QPIRG McGill Resource Centre

Thanks to Madeline Spence for all the fantastic photos! Check out our Facebook page here.

Upcoming Workshop

Are you interested in learning how to repair old books? How about learning how to create new books out of recycled materials? Our library committee is organizing a one day intensive workshop with some of  Montreal’s most fabulous book reconstruction artists! If you are interested in participating in a workshop of this kind and you will be in Montreal between February 18,2012 –February 25,2012,send us an email (qpirgmcgill_library@riseup.net) so we can book a space for you.

Attention all current QPIRG McGill Library patrons!

We are now assigning membership numbers to all library users. If you have been a member for years,  you must update your membership information. Upon doing so,  you will obtain a membership number which you can then use to check out materials. For more information,  click on the Membership tab.

New Books!

Normal Life:Administrative Violence,Critical Trans Politics,and the Limits of the Law by Dean Spade. From the back cover:

Much of the legal advocacy for trans and gender nonconforming people in the US has reflected the civil rights and “equality”strategies of mainstream gay and lesbian organizations –agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee equal access,nondiscrimination,and equal protection under the law. This assumes that the state and its legal,policing,and social services apparatus –even its policies and documents of belonging and non-belonging –are neutral and benevolent. While we all have to comply with the gender binaries set forth by regulatory bodies of law and administration,many trans people,especially the most marginalized,are even more at risk for poverty,violence,and premature death by virtue of those same “neutral”structure.

Dean Spade’s book raises revelatory critiques of current strategies pivoting solely on a legal framework,but also points to examples of an organized grassroots trans movement that is demanding essential legal reforms  while making more comprehensive interventions into dangerous systems of repression –and the administrative violence that ultimately determines our life chances.

Against Equality:Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars,edited by Ryan Conrad with introduction by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. From the back cover:

Against Equality:Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars provides hitherto unavailable set of critiques on a subject that has rarely been approached with as much candor and nuance. Defying the prescriptive logic of “gay is good”that permeates mainstream gay politics,it seeks to interrogate the place of the military in the queer imagining of the world and simultaneously challenges the mainstream left to question its signing on to the damaging militarism of contemporary gay politics.

Check out a recent interview with the book’s editor here.

Decolonizing Anarchism by Maia Ramnath.  From the back cover:

Decolonizing Anarchism examines the history of South Asian struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism,  highlighting lesser-known dissidents as well as iconic figures.  What emerges is an alternative narrative of decolonization,  in which liberation is not defined by the achievement of a nation-state.  Author Maia Ramnath suggests that the anarchist vision of an alternate society closely echoes the concept of total decolonization on the political,economic,social,cultural,and psychological planes.  Decolonizing Anarchism facilitates more than a reinterpretation of the history of anticolonialism;  it also supplies insights into the meaning of anarchism itself.

You can listen to an interview with Maia Ramnath produced by CKUT by clicking here.