Public Book Discussion
SFU Harbour Centre, 515 W. Hastings, Vancouver The Department of Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies, the Institute for Performance Studies, and the Department of History at Simon Fraser University would like to welcome Dr. Liz Millward to discuss her new book, "Making A Scene: Lesbians and Community Across Canada, 1964-1984" (UBC, 2015)
Tuesday, September 6th, 2016. 7-9pm
SFU Harbour Centre, Room 1415
FREE and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and refreshments will be provided.
Dr. Millward is assistant professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba and is a leading scholar on place-making and sexuality. Her work has been published in Gender, Place, and Culture, Women’s History Review, Feminist Media Studies, and Australian Feminist Studies. Her book Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922-1937 (Montreal: MicGill-Queens’s University Press, 2008) won the Canadian Women’s Studies Association Annual Book Prize in 2010.
About "Making A Scene":
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Canadian lesbians started “coming out” en masse to find each other and build community. After decades of having their sexuality pathologized, disparaged, or erased from public view, these women were ready to “make a scene,” both by bringing attention to themselves in order to challenge prevailing stereotypes and by creating physical spaces, and to create opportunities for lesbians to get together.
Making a Scene documents the lesbian movement that developed in Canada between 1964 and 1984. It chronicles the spaces lesbians created across rural and urban Canada, from physical locations, such as lesbian and gay centres, drop-ins at women's centres, communal houses, bookstores, bars, cafés, and private members' clubs, to the ephemeral sites women travelled to in order to meet each other, such as conferences, workshops, festivals, and Dykes in the Streets marches.
Enriched by interviews and a wealth of primary sources, including diaries, letters, newsletters, reports, and minutes, Making a Scene brings to life the exuberance of these young women and the challenges they faced during this transformational period in Canadian history. It consolidates existing work, introduces new research and insights, and will inspire future studies of lesbian geographies.
Vancouver lesbian histories are featured prominently in "Making A Scene." To learn more about lesbian organizing across Canada, and in B.C. specifically, you don't want to miss this talk.