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AbstractWho is Donna Haraway ? An historian of science specializing in hominids, theoretician of cyborg feminism, she has recently turned her attention to domestic animals. We analyze both the rhetorical and biological tropes (such as metaplasms, symbiosis) with which Haraway hybridizes the disciplines and troubles their theoretical boundaries without on that account falling under the label “postmodern”. Haraway employs a critique of conceptual dichotomies, which she partly extends, however, in her multiplication of portmanteau words (naturecultures, cyborgs, etc.). Then we analyze Haraway's conception of the subject as starting from three typical locations on the galaxy of personae : primates, cyborgs, and dogs. In each case, Haraway ingeniously multiples structures and allegiances in such a way as to elude any definite label. These changes of object and method succeed in rendering her elusive and renewing the corrosive power of her conceptual apparatus.

With the founding of Sibyllines in 1997, Brigitte Haentjens created a new space for artistic freedom, one whose rules and orientations she took it upon herself to define. The study of various media discourses – interviews and critical commentary published in the French-language print media – devoted to the shows Je ne sais plus qui je suis (1998) and Hamlet-machine (2001) highlights the main aesthetic and philosophical components of this undertaking in the early years of its existence, based on a comparison between the views of the artist and her collaborators as well as those of the journalists covering these events.

In 2002, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Louise Gosselin's Canadian Charter challenge to a Quebec welfare regulation that reduced benefits for those under-30 by two-thirds, forcing them to choose between hunger and homelessness. This article examines the legacy of Gosselin v. Canada for the rights and constitutional inclusion of people living in poverty. The article first considers the important jurisprudential step forward in the case : the Supreme Court's rejection of the argument, at odds with the expectations of disadvantaged groups and with Canada's international socio-economic rights obligations, that section 7 cannot impose positive obligations on governments. The article then considers the Court's two steps back in the Gosselin case : the majority's approach to the evidence and its treatment of Louise Gosselin's substantive argument. The article argues that Charter claimants in poverty cases continue to face prejudicial stereotypes and disproportionate evidentiary burdens. Their section 7 claims are also consistently reframed by the courts and then dismissed as nonjusticiable. The article concludes that the Supreme Court's failure to revisit Gosselin, or even to grant leave to appeal in any poverty case since then, represents a serious failure of constitutionalism in Canada.

It may at first glance appear that the radicalism of some New York Democrats regarding the social and economic consequences associated with the development of commercial capitalism found no echoes in the Lower Canadian press. However, such a sensibility can be found in the discourse of Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan, Louis-Joseph Papineau's principal lieutenant in the 1830s. While he was a tireless promoter of patriote positions in the 1830s, O'Callaghan demonstrated a marked independence of spirit, and his most notable deviation from the party line came over the issue of banks and their relationship to the working and agricultural classes of Lower Canada. Indeed, on this question, he adopted a position which was significantly more radical than that of his colleagues from La Minerve, condemning all banks, including the Banque du peuple, for their manipulation of paper money. His position sparked sharp criticisms from other members of the patriote leadership and created a division which this Irish patriote would long remember. In this sense, O'Callaghan resembles radical democratic journalists such as William Legget, who led a crusade against the banks in the interests of the working classes of New York and Philadelphia.

The representations of Louis-Joseph Papineau in anglophone political discourse of the 1820s and 1830s were constructed using a political vocabulary and political rhetorics which helped structure the local public sphere, but were also shaped by multiple discursive traditions present in the British, American, as well as British North American contexts. From 1827 to 1832, texts dealing with Papineau focused mainly on his ability to act as Speaker of the Lower Canadian Assembly and on his role as leader of what his political enemies termed the « Papineau faction ». Reform newspapers refuted such charges and countered them with a representation of Papineau which portrayed him as the defender of the people in the broadest sense. Attacks on the Patriote leader intensified between 1832 and 1834, and critics increasingly insisted on his demagogic tendencies. After 1834, many articles devoted to Papineau portrayed him as French revolutionary, as a Jacobin, and sometimes as Robespierre himself, which underlines the continued relevance of anti-Jacobin discourse in Lower Canada. In all of these cases, the representations of Papineau relied on prototypes well established in the discursive universe of the period, which writers brandished in order to call up historical images and references familiar to their readers.

Keywords: Papineau, Louis-Joseph, Discours politique, Anti-jacobinisme, Tory, Bas-Canada, Constitution, Presse anglophone, Papineau, Louis-Joseph, Political Discourse, Anti-Jacobinism, Tory, Lower Canada, Constitution, English Language Press