November 2017 – Page 3 – Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous and People of Colour Vancouver

QTBIPOC Youth Road Map and QTBIPOC Youth Gathering

The QTBIPOC Youth Gathering came out of a collaboration between the Urban Native Youth Association (UNYA) and QMUNITY, alongside other organizations. It was a day-long gathering that occurred on 30 January 2017. The gathering invited over 50 queer, trans and two-spirit youth of colour from across British Columbia to share information about resources, as well as discuss what is lacking in their communities to facilitate change while centering the voices of those for whom changes are to be made. Together with the facilitators (also QTBIPOC youth), they put together a QTBIPOC Road Map to be shared with each of the youths’ communities. The event also notably included workshops for adults and non-QTBIPOC people, while funding was made available for youth who live outside of Vancouver to participate in the meeting (Takeuchi, 2016).

The plan to create a youth gathering grew out of conversations that began in 2016 between UNYA, the Vancouver School Board and youth support workers around creating safer spaces for queer, trans, two-spirit, people of colour youth. Aimee Beauchamp of Squamish Nation, a school support counsellor notes that upon beginning her work with UNYA, she received many requests to run programs for two-spirit and queer indigenous youth. After connecting and consulting with various organizations, they decided that the best way to understand needs of the youth was to have them partake in discussion (Takeuchi, 2016). Ayesh Ismail-Kanani, one of QMUNITY’s youth workers co-facilitated a brainstorming session, while Tiaré Jung followed along with conversations and drew live images of the ideas that were being presented to produce an infographic. By documenting and facilitating discussion rather than leading it, QTBIPOC voices are centered, as opposed to a reliance on assumptions about how youth navigate institutions (Ismail-Kanani, 2017).

Image description: A map titled “QTBIPOC Youth Road Map,” outlining needs in various institutions including “learning and school,” “health care,” “work,” “social activities and recreation,” “public space,” “home” and “trusted people.” Under each category, needs are listed with some marked with a red circle to note level of priority.

The QTBIPOC Road Map maps out important sites in the everyday lives of youth and their needs within those spaces. Needs are marked with red dots to denote a higher level of priority; some examples of this include gender neutral washrooms, quiet public spaces to decompress, healthcare professionals always learning, staff training in schools, inclusive learning that acknowledges queerness and transness and people of colour histories, accessible queer recreational spaces and affordable housing. The emphasis on different spaces and the significance of various relationships that QTBIPOC youth have with different institutions importantly points to the need to move away from the production of cis-white-centered queer spaces (e.g. Davie Street) by moving away from idealizations of the metropolis, as such work reveals the operation of interconnected systems of oppression across cities, suburbs and rural communities. This is exemplified by its mention of the need for accessible and meaningful community consultation of public space alongside issues around affordable housing, including spaces for more marginalized youth. This connects QTBIPOC to issues around settler colonialism, including gentrification and neoliberalism’s centering of the ‘free individual.’

The discussion between QTBIPOC ultimately disidentifies with identitarian politics, recognizing its strategic uses in terms of queer, trans and two-spirit, people of colour advocating for their needs, while also emphasizing the desire to be seen as ‘whole,’ and, thus, beyond mainstream queer politics’ tendency to devalue or erase race and class from discussions around sexuality and gender. The presentation of the lived realities of QTBIPOC and their navigation of societal constraints in the everyday moves away from the homonormative white middle class subject, centering identitarian ideas about queerness, sexuality and gender that is supported by a post-racial and multiculturalist understanding of the lower mainland (Bacchetta et al, 2015, p. 771; Manalansan, 2005, p. 147). The articulation of discussion about the everyday lived lives of QTBIPOC youth through a road map reveals the “inadequacy of conventional narratives where self and community progressively unfold,” as the desire for transformation is shaped by the need to navigate institutions to survive, highlighting important work being done within institutions (Manalansan, 2005, p. 147). While this is not necessarily ‘transformative’ or radical, the livability of queer and trans lives of colour and two-spirit lives becomes a site of contestation that centers the desires, affect and, thus, futurity of QTBIPOC and two-spirit youth.

The success of the road map has yet to have been reported, but it has been made available as a resource on QMUNITY, UNYA and other web pages, as well as reportedly being made accessible to the communities of the youth who participated in the gathering. The bringing together of QTBIPOC from beyond the ‘Vancouver’ area provides a more nuanced notion of queerness that is not limited to the bounds of the metropolis that brings into the realm of possibility alternative spaces.

