Section 149-Working | Jeannette Sirois

In Development

National research-creation project, in development (2026–2028)

Section 149 is a national research-creation project that examines how queer and trans lives in Canada have been historically shaped, classified, and constrained through legal, medical, religious, and bureaucratic systems. The project takes its name from Section 149 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which until 1969 criminalized same-sex relations between men, and uses this legislative history as a point of departure rather than a conclusion.

Working through large-scale portrait drawing, archival research, and public testimony, Section 149 investigates what it means to be made administratively legible: to be named, recorded, assessed, and regulated within systems that present themselves as neutral but produce lasting material and bodily effects.

This project is currently in development. No drawings have yet been produced.

Conceptual Framework: Counter-Legibility

Section 149 operates through a framework I have developed called counter-legibility. Counter-legibility names the pressure placed on people to become readable within institutional formats that were never designed to fully recognize them. While legibility is often framed as access or inclusion, it is produced through simplification, fixed categories, and standardized language that frequently misrepresent lived experience.

For queer and trans people, this pressure is cumulative. It does not remain abstract. It settles into posture, self-presentation, visibility, and silence. Section 149 responds by treating portraiture as a counter-archival act: a slow, embodied process that resists extraction and refuses the reduction of lives to records.

Artistic Form and Method

The project will consist of five large-scale portrait drawings, each 72 × 96 inches, rendered with a combination of dust pigments and media mimicking the human body composition, wax and oil pencils and mixed media on paper and mounted to aluminum panel.

Each portrait will be structured through layered institutional language drawn from regional archival sources, including legal records, medical documentation, religious texts, and bureaucratic correspondence that will be heat seared/branded onto the paper surface. This language will be integrated directly into the drawn surface, not as illustration but as pressure, interruption, and residue.

Drawing is central to the project’s ethics. Its slowness, physicality, and vulnerability stand in direct opposition to the speed and abstraction of institutional record-keeping. Each work will require sustained time, labour, and collaboration.

Regional Structure (with reference points)

Sitters will be specific to the 5 regions explored in this project. The project is structured around five panels corresponding to distinct regions of Canada: Atlantic, Québec/Ontario, Prairie, Western, and Northern.

Each panel will be informed by historical moments, archival practices, and regional struggles for legibility- as systems of record, regulation, exclusion, and resistance.

Regional specificity will be established through:

Archival language unique to each region
Local legal, medical, or religious histories
Linguistic tone, terminology, and record formats

This structure allows the project to articulate a national voice while acknowledging regional differences in how queer lives have been regulated, recorded, or erased.

A Regional Overview of Queer History and Archival Preservation in Canada

Atlantic (Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI)

This region’s queer histories have long been obscured by local conservatism and broader national narratives.

Key Organization: In Newfoundland and Labrador, early organized activism emerged around the Community Homophile Association of Newfoundland (CHAN) in the 1970s.
Legislative Milestone: This group was instrumental in early mobilization, eventually leading to the provincial government winning human rights protections on the basis of sexual orientation in 1997 via the Human Rights Code Amendment Act.
Historical Context: These struggles show how queer presence in Atlantic Canada had to carve space within colonial, religious, and small-town record cultures that tended to erase it.

Central (Québec and Ontario)

This region contains the oldest and most extensive institutional queer archives in the country.

Québec: The Archives gaies du Québec, founded in 1983, preserves manuscripts, publications, and audio-visual materials. It reflects how community actors resisted erasure by rescuing material culture long before state institutions recognized its value.
Ontario: Home to The ArQuives, established in 1973 (originally as the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives) in Toronto.
Pivotal Moments: Ontario’s history includes the 1981 Operation Soap bathhouse raids, which served as a "Stonewall" moment for Canada, leading to the formation of the Right to Privacy Committee. In 2003, Ontario became the first province to legalize same-sex marriage following the Halpern v. Canada ruling.

Prairie (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta)

Prairie queer histories challenge the myth of invisibility in rural and agricultural hubs.

Scholarly Documentation: Valerie Korinek’s "Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985" traces resilient networks across Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, and Calgary.
The Term "Two-Spirit": A landmark moment occurred in Winnipeg in 1990 at the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference. It was here that the term "Two-Spirit" was officially proposed and adopted to replace colonial terminology, reclaiming a specific Indigenous identity.

Western (British Columbia)

B.C. history highlights a tension between urban activism and the often-overlooked rural north.

Early Activism: Activism was ignited by the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE), founded in Vancouver in 1971, which published the influential newspaper The Gay Tide. That same year, B.C. activists participated in the national "We Demand" protest on Parliament Hill.
Regional Recovery: While urban history is well-documented, the Northern BC Queer Connection Society’s Queer History Project (launched in 2024) is currently filling gaps by documenting 2SLGBTQIA+ histories in northern B.C. through community testimony and archival materials.

Northern (Territories and North)

Queer histories in the North are characterized by a resistance to colonial record-keeping.

Community Memory: Across the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, queer histories are visible in community memory and localized initiatives rather than traditional archives.
Indigenous Resilience: Queer and Two-Spirit people in Inuit and Indigenous contexts have navigated colonial and Christian systems that often erased gender and sexual diversity.
Modern Research: Researchers today foreground Indigenous gender systems and oral traditions as a vital counterpoint to colonial archival practices, reclaiming identities that predate colonial legislation.

Living Archive and Public Engagement

Section 149 includes a living archive component that gathers public testimony, written responses, and community reflections during exhibition. These contributions will not function as supplementary interpretation but as an evolving counter-record that resists closure.

The project prioritizes collaboration with community organizations, archives, and local partners to ensure ethical engagement, contextual care, and reciprocal exchange.

Relationship to At the Table

Section 149 emerges directly from my ongoing portrait series At the Table, which positions queer sitters as witnesses within decision-making spaces. While At the Table focuses on presence and testimony, Section 149 extends this inquiry into the systems that determine who is permitted to be seen, named, or believed.

Together, the projects form a sustained investigation into portraiture as a counter-archival practice.

Project Status

Section 149 is currently in the research and development phase (2026–2028).
Archival research, curatorial dialogue, and community partnerships are ongoing.
The drawings have not yet begun.