The Toronto Women's Bathhouse Raid: Querying Queer Identities in the Courtroom

In 1998 the Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee (TWBC) organized the “Pussy Palace”, Canada's first women's bathhouse event. Held semi‐annually at a gay male bathhouse in downtown Toronto, this newly emergent and potentially transgressive form of identity politics and spatial organizing caught the eye of the policing arm of the state; charges were laid and a public trial ensued. Through an analysis of the court decision and mainstream and alternative press coverage of the Pussy Palace, in this paper we explore the unstable and highly transitory operation of “queer” sexual citizenship within the confines of both the homonormativity of the gay and lesbian community and the regulatory regimes of the nation state. We argue that the policing and judicial institutions of the state seek to neutralize the potential transgressiveness of queer identities by absorbing them into hegemonic nationalist and citizenship discourses.     

AVIATION NOISE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: THE BARRIO BARRIER*

ABSTRACT Aviation noise is a harmful pollutant, which has yet to be studied in the environmental justice literature. This paper uses Tobit and logit multivariate regression analyses to analyze noise pollution exposure from a major commercial‐service airport. It addresses the issue of whether people moved to the aviation noise‐impacted areas or the noise encroached on the people, and controls for economic and political costs as well as the possibility of racial and ethnic prejudice. The results indicate that ethnicity is the primary cause of the disproportionate burden of aviation noise pollution borne by Hispanics in the area analyzed.     

Nationalism,Ethnicity and Religion: Fundamental Conflicts and the Politics of Identity in Tanzania

Abstract. This article explores the competing relations between ethnic, religious and racial identities in contemporary Tanzania at a time of rapid socioeconomic change and in the face of the declining authority and legitimacy of the state. During nearly four decades of one-party rule the state has pursued policies - educational, linguistic, developmental, etc. - aimed at constructing a secular national identity capable of uniting diverse social groups under the banner of African socialism. However, economic retrenchment in the 1980s and political liberalisation in the 1990s has contributed directly to a series of upheavals leading many Tanzanians to redefine the structures of common difference and to a fracturing of national identity. This article seeks to understand the reasons for the upsurge of conflict and cultural fragmentation in the 1990s.