Zoë Newman’s research investigates places where constructions of gender, race, and sexuality shape each other and meet up with ideas about citizenship, neoliberalism and public space.

I teach both in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and in the Department of Sociology. Current and Upcoming courses: 2020: Feminist Methodologies and Methods; Queer Methods and Sex Research; Introduction to Sexuality Studies; Female Masculinities and Queer Genders ; Gender and the City. 2020: Sociology of Urban Life.

My most recent project was called “Walk the Walk: Experiential learning and university campus field trips,” and I was thinking through how to do ‘experiential learning’ more critically, and how to use walking to address western ways of knowing that treat rationality and the body as separate. Another recent project was developing a Sociology course called “Publics and Privates,” to look at the concept of the public and private spheres in historical, political, and social terms. Before that, I worked with upper-year Sociology students to develop what we called “My Sexuality Studies Video Diaries.” I have some older and still ongoing work on the ambivalent meanings of spectacle, and on representations of the body of Rob Ford, Toronto’s former Mayor. I’ve also done research on public celebrations like Pride and Caribana/Carnival; the phenomenon of Martha Stewart as a purveyor of whiteness; lofts, identity-marketing, and gentrification; and the 1977 backlash against gay men on and around Yonge Street. My publications include a chapter called “The Spectacle of Public Sex(uality): Media and State Surveillance of Gay Men in Toronto, 1977,” in Expanding the Gaze: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance (2016), and “Bodies, Genders, Sexualities: Counting Past Two” in Power and Everyday Practices (2012). My past work as an editor includes a 2008 special issue of Resources for Feminist Research, entitled “Decolonizing Spaces.”

Office: S114 Ross Building
Phone Number: 416-736-2100 x22565