The Canadian Committee on the History
of Sexuality, a subcommittee of the
Canadian Historical Association, is
pleased to offer its Prize
for Best Article on the History of
Sexuality in Canada. The CCHS
prize is designed to recognize excellence
in and encourage the growth of scholarly
work in the burgeoning field of the
history of sexuality in Canada. The
winning article will be one that makes
an original contribution to the study
of the sexual past from any period
in the history of what is now called
Canada.
2008
Prize
Marie-Aimee
Cliche (UQAM), “Du
peche au traumatisme: L’inceste,
vu de la Cour des jeunes delinquants
et de la Cour bien-etre social de
Montreal, 1912-1965”
Canadian Historical Review
87 (June 2006) and Tamara
Myers (UBC), “Embodying
Delinquency: Boys’ Bodies, Sexuality,
and Juvenile Justice History in Early-Twentieth-Century
Quebec” Journal of
the History of Sexuality 14 (October
2005).
Cliche and Myers make particularly
fitting co-winners, for they both
focus on the same place and time,
employing some of the same sources
– early- to mid-twentieth-century
Montreal court records – to
give us two distinctive takes on the
history of sexuality. Drawing on feminism
and the work of Ian Hacking, Cliche
provides a sensitively negotiated
overview of the changing understandings
of incestuous relations, underscoring
how sexual meanings are subject to
historical pressures and can shift
dramatically over an even relatively
short period of time. Myers deploys
sexuality to complicate in useful
ways much current thinking on the
history of gender and ‘juvenile
delinquency,’ demonstrating
that for some boys, like for many
girls, the definition of delinquency
could be sexual, even if that sexualization
played out in highly gendered ways.
Cliche and Myers both have made original
and substantial contributions to the
history of sexuality in Canada, furnishing
studies at once empirically rich and
historiographically engaged.
The next prize will be awarded at
the 2010 annual meeting of the Canadian
Historical Association. For the 2010
competition, articles published in
2008 or 2009, written in English or
French, are eligible.
