Critical Feminist Histories in Canada is a hybrid three-day conference held from 2-4 October 2026, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The goal is to bring together feminist scholars to reimagine, revitalize, and reinvent the project of “feminist history.”

Keynotes include Susan Stryker, a historian, theorist, filmmaker, and activist; and Ethel Tungohan, the Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy at York University.

I will be presenting on a panel titled Trans History and Queer History taking place from 8:30-10:00 am. My paper, “This Field is Mandatory: Genealogies of Nonbinary Marginalization in Canada,” looks at how legal, medical, and administrative systems have historically produced and enforced a gender binary, which excludes nonbinary people from institutional recognition. Nonbinary lives are frequently absent from the historical record not because we did not exist, but because dominant frameworks of documentation, preservation, and knowledge production foreclose our legibility.

You can register for the conference here and view the full program here.

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Event details

What: Pride flag raising and farmers’ market

Where: Montgomery’s Inn (4709 Dundas St W, Etobicoke, ON)

When: Wednesday, 3 June 2026 from 2-6 pm

Cost: Free

Who: Everyone is welcome!

Throughout the event, I’ll be tabling for The ArQuives and displaying historical buttons from activist groups, as well as matchbooks from queer bars across Canada. I’ll also have ArQuives merch available for purchase, including Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada, tote bags, stickers, postcards, and carabiners.

Come celebrate Pride with the Etobicoke community, learn more about Canada’s 2SLGBTQIA+ history, and connect with your neighbours!

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The conference brings together 2SLGBTQ+ community members, researchers, nonprofit organizations, heritage professionals, academics, historians, publishers, and emerging scholars who share an interest in documenting, preserving, and celebrating diverse and intersectional 2SLGBTQ+ histories in Canada.

I will be presenting a paper titled “Fragmentary Remains: Archival Ambiguity and Making History” on Saturday, 15 May.

This paper examines the role of ephemera, including photographs, zines, correspondence, marginalia, community newsletters, and other fragmentary records, as critical evidence in the recovery of queer and trans histories. It explores how historians and community researchers attempt to recover past lives, relations, and networks when identities cannot be confirmed or named concretely.

Using analytical categories such as queer sociality and trans possibility, the paper demonstrates how fragmentary materials reveal relational histories, including shared spaces, affective ties, and informal networks, while resisting definitive claims about individual figures.

Finally, the paper attends to the contexts in which queer and trans histories are presented, noting that academic and community engagements make different demands on certainty, naming, and narrative form. Ethical historical practice, I argue, lies in remaining accountable to how recovery work circulates, what it enables, and what risks it carries for the communities whose lives it seeks to make visible.

For the full schedule of events and hybrid registration info, see arquives.ca/fmv2026/.

The post See me at the From Marginalization to Visibility conference first appeared on Nico Mara-McKay.

My review of Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe‘s excellent graphic memoir, has recently been published in Literary Hub as part of a review project that aims to redress omissions in the New York Times‘ books coverage.

The Times has long been notorious for its hostile coverage of trans people. Over the last decade especially, its coverage has frequently dehumanized us. As Assigned Media has reported, “On at least five prior occasions dating to 2022 medical groups, experts, advocacy organizations, and parents themselves have taken the extraordinary step of issuing public statements saying that The Times had distorted their positions.”

The problem became so pronounced that in 2023, more than 180 of the paper’s contributors signed an open letter condemning what GLADD characterized as its “irresponsible, biased coverage of trans people,” joined by more than 100 organizations, and more than 10,0000 subscribers. Yet, the newspaper refused to engage meaningfully with the serious concerns raised.

There are real consequences to misinformation and disinformation about trans healthcare and calls to limit or rollback human rights for trans people. In June 2025, The Objective reported that New York Times stories were cited 29 times in amicus briefs supporting a ban on healthcare for trans youth in Tennessee alone. The ban was upheld and, shamefully, the Times ran six separate stories celebrating the outcome, ignoring trauma these trans kids will now be forced to endure. This is just one example among many, but it illustrates how inaccurate reporting is harmful and has been fuellling anti-trans legislation that affects people’s real lives.

This anti-trans bias was also visible in the books section during the tenure of Pamela Paul, who served as children’s editor from 2011 to 2016 and then as editor of the entire review section from 2016 to 2022. During those years, coverage of books by trans authors was sparse, despite the publication of a number of landmark works, Gender Queer among them, and few — if any — regular contributors were themselves trans.

At the same time, Paul hired anti-trans opinion writer Jesse Singal to write a glowing review of an anti-trans book, and the section published a piece defending anti-trans campaigner J.K. Rowling. Following Paul’s depature as reviews editor, she continues to publish anti-trans screeds at the Times.