References:

Jung, T. (2017, January 30). QTBIPOC road map [Illustration / Online image]. Retrieved from http://qmunity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/QTBIPOC-Youth-Road-Map.png

Ismail-Kanani, A. (2017, February 28). Hearing from the youth: QTBIPOC youth gathering. QMUNITY. Retrieved from https://qmunity.ca/news/qtbipoc-youth-gathering/

Manalansan, M. (2005). Migrancy, modernity, mobility. In Eithne Luibheid and Lionel Cantu (eds.), Queer migrations, 146-160.

Bacchetta, P., El-Tayeb, F., & Haritaworn, J. (2015). Queer of colour formations and translocal spaces in Europe. Environment and Planning D, 33(5), 769-778.

Takeuchi, C. (2016, December 12). Urban native youth association to hold gathering about safe spaces for queer youth. Georgia Straight. Retrieved from https://www.straight.com/blogra/844226/urban-native-youth-association-hold-gathering-about-safe-spaces-queer-youth

Black Lives Matter Vancouver and Toronto

Black Lives Matter Vancouver:

Cicely-Belle Blain co-founder of BLM Vancouver states that when Black Lives Matter is written about in mainstream and independent media, the point is usually completely missed (The Built Environment, 2016). This is because “‘mainstream media’ usually just means white media — as in, media written BY white people, FOR white people (The Built Environment, 2016). Rather than try to make ‘mainstream’ sound neutral, call it the ‘whitestream media. For instance, one of the mainstream media columns was are informed by a racist climate of white supremacy that requires black communities and black activism to be constructed as dangerous and disruptive (The Built Environment, 2016). Another depicted the organization as disruptive by questioning if, it was only Black lives that mattered. It further states that “Black Lives Matter” is a phrase that almost always fuels controversy and a wide range of heated reactions (The Built Environment, 2016). This is a reminder that the media is controlled by whiteness and therefore like its audience, it expresses white fragility. As a result, although racism is central the Black lives, this is not considered a factor, since everything is viewed through colour-blind racism (The Built Environment, 2016).

Blain opposes the co-optation of black experiences by white media-makers/writers and shares the specific strategies that they and the BLMV team have used in resistance (The Built Environment, 2016). This involves delving into historical research, to sharing Instagram memes, to building visible community presence through photography/video, to learning from the institutional experiences of academics of colour at the University of British Columbia (The Built Environment, 2016).

In addition, the movement deconstructs documentaries, like “Do Not Resist”, winner of best documentary of the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival (The Built Environment, 2016). This film is a depiction of the militarization of the local police departments since 9/11 (The Built Environment, 2016). As it relates to Vancouver, this medium signify the policing, suppression and dismantling of Black voices like those of Hogan’s Alley. Similarly it is an illustration of the many in which law enforcement police and control Aboriginal bodies, particularly in marginalized zones such as the Downtown Eastside. As well as the surveillance of brown bodies who occupy the space of the stranger, threat, and by extension (The Built Environment, 2016) the monstrous, Muslim terrorist (Puar & Rai, 2002).

Black Lives Matter Toronto:

Janaya Khan, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter Toronto states that the Canadian police, media, and society at large are inundated with anti-black racism. In addition, the movement is perceived by the media as a social, systemic, structural power because it challenges the homonormativity of the white queer community and mainstream Canada (Maclean’s, 2016). Both the Vancouver and Toronto chapters of Black Lives Matter opposed police presence in Pride parades with regards to racialized police brutality, but white Queer people benefit from police presence and inclusion in Pride parades because it assists in achieving homonormativity (Agathangelou et al., 2008). The “good” white Queer citizen can gain institutional acceptance by distancing themselves from and erasing Queer people of colour, posing as citizens on the same side of privileged white heterosexual people, emphasising the benefits of their whiteness and denouncing the detriments of their Queerness (Agathangelou et al., 2008). Because Queer activism is mobilized through homonormativity, Pride parades are restricted in what type of activism, and what type of Queer people, can be used in demonstrations. Thus, “freedom depends on the (re)founding of unfreedoms” (Agathangelou et al., 2008, 131). While Pride parades are designed to challenge heteronormativity, in practice, they actually normalise homonormativity, which then leads to homonationalism (Puar, 2007, in Greensmith & Giwa, 2013).

Extending upon homonationalistic discourse, many Queer activisms have a goal of obtaining social rights and acceptances through assimilation into current social structures, which leaves behind more vulnerable group members, such as Queer people of colour (Cohen, 1997). Similarly, immigrated citizens