Sethna, Christabelle | Canada

Christabelle Sethna is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Women's Studies and the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa. She has published widely on sex education, contraception and abortion history. She has completed three major studies on the relationship of medico-moral panic caused by venereal disease on the sex education of Ontario children in the first half of the twentieth century; the impact of the birth control pill on single Canadian women university students between 1960 and 1980; and on the travel Canadian women undertake to access abortion services, past and present. With Steve Hewitt at the University of Birmingham, she is now conducting a research project on Canadian state surveillance on second wave feminist groups during the 1960s and 1970s. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) has funded her research.

Project at IAS-STS: Technologies of surveillance: National security, feminist activism and the RCMP, 1960-1980

In a post 9-11 world, Canadian state surveillance of known or suspected terrorists has raised justifiable concern over the loss of civil liberties in a democratic society. Alarms have rung regarding the targeting of racialized immigrants, citizens and travelers, the globalization of surveillance networks, and the expansion of everyday technologies of surveillance. However, surveillance conducted in the name of national security is not a recent phenomenon in Canada. This project spotlights the mid-1960s-1980s, a period synchronous with the Cold War and with the emergence of Canadian second-wave feminism. During this period, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) complied files on feminist individuals, groups and events undertaken in the name of national security. These files constitute an archive of technologies of surveillance that can be used to study the profoundly gendered nature of state surveillance. This project represents my contribution to a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded study I am undertaking with my co-author Dr. Steve Hewitt, University of Birmingham, UK.

Selected Publications

Hewitt, S. and Sethna, C. (In Press). "Sex Spying: The RCMP and Women's Liberation Groups." In L. Campbell, D. Clément, and G. S. Kealey (Eds.).  Debating Dissent: Canada and the 1960s.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sethna, C. and Doull, M. (2012). “Accidental Tourists: Canadian Women, Abortion Tourism and Travel.” Women’s Studies: An interdisciplinary journal 41, 4: 457-475.

Sethna, C.  (2011). “All Aboard? Canadian Women’s Abortion Tourism, 1960-1980." In C. Krasnick Warsh (Ed.) Gender, Health and Popular Culture (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press), pp. 89-108.

Sethna, C. (2010). "Animal Sex: Purity education and the naturalization of the abstinence agenda." Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning 10, 3: 267-279.

Sethna, C. and Hewitt, S. (2009). "Clandestine Operations: The VWC, the Abortion Caravan and the RCMP." Canadian Historical Review 90, 3: 463-496.