In 2004, the first same-sex couple legally married in Quebec. How did homosexuality – an act that had for centuries been defined as abominable and criminal – come to be sanctioned by law?

Judging Homosexuals finds answers in a comparative analysis of gay persecution in France and Quebec, places that share a common culture but have diverging legal traditions. In both settings, Patrice Corriveau explores how various groups – family and clergy, doctors and jurists – tried to manage people who were defined in turn as sinners, as criminals, as inverts, and as citizens to be protected by law.

By bringing to light the various discourses that have over time supported the control and persecution of individual homoerotic behaviour in France and Quebec, this book makes the case that when it came to managing sexuality, the law helped construct the crime.

Patrice Corriveau is assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa and the author of La répression juridique des homosexuels au Québec et en France.

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Kathe Roth was born in Montréal and now lives in Saint-Lazare, Québec. She has been a literary translator and editor for more than twenty-five years. Her work includes over thirty translated books and essays of literary non-fiction on various subjects, including art, architecture, economics, history, and sociology, as well as fiction. She was a finalist for the Governor General Award for literary translation in 1993 for “The Last Cod Fish” by Pol Chantraine. She is a member of the Literary Translators Association of Canada.

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Judging Homosexuals has a clear thesis and is logically organized. The translator has done an excellent job in making specialized academic discussion understandable in a second language. The book is highly readable and should prove to be of value to not only academics in a number of disciplines such as history, criminology and gender studies, but also undergraduates.

Law and Politics Book Review