WELCOME TO CHRIS FOX, OUR NEWEST BOARD MEMBER

Lambda Foundation is delighted to welcome L. Chris Fox to our Board of Directors. Chris holds a BA and MA in English from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in English from the University of Victoria (2010). Her primary scholarly interests are in women’s, queer, and Canadian literatures and she has published in Ariel, Atlantis, Studies in Canadian Literature, The Malahat Review, and Canadian Literature as well as in various Queer community newspapers. She was an activist in Toronto’s early feminist and gay movements, serving as a counsellor and speaker for the Community Homophile Association of Toronto -- she took to the streets often, including bussing to Ottawa for Canada’s first gay rally. As a Metropolitan Toronto Central Library worker, she became involved in the labour movement and negotiated Canada’s first non-discrimination clause to include gays and lesbians. After relocating to Vancouver, she worked in the Engineering Dept. of the City of Vancouver where she continued the struggle by participating in Diversity Committees and in various union activities until seduced by Academia. She currently lives in Victoria and is the principal editor of Fox Edits, an editing service specializing in academic writing. Chris is married to Canadian author, Arleen Paré, first winner of Lambda Foundation’s Candis Graham award (UVIC).

THANKS SO MUCH! OTTAWA U AND OTHER SCHOLARSHIPS.

Our volunteer board of directors thanks the very generous people who have already donated to our current fund-raising drive and urges the rest of our friends and supporters to please do the same. This is your chance to support LGBTI scholarship that develops the best knowledge about our lives and issues ...in the classroom and beyond. Professors rely on their own research and that of others when they impart knowledge to their students, the media and the public. There is a lot of information out there yet to be discovered, as well as misinformation that needs to be corrected. Our smart and courageous scholarship winners do that important work.

Good news! We have raised enough money so far to make sure that the $500 LAMBDA FOUNDATION prize at the University of Ottawa can be awarded every academic year from 2013-2014 on, without interruption. This is the way it works: the university carefully invests the endowment for us and the money it earns annually becomes the award, with any amount over $500 reinvested in the principle. In previous years, the endowment has not always generated enough money for that $500 award, but now it will, thanks to your help. We still intend to double the Ottawa U award over time to $1000 per year, in line with most of our other Lambda awards across Canada. To do that, we need to raise at least another $8,000, which would bring the Ottawa U endowment total to about  $22,000. Another of our priorities is our "where needed most" fund. Please contribute to either or both of these goals, or choose a Lambda award at another Canadian university by visiting our giving page here.

 Brandon  Carroll is especially interested in the ways in which gays and  women use fiction to write their own stories in order to serve a particular purpose - a practice known as autofiction. He has also been helping to research the archived papers of a homosexual who lived in France over 100 years ago and recorded the experiences of his own gay community.

My research in contemporary French literature examines the figure of the father in gay writing. Specifically, I have considered the notion of filiation as demonstrated in works of autofiction by the authors Hervé Guibert and Mathieu Lindon. Each author was greatly influenced by their romantic relationship with the philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault. The paternalistic nature of this relationship greatly affected each author and the relationships portrayed in their novels.

My Master’s research will continue to focus on writings by homosexual men at the beginning of the Third Republic in France (ca. 1880-1900). The literature I will investigate has not been the subject of much scholarly research and in many cases has only been republished recently by smaller publishing companies in France (Quintes-feuilles and GayKitschCamp).  

Since the summer of 2011 I have had the privilege of joining a project led by a Canadian professor and a French researcher on male homosexuality in fin de siècle France. The project examines archives left in Troyes by a  gay man named Georges Hérelle, which shed light on the microcosm of homosexuality in that era. The interest in these archives lies in that they constitute a study of homosexuality executed not by a scientist or medical professional, but a “regular” man working from the vantage point of being a member of the gay subculture.  In my conference papers I have considered the Hérelle archives within the framework of transgression and abjection. I have sought to determine if there is evidence that Hérelle saw his work as morally questionable and if I could detect an abject sentiment; that is to say, if there was a trace of self-directed homophobia.

  Andrea Routley (UVic winner 2011)  publishes a queer literary magazine called Plenitude Magazine. "Plenitude Magazine aims to promote the growth and development of LGBTQ literature through a biannual publication of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, graphic narrative and short film by both emerging and established LGBTQ writers. Plenitude aims to complicate expressions of queerness through the publication of diverse, sophisticated literary writing, graphic narrative and short film, from the very subtle to the brash and unrelenting." There is a call for submissions at http://plenitudemagazine.ca