Killjoy is an organization that organizes events specifically for black / indigenous / mixed race / people of colour who are also queer / trans / two-spirit / intersex. Killjoy has held numerous QTBIPOC dance parties and on August 8th, 2016 Killjoy organized a week long series of events called Killjoy Fest which “both celebrates difference as well as empowers the queer community to actively address the harm perpetuated by racism & colonization (Killjoy n.d.).” Events during the week invited “BIPOC”, “QTBIPOC”, and “Everyone” to attend, depending on the event in question. These appellations were a deliberate move to create QTBIPOC only spaces where members of the community could meet one another and build connections. As Marlon Bailey (2014) writes, “space is as much a social entity as it is a material one (p. 494)”. Killjoy offers a model of “for us, by us” organizing that is attentive to the value of intentionally creating QTBIPOC spaces and places.
QTBIPOC occupy identities that are multiply marginalized in what Gopinath (2005) calls “spaces of impossibility (p. 18)”. While Gopinath is talking specifically about the impossibility of nonheterosexual South Asian women, I find her term to be valuable to QTBIPOC as a whole because of the historic entanglements of queerness and whiteness as well as heteronormativity and racialization. Because of the ways in which racialized people are othered in white settler colonial states, the desire for belonging to the space of the nation state may manifest in the performance of respectability (Jafri 2013). By performing heterosexuality and binary gender rigorously the racialized other avoids further marginalization in the forms of sexual and gender deviancy. The specific creation of QTBIPOC space works to undo the impossible notion of QTBIPOC existence. We exist. Finding one another and sharing joy and crafting relationships is an act of tremendous healing.
One aspect of Killjoy’s organizing that I love is their explicit welcoming to trans/non-binary/two-spirit/third-gender people; an acknowledgement of genders that exist beyond the binary and that they are an essential part of the community Killjoy seeks to grow. With the rise of Jordan Peterson’s infamous disavowal of non-binary genders under the banner of “free speech” coinciding with the essentialist discourse of radical feminists, transphobia abounds.
Following the transphobic, anti-sex work ideologies espoused by groups within Vancouver including the Vancouver Women’s Library (Flegg 2017), Killjoy added it’s name among scores of others in a note titled “Open letter against transmisogyny and anti-sex work rhetoric in Vancouver.” They address performative inclusion, a tactic that is utilized by groups in order to avoid criticism and obscure lurking transphobia. Part of the letter reads: “We denounce hypocritical and opportunistic uses of the term inclusivity. Genuinely inclusive initiatives must demonstrate accountability and actively give power back to marginalized people. We will not be misled by fraudulent claims while transmisogyny and sex worker phobia proliferate unchecked (2017).” What Killjoy is doing runs along the vein of Bailey’s (2014) discussion of geographies of exclusion that necessitate QTBIPOC to form their own spaces of “inclusion, affirmation, and celebration (p. 494).” Creating space for non-white beyond-binary genders is a radical statement of love and care in a hostile world.
REFERENCES:
Bailey, Marlon. (2014). Engendering space: ballroom culture and the spatial practice of
possibility in Detroit. Gender, Place and Culture, 21(4): 489-507.
Flegg, Erin. (2017). New Space, Old Politics. Maisonneuve. October 10. https://maisonneuve.org/article/2017/10/10/new-space-old-politics/
Gopinath, Gayatri. (2005). Impossible desires. In Impossible desires, 1-28
Killjoy. (2016). About us. http://killjoyfest.tumblr.com/about
Open letter against transmisogyny and anti-sex work rhetoric in Vancouver. (2017). The Talon. http://thetalon.ca/open-letter-against-transmisogyny-and-anti-sex-work-rhetoric-in-vancouver/