Last week, I re-read one of the books I loved when I was a teenager: The Scarlet Letter (click on the title to read it online for free). This blogpost explores how this 1850 novel illustrates that love can actively resist patriarchal and neoliberal structures.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland discusses modernizing NAFTA at public forum at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa on Monday, Aug. 14, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

This morning, I was chatting with a friend about how we feel that most policies fail: because they do not consider the uniqueness of women’s and girls’ issues and needs. My friend recently spent some time in Canada, and told me about Canadian politics, in particular about their foreign policy. I am not a political scientist (and have no ambitions in that direction either), but much of what I learned about Canada this morning seems to resonate with the feminist framework that I use for the Cyborg Mermaid. I decided to write a blog about these connections, to generate some discussion and perhaps inspire soms real political scientists.