, the publication for the Canadian Institute of Planners. The issue focuses on social and racial equity in planning and aims to help practitioners interrogate the norms and systemic inequities that are embedded in the work that planners do. My article, "We've painted a rainbow crosswalk. Now what?", invites readers to consider the role of sexuality in municipal planning and the many ways planners can approach inclusion efforts.
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