Molly Wood’s Bush: Settler Colonialism, Queer Activism, and Commemoration in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the relationship between queer activism and settler colonialism in Toronto from the 1970s to the 2000s through the commemoration of Alexander Wood, a nineteenth-century magistrate. Over the course of these three decades, Wood was reclaimed as a historical gay man by a variety of queer activists who sought to incorporate lessons from the past into their work. After briefly introducing the early liberationist interpretations of Wood, this article investigates the process through which Toronto’s gay village, Church-Wellesley Village, became legible as “Molly Wood’s Bush,” a piece of land Wood purchased in the 1820s with roughly the same geographic boundaries. Emerging homonationalist forms of queer activism that placed queer life within the bounds of national belonging provoked a reinterpretation of Wood, making him into a gay pioneer and culminating in the creation of a statue to mark the Village as queer territory. By examining a series of rewritings of Wood’s history as well as their reception in Toronto, this article argues that the role of commemoration in creating maps of belonging that facilitate integration into the settler colonial order must be included in understandings of queer activism in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".