The Control of Sexual Representation – Bringing Histories of Resistance into the Future

What can the legacies of the censorship of queer and sexually explicit representation in Canadian visual and media art, and artists’ organizing against it, teach us today – and tomorrow? What lessons can we bring from art and film/media history to the current Culture Wars unfolding within new technological realities? Where once queer artists fought against provincial film review boards, Canada Customs, and overly broad federal legislation driven by moral panics, now they contend with vague online governance rules, deplatforming based on algorithms, and new legislation promising to address the harms of AI-driven content. Meanwhile, “old” forms of censorship and media-driven controversies persist. It is vital to understand this history as ongoing even if censorship looks different now – what content is targeted and how, what platforms we use to make and share art, what we collectively fear and want to suppress – than it did in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s. What tools can we bring from the past to offer nuance to contemporary debates around sexual representation and to contest overzealous state and tech-corporate control? This roundtable shares insights from artists, curators, and scholars who gathered together for a study day to discuss these topics.

An initiative of the SSHRC-funded research project Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories with the support of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and the Media and Materiality cluster, the DIGS Lab, the Media History Research Centre, and the Milieux Institute at Concordia University, as well as the Curatorial Research Cluster at the University of British Columbia.

Speakers:

Jon Davies is a curator, writer, and art historian from Montréal. He received his PhD in Art History in 2023 from Stanford University, where he wrote the dissertation “The Fountain: Art, Sex, and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995.” He edited the anthology Colin Campbell: More Voice Over (Concordia University Press, 2021) and co-curated the 2023 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, “Queer World-Mending,” with artist Steve Reinke. More recently, he was General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada (2024–25) and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in History at Carleton University (2025–27).

Adrian Deveau is a scholar and artist based in Montréal, and holds a PhD in Art History from Concordia University. Adrian has worked with arts-based organizations, including Thinking Through the Museum: Museum Queeries, the Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), Vancouver Biennale, and Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Their work has appeared in Museum Queeries: Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, and LGBTTQ* Interventions into Museums, Archives, and Curating (Jagiellonian University Press, 2026), Ampersand: An American Studies Journal, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Adrian currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Third Floor Journal and postdoctoral co-ordinator at the Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

Dr. Genevieve Flavelle is an art historian and independent curator whose work focuses on contemporary Canadian art, queer and feminist art histories, and 2SLGBTQ+ art. Her curatorial practice is grounded in queer, feminist, and decolonial approaches. She has organized exhibitions and public programs across Canada and is currently Curator-in-Residence at Western University.

Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University in Toronto, and author of Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean. A Getty Scholar (2026) and Clark Beinecke Fellow (2024), Dr. Gosine's artistic and research practices have been concerned with how anxieties about difference shape and produce power. In 2025, Nature's Wild with Andil Gosine (RETURNS) was presented at Paul Petro Contemporary Art after the abrupt and politically charged cancellation of his solo exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) in Washington, DC. To celebrate the forthcoming Portuguese translation of his book, an exhibition inspired by it will take place in Brazil in 2027. His next book is Félix & I: an intimate engagement with French colonial portraiture

Drew Hooper is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Queen’s University. His research examines the censorship of queer art in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s, focusing on the logics that underpinned acts of censorship and the ways arts communities resisted, challenged, or otherwise responded to censorship. More broadly, his research explores the intersections of art, politics, and queer visibility, with particular attention to how institutional and cultural forces shape access, representation, and discourse. In addition to his research, he has taught undergraduate courses in global modern art history, guest-lectured in various courses, and presented at conferences, including Museum Without Walls and the Universities Art Association of Canada conference.