Debating Hate Crime examines the language used by parliamentarians, senators, and committee witnesses to debate Canada’s hate laws. Drawing on discourse analysis, semiotics, and critical psychoanalysis, Allyson Lunny explores how the tropes, metaphors, and other linguistic signifiers used in these debates expose the particular concerns, trepidations, and anxieties of Canadian lawmakers and the expert witnesses called before their committees. Lunny reveals the meaning and social signification of the endorsement of, and resistance to, hate law. The result is a rich historical account of some of Canada’s most passionate public debates on victimization, rightful citizenship, social threat, and moral erosion.

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Allyson M. Lunny is an associate professor in the Law and Society program at York University. She has published in the areas of sexuality, law, and critical psychoanalysis. Her publications include “‘Look, a Faggot!’: The Scopic Economies of Cruising, Queer Bashing, and Law,” “Provocation and ‘Homosexual’ Advance: Masculinized Subjects as Threat, Masculinized Subjects Under Threat,” and “Heimlich Maneuvers: Freud’s Analytic Seduction of the Wolf Man.”