Description
In the 1960s, a youthful and ambitious lesbian movement began taking shape in Canada. After decades of being pathologized, disparaged, or erased from public view, lesbians were ready to make a scene – both by calling attention to themselves and by creating places to come together and forge their own culture. Making a Scene tells this story, revisiting the spaces lesbians created across rural and urban Canada, from physical locations, such as bars, bookstores, and members’ clubs, to ephemeral sites, such as conferences, festivals, and protest marches. Enriched with interviews, this volume captures the exuberance and challenges of this transformational period.
Contributor Notes
Liz Millward is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba. Her work on lesbian place-making has been published in Gender, Place and Culture, Feminist Media Studies, Women’s History Review, and Australian Feminist Studies. Her book Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922-1937 won the Canadian Women’s Studies Association Annual Book Prize in 2010.
Editorial Review
This well-researched study of twenty formative years of lesbian community-building in Canada covers a lot of ground … Millward has captured the flavor of an era by combining data from previous studies with eyewitness accounts and black-and-white photos from private collections. She proposes a symbiotic relationship between self-defined lesbians and their “scene” or social milieu: a lesbian identity requires a social context, and vice versa.
— The Gay and Lesbian Review
