Graduate Student Kyler Chittick to speak at MacEwan University as part of the Queer Horizons speaker series
19 September 2025
Prairie Obscenities: Feminism, Moral Conservatism, and Queer Suppression in Canadian Law
Tuesday, October 14, 2025, 5:00 p.m.MacEwan University - Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity
11110 104 Ave NW, Edmonton
Kyler Chittick situates the evolution of Canadian obscenity law within the regional context of sex-related moral panic in early 1980s Alberta. While Towne Cinema Theatres, Ltd. v. The Queen (1985) and R. v. Butler (1992) are often treated as discrete milestones in obscenity jurisprudence, he argues that both emerged from a provincial climate marked by moral conservatism, rights-based legal challenges, and intensified anxieties about sexuality. Drawing on the controversies surrounding screenings of Dracula Sucks (1978) and Caligula (1979), he shows how federal-provincial tensions over censorship converged with broader struggles among civil libertarians, religious conservatives, and feminists. Alberta’s distinctive legal and political climate—exemplified by the Pisces bathhouse raid (1981) and local feminist efforts paralleling U.S. anti-pornography ordinances—has been overlooked in accounts of obscenity law. By recovering this context, he demonstrates how Towne Cinema informed LEAF’s intervention in R. v. Butler and how a “feminist” legal framework, initially mobilized against straight pornography, came to reinforce conservative sexual morality and target queer sexual expression. Ultimately, the article traces how the queerness of Dracula Sucks—its ambiguity, excess, and resistance to fixed identity—was already subject to institutional and industry scrutiny, prefiguring Butler’s contradictions and the enduring anti-queer legacy of Canadian obscenity law.