In response, Sandy Ernest Allen, working with Maris Kreizman, invited trans writers to review books that had been overlooked during Paul’s tenure. These essays were published by Literary Hub as part of a project titled “What Was Lost: A Queer Accounting of the NY Times Book Review, 2013-2022.” The collection gathers 13 reviews of literary fiction, memoir, history, and other nonfiction works that should have received critical attention in the US paper of record, but did not.

My contribution revisits Kobabe’s graphic memoir in a review essay titled “On the Power of Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, One of the Most Banned Books of Its Era.” (Note: The title isn’t mine. It strikes me as funny to write about an “era” for a book published fewer than seven years ago, but such is the nature of headline writing in our current moment, I suppose.)

While doing researching on the book, I discovered that although Gender Queer has been mentioned in the New York Times at least 27 times, it has never actually been engaged with critically. Instead, it appears in articles and podcasts about censorship where it is framed as “controversial.”

But trans existence is not controversial; it is an inevitable part of human diversity, and it deserves thoughtful engagement — not dismissal or avoidance to placate bigots who find our existence distasteful.

If you would like to read my full review, you can find it at Literary Hub.

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Empty Inside: An Autistic Zine, Vol. 1: Interoceptive Hyposensitivity is a personal zine exploring what it’s like to be autistic in small, everyday moments.

Volume 1 focuses on interoceptive hyposensitivity, which is a sensory processing difference where a person has reduced or muted awareness of their body’s internal signals. Many autistic people experience this, and it can make everyday needs like hunger, thirst, or muscle tension difficult to notice until they become urgent and overwhelming.

If you’ve ever wondered why some needs sneak up on you out of nowhere, or if you’re curious about sensory processing and everyday autistic experiences, this zine offers insight and strategies for managing those challenges with compassion.

This 20-page zine features 19 original photos and is the first in what I hope will become an ongoing series exploring autistic differences and their everyday realities — the things you won’t find in the DSM-5.

Future volumes will explore alexithymia, monotropism, dissociation, aphantasia, prosopagnosia, and more. (Though perhaps not in that exact order.)

Available for purchase on Patreon (CA $10) or Itch.io (US $10); both versions include a print-ready file and a digital edition designed for comfortable on-screen reading.

Note: Paid Patreon subscribers receive a discount on all purchases: 20% for Supporters and 50% for Patrons.

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You ever find yourself reading a novel about a bisexual vampire on Hallowe’en and then somehow it’s 2 am, and you’ve finished it, but you still can’t stop thinking about it? Yeah.

This isn’t a formal review but more of a reflective essay — and there will be spoilers. So, if that’s a concern, this is probably a good point to stop reading.

I buy books faster than I can read them, and this one’s been sitting on my TBR pile probably since it came out in 2024 — certainly long enough that the back cover is now sun-faded. I must have once known Thirst was split into two parts with two protagonists, but I’d forgotten by the time I finally started reading it. 

The switch between narratives felt a little jarring at first, but it’s what kept me reading into the early hours of the morning. Ultimately, the dual structure worked well, as the two perspectives complemented and echoed one another, deepening the story’s emotional resonance.

The first half follows an unnamed vampire arriving on the shores of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. We glimpse her backstory in fragments: sold by her mother when she was only a child to the vampire who would become her master; the brutal destruction of her vampire sister-wives and her narrow escape; centuries spent wandering Europe, learning to survive on her own until another disaster drives her across the ocean.

She arrives in Buenos Aires amidst a plague, and the deaths she causes go largely unnoticed as carts regularly trundle through the city collecting the dead. She takes lovers, hunts at turns quietly or theatrically. Sex and violence are recurring, often intertwined themes. Her mother’s betrayal remains a sore spot, leaving her angry, hollow, and profoundly alone.

Her desires are immediate, all-consuming, and at the forefront of everything she experiences, but the particulars are fuzzy. She has no name, no nation; time and place are only loosely sketched. Names, for her, belong to others (lovers, a groundskeeper, children), but a name is not something she claims for herself. 

Our protagonist learns to adapt and hide among the humans, but her attempts at discretion are self-delusion. She doesn’t understand or care what drives them. To her, humans are diversions, amusements, irritants, food — but scarcely sentient. Her only concerns are for her own survival and the brief, transgressive thrill of feeding from someone attractive. She’s truly a monstrous creature, and it’s gorgeous to behold.

The vampire tropes are sumptuous: sensual blood-drinking, ritual murder, disturbing sex scenes, velvet-lined crypts, luxurious coffins, the absence of a reflection and its implications for her general hygiene. It’s rich, dark, atmospheric, and dripping with Gothic decadence. The jacket copy compares Thirst to Frankenstein, but it feels closer to old horror cinema: Dracula and his brides, crypts of velvet and stone, beautiful yet filthy. When her crimes grow too visible, she retreats to a cemetery and befriends a groundskeeper in a rare moment of connection and restraint. As she comes to rely on him and moves towards building a genuine connection, she chooses to entomb herself and seal away her endless hunger.

The novel’s second half follows a young, divorced mother in present-day Buenos Aires who tends to her dying mother and energetic child, all while trying to hold the rest of her life together. We get a glimpse of her and her son in the prologue, but it’s not until the second half of that her story truly emerges. Where the vampire’s life is largely untethered from time, the modern woman’s is tightly bound to it. Her days are marked by visits with her mother, childcare, errands, and the quiet suffocation of obligation. 

Her name, Alma, appears only once, and she doesn’t seem to think of herself that way, so I won’t either. It feels truer to how Yuszczuk’s protagonists reveal themselves: one so self-centred that claiming a name would be meaningless and the other so absobred in caring for others that her own identity nearly disappears.

In contrast to the vampire’s hazy centuries, these scenes are dated and successive: a chronology that builds towards an inevitable breaking point. She is responsible to and for others, and their needs always come before her own. Her fridge is empty, her body and mind exhausted; she cannot recognize the weight of the grief she carries until she is forced to take a leave of absence from work.

The novel’s two halves run parallel: the vampire’s narcissistic alienation mirrors the human woman’s self-erasure. One consumes to fill her hunger; the other is consumed by her obligation. Both are shaped by need, by desires that can never be fulfilled. 

The modern protagonist inherits a legacy that brings her closer to the vampire, and their stories finally intersect. When life feels hopeless, when grief is so overwhelming that it becomes invisible, the sudden emergence of something immortal and powerful feels less like a threat and more like a release. It’s no wonder she’s drawn to it.

Already standing at the edge of desperation, she steps closer, chasing dead secrets long buried. Of course she releases an ancient evil. Of course she’s attracted to it. After all, death is another kind of surrender — a loosening of bonds and obligations. Her mother has been dying for years; she’s watched the slow decay of body and mind. In letting go of her familial obligations, she binds herself instead to an ancient and insatiable hunger. Even so, how could she not feel a kind of relief in the vampire’s easy intimacy with death?

I know something of that living grief. My mother died recently after years of illness. Hers was kidney failure from complications with diabetes; the protagonist’s mother’s disease is unnamed but it’s presented as degenerative and terminal. For me, the grief was made more difficult because I was not able to be with my mother or care for her in her last years. 

Am I reading more into this than Yuszczuk intended? Maybe. But that’s what good literature does: it unsettles us and teaches us to think in new ways. It shows us things we’ve tried to hide and exhumes what we thought we’d laid to rest.

Marina Yuszczuk is an Argentinian novelist and poet, and the author of thirteen books. Thirst (La sed) is her second novel and first book to appear in English translation. Given the strength of this novel and its favourable reception, I hope we’ll see more translations from her back catalogue as well as future works.

Purchase from your local indepdent bookstore, or:

Note: This review contains affiliate links, which help me survive under capitalism, cost you nothing, and did not influence this review.

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Running from 15-17 October 2025, Together for Change is an annual gathering that brings 2SLGBTQIA+ leaders and sector partners together from across Canada for three days of movement building, community care, and collective action.

Our workshop, “Strengthening and Activating Your Communities Through Collaborative Programming,” will share how we design and deliver engaging workshops and events that highlight 2SLGBTQIA+ community histories. Through a hands-on demonstration, participants will explore how community-driven programming fosters storytelling, strengthens relationships between nonprofits and their communities, and creates space for celebrating queer and trans histories.

Workshop participants will also have the opportunity to create their own zines and take home a workshop toolkit zine. This toolkit provides an inclusive, adaptable resource to support attendees in planning and implementing programming that uplifts community stories and can be tailored to the unique needs of the communities they serve.

Join us on Wednesday, 15 October 2025 1:30-3:30 pm!

This will be my first time attending Together for Change, and I’m very much looking forward to it!

The post Upcoming workshop at Together for Change 2025 first appeared on Nico Mara-McKay.

In 2023, I was hired by The ArQuives to coordinate a large capacity-building project, and part of that work involved community consultations across the country, as well hosting online consultations, and meeting one-on-one with folks from coast to coast to coast.

During the in-person sessions in February and March 2025, participants created zine pages representing their communities in Ottawa, Montréal, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Whitehorse, Yellowknife, Fredericton, Halifax, and St. John’s. These pages were later assembled into community zines for each city and are now available in this digital exhibition in both English and French.

These zines present a vibrant portrait of queer and trans life across Canada today, reflecting both local creativity and a shared commitment to preserving and celebrating these stories.

The zines are freely available for download in two formats: a print-ready booklet you can print and fold into a physical zine, and a digital layout designed for easy reading on screen.

I hope you enjoy them!

Covers and pages from a few of the zines

The post New digital exhibition at The ArQuives first appeared on Nico Mara-McKay.

On 20 and 27 August I appeared on two episodes, “Trans History 1: How and Why We Name Trans People in History” and “Trans History 2: Examples of Trans People in History.” I had the chance to talk about how trans histories are conceived of and approached within the discipline of history, share some of my own research, and explore the excellent work happening in the growing field of Medieval Trans Studies.

It was a lot of fun! (Though I wish I had a better microphone, and I’m sure I sounded very autistic, but it is what it is.)

I’ve done guest appearances before, but this one came with my first IMDB credit, which is kind of nifty. (Alas, editing apparently requires a paid account.)

Huge thanks again to Tilly and Susan for inviting me on and giving me the chance to share one of my special interests with their listeners!

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The ArQuives is the largest independent queer archive in the world and collects materials on a national level. It’s such an important repository of Canadian history, and I was honoured to be hired. 

In this post, I share a bit more about what went into the research, as well as the results of that work.

A brief note on the pillar text itself: it’s actually incorrect. It looks like an error was introduced somewhere in the editing process, which I was not consulted on. When it was founded in 1973, it was actually established as the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives, and renamed Canadian Gay Archives two years later. However, at the time the pillar text was being written, The ArQuives was newly renamed from the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives to The ArQuives, which may have been a source of confusion for the editor.

I only had a few words and characters to sum up the history of a (then nearly, now actually) 50 year old organization, which was quite a challenge. I’m glad that most of the text was kept, especially the explicit mention of trans and two spirit folks.

It’s funny to me that these few words simultaneously represent the most public thing I’ve ever published and also the most anonymous.

As a part of the work for Heritage Toronto, I also drafted a 1,000-word history of the organization, a version of which I will share below. I’m not sure what happened to that history. It’s probably in a government folder somewhere. The original was appropriately footnoted, but Patreon doesn’t allow for footnotes; instead, a bibliography follows. Anyone interested can contact me for specific references.

When I wrote this, I had just finished interning at The ArQuives as a part of a credit course during my last year of undergrad at the University of Toronto, and was looking for work before I would begin my master’s in the fall. A lot of the background knowledge and research came from my time working there on the Genderqueer in Canada digital exhibition. (More on that in a future post, maybe?) Additional sources were recommended by the executive director of the organization, as well as through searching through what was available through my institutional access at the University of Toronto. Of course, as always, there were nifty things I didn’t have the space to include in such a brief account, but that’s always the case.

Archives have a history of their own, and The ArQuives’ history has always been a political one. I hope you enjoy this brief introduction to what it is, what it does, and whose interests it aims to serve.

The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives: A History

History

Situated in the heart of Toronto’s LGBTQ2+ Church and Wellesley Village, The ArQuives is located at 34 Isabella Street, just east of Yonge Street. Its current location, the Jared Sessions House, was purchased for one dollar by the organization from the Children’s Aid Society in the winter of 2006. The house was built between 1859-1860, and required renovations to suit the needs of the archive, in keeping with the requirements set by the Heritage Preservation Services, as this is a heritage property. In 2009, The ArQuives moved in.

The ArQuives emerged out of the student activism and the materials gathered by the collective behind Canada’s first queer magazine. Founded in 1971 by Jearld Moldenhauer, The Body Politic was the most widely circulated queer news magazine in Canada. By 1973 the magazine was run by a collective. Moldenhauer and Ron Dayman, another member, recognized the value of the material they had acquired, including that which was not being used for publication. That fall Dayman announced the creation of the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives, which was intended to be national in scope. Donations were solicited through advertisements in the magazine, as well as by contacting lesbian and gay organizations across Canada. In 1975, it was renamed to the Canadian Gay Archives (CGA), and was under the care of Edward Jackson. After fighting for recognition as an archive and as a nonprofit. The CGA was incorporated in 1980, and established a board of directors, though the day-to-day affairs continued to be managed by the Archives Collective. In 1993, the board of directors elected to change the name to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA) in order to be more inclusive, and in 1995 the website was launched. In a further commitment towards inclusion, in March 2019, the CLGA became The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives.

Steven Maynard cited the founding of this archive as the “beginning of a self-conscious gay history movement in Canada.” That this archive remained independent was and continues to be important, though that was not always guaranteed. In 1975, the Archives of Ontario offered to acquire some of the holdings from the Canadian Gay Archives, and that offer was rejected. Marcel Barriault called this “a politically empowering act,” as it kept the control of this material in the hands of the community that it represented and served. This included and continues to include materials that other archives might not preserve.

To read the full post, “A pillar of queer history in Toronto,” please subscribe to Ephemeral Record.

Pullquotes

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