ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 11 No. 6 (June 2001) pp. 327-331.

LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS IN CANADA: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND EQUALITY-SEEKING, 1971-1995 by Miriam Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Cloth $50. ISBN: 0-8020-4391-7. Paper $17.95. ISBN: 0-8020-8197-5.

Reviewed by Jon Goldberg-Hiller, University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

The North American career of rights politics veers off in queer directions when it comes to lesbian and gay demands. Infused with an early appreciation for the rights gains of the civil rights movement, many lesbian and gay organizations in the United States and Canada eventually learned to distrust rights politics, exploring other forms of mobilization and a politics of "direct access" (Bower 1994). Nonetheless, a series of dramatic rights victories in the 1980s and 1990s in both countries concerning relationship recognition and antidiscrimination protection have forced a rethinking of mainstream rights strategies while they have made the issue of
"gay rights" the sine qua non of the excesses against which conservatives have fought the civil rights revolution. What has led progressive gay and lesbian social movements to alternatively embrace and reject rights strategies in Canada is an important and interesting question for students of legal mobilization that Miriam Smith takes up in her book.

Smith's longitudinal and comparative study of Canadian lesbian and gay political strategies is designed to understand the importance of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which progressively came into force in 1982 and 1985) for rights mobilization. Her study compares political and legal strategies of numerous provincial and national lesbian and gay advocacy groups before and after the Charter, as well as across Canada in order to highlight the unique influence of anti-Charter Quebecois nationalism on rights politics in that province. From this broad framework, she is able to study the interaction of three key variables borrowed from American "resource mobilization" theory of social movements: the political opportunity structure in which collective action is rewarded or discouraged; the mobilizing structure which includes the organizations and networks of activists; and the cultural frames in which the meaning of action and the identities of participants modulate political action. This methodological choice creates an admittedly state-centric analysis. Smith's interest in the period 1971-
1995 is designed to clarify the important role that the state has played in rights mobilization while avoiding analysis of the "decentering of the state [that] may be the path of the future" (p. 11). I'll return to this unexplored pathway in the course of this review.

The value of Smith's approach is tangible in numerous respects. Threading a line between the "thick analysis" of David Rayside (1998), and the theoretically sophisticated work of Didi Herman (1994) and Carl Stychin (1995; 1998: Ch. 4), Smith has explored the general tugs and pulls that have shaped legal mobilization by lesbian and gay groups in Canada. Of particular note is her discussion of the ways that rights mobilization differed before and after the

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Charter. For many groups caught up in an ideology of gay liberation in the 1970s, litigation and rights-claiming were integrated into multidimensional forms of collective action. In part, this was because of material reasons; the resources necessary for litigation could not be easily borne by individual litigants. Because Canada has not provided core funding for gay and lesbian identity groups-as it has for official language minorities, women's and indigenous groups among others-gay and lesbian organizations drew membership from a diverse activist community. Additionally, because gay liberation embraced the political ethic of "coming out," rights claims, regardless of their persuasiveness to courts and state actors, advanced personal and organizational agendas firming subaltern identities. As a cultural frame, "gay liberation was aimed as much at lesbians and gay men themselves as it was at the wider society or the state" (p. 143). Rights advanced grassroots mobilization, symbolically aided in the creation of a minoritarian identity able to assert a place in Canada's liberal environment, and helped create a movement. Successful despite few substantive legal victories in the courts (a paradox animating some of the best studies of legal mobilization, such as Michael McCann's, 1994),
many gay liberation groups dissolved in the early 1980s at the same time that the state was opening itself to the claims of civil rights groups.

As Smith explores, the contrast between a more receptive political opportunity structure signaled by the Charter and a weakened mobilizing structure significantly altered the meaning of legal mobilization. Where once legal mobilization advanced movement goals, litigation initiated under the "equality rights" provision (Section 15) of the Charter was conducted by more demographically limited organizations with low degrees of national identification that restricted its political utility. As one
consequence of limited organizations, the cultural frame of "rights talk" dominated concepts of rights.

"Rights talk assumes that the technical standards of constitutional law, enforced by courts, can resolve political problems and conflicts. Rights protections under the law and the constitution are the key goal, both because the law is an indicator of dominant and approved social values and because legal changes are enforceable and meaningful ways to assert rights claims.. Political actors are engaged in rights talk when they assume that victories before the courts and changes in law still ensure rights protection" (p. 75).

Smith's appreciation for rights talk seems particularly restrained. To the extent that rights talk orients political action towards the state, it limits the horizon of political action. Nonetheless, Smith does not adhere to the Critical Legal Studies critique of rights. Clearly, rights mobilization under the pre-Charter sway of gay liberation did not result in conservative political outcomes; to the contrary, it was inspirational, in her account, for many radical understandings and strategies. Without
adequate political mobilization, however, rights talk encourages a tactical approach to politics to Smith's apparent lament.

One example of the political narrowing associated with rights talk is an uncritical notion of "family" that emerged in litigation over the recognition of same-sex

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relationships. Gay liberation was critical of family, seeing it as the institutional site of much patriarchal and heterosexist discourse and in need of reforms that could be modeled on lesbian and gay relationships. Litigating under the Charter, however, organizations such as Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere (EGALE), an
Ottawa-based primarily middle class and gay male organization, advanced the claim that homosexuals were similar to heterosexuals and on this basis deserved equal legal recognition of their relationships. Ultimately, the family lost its position of critique and with it, the demographic bias of EGALE failed to excite broader elements of the national community. As Smith shows, political action in Canada under the rubric of rights talk has been enunciated from small and fractured organizations and has provided no basis on which to envision a broader Canadian movement.

The tension between rights talk and nationalism is made explicit in Smith's accounting for gay and lesbian politics in Quebec. While the Charter encouraged an increase in rights talk for the rest of Canada, Quebecois nationalism suppressed this discourse as it displaced the Charter from the relevant center of politics. Fewer rights claims emerged in Quebec after 1985, according to Smith, and those that did focused more on the issue of homophobic violence than on relationship recognition.

Smith's claim for Quebecois exceptionalism raises important questions about rights talk, specifically, and her reliance on resource mobilization variables more generally. The notion of cultural frame deployed here is treated as a fairly discrete quantum; in the Quebec example, it maintains separation between the categories of nationalism and rights-based constitutionalism. What preserves this separation is not explored, and recent rights scholarship not wedded to state-centric analyses such as Smith's gives us some reasons for skepticism. This is not to claim that Smith's take is unresponsive to rights debates. Indeed, she has given rich contextual reasons based in her analysis of mobilization structures to doubt both the Communitarian critique of rights (Glendon 1991) in which rights are positioned as corrosive to community development, and the fact that purveyors of rights talk are duped into what Scheingold (1974) has called the apolitical "myth of rights." Nonetheless, the meanings that rights and rights mobilization may hold are not interrogated for its mechanisms of sense creation. What seems particularly absent from this analysis are the ways in which rights talk may subtly shift modes of governance (Cooper 1998), redraw social understandings of space (Darian-Smith 1999; Patton 1995), and reinflect nationalism.

In a powerful and relevant example of this newer rights scholarship, Stychin (1998) has argued that Quebecois nationalism offers a sexualized and colonial notion of deviancy in contrast to the rest of Canada that reinforces rights politics rather than opposes it. Vis-a-vis the rest of Canada, Quebec's mirrors the complicated Canadian relationship to the United States, and provides an opportunity for reasserting a slight, male, superiority to Quebec's relative femininity. This has implications for lesbians and gays in Quebec, according to Stychin. Legal mobilization that advances "family" still exists within Quebec, but it calls upon community in a more
intimate and more national manner than comparisons with the heterosexual family might reveal. Rights talk, from this perspective, engages

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numerous broad and secondary mechanisms of belonging with subtle and very complex consequences that resist a simple binary between rights frames and national forms of identity.

If global understandings that interpenetrate state boundaries are always already present in these Canadian cultural frames, then so are contemporary spatial alternatives advanced by right wing politics. Certainly, the explosive popularity of the Canadian Alliance and its religious-right, anti-gay leader, Stockwell Day, suggests that something significant is underfoot. Smith pays attention to right wing opposition to gay and lesbian assertions of pluralism in the 1970s and 1980s,
including the opposition voiced against the Charter. Yet, opposition to civil rights and to the Charter by conservative forces drops off Smith's radar screen in
the 1990s. This is a significant limitation. Patton (1997) and Herman (1997) have shown that one dynamic of contemporary North American right wing anti-
rights politics is to transform the spaces in which individual and civil rights gain their meaning. For Patton, the opposition to flexible pluralist spaces in which social identities can be recognized is waged with a totalizing notion of space, akin to nationalism, that uses a zero-sum framework to delegitimize gay and lesbian rights politics. In this regard, she argues, right wing ideas of space borrow heavily from rights-skeptical Queer politics, setting up complex and reflexive relationships. Losing sight of the right leaves Smith, at times, with an overly-mechanical model of rights mobilization.

Attention to these kinds of cultural dynamics separates critical from mainstream mobilization studies today. By ignoring the potential of this important scholarship, Smith's book leaves us unprepared to link her rich findings to "the path of the future" that is bracketed out of her study. That said, there are ample reasons to reward this book with a close and scholarly read. Smith has captured many influences of the Charter, and North American rights scholars have much to learn from this work.

REFERENCES:

Bower, Lisa. 1994. "Queer Acts and the Politics of 'Direct Access': Rethinking Law, Culture, and Community." LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW 28:1009.

Cooper, Davina. 1998. GOVERNING OUT OF ORDER: SPACE, LAW, AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING. London ; New York: Rivers Oram Press.

Darian-Smith, Eve. 1999. BRIDGING DIVIDES : THE CHANNEL TUNNEL AND ENGLISH LEGAL IDENTITY IN THE NEW EUROPE. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Glendon, Mary Ann. 1991. RIGHTS TALK: THE IMPOVERISHMENT OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE. New York: Free Press.

Herman, Didi. 1994. RIGHTS OF PASSAGE. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

------. 1997. THE ANTIGAY AGENDA: ORTHODOX VISION AND THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McCann, Michael. 1994. RIGHTS AT WORK: PAY EQUITY REFORM AND THE POLITICS OF LEGAL MOBILIZATION. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Patton, Cindy. 1995. "Refiguring Social Space." In SOCIAL POSTMODERNISM: BEYOND IDENTITY POLITICS, ed. L. Nicholson and S. Seidman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

------. 1997. "Queer Space/God's Space: Counting Down to the Apocalypse." RETHINKING MARXISM 9 (2):1-23.

Rayside, David. 1998. ON THE FRINGE : GAYS AND LESBIANS IN POLITICS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Scheingold, Stuart. 1974. THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Stychin, Carl. 1995. LAW'S DESIRE: SEXUALITY AND THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE. London: Routledge.

Stychin, Carl. 1998. A NATION BY RIGHTS : NATIONAL CULTURES, SEXUAL IDENTITY POLITICS, AND THE DISCOURSE OF RIGHTS, QUEER POLITICS, QUEER THEORIES. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Copyright 2001 by the author, Jon Goldberg-Hiller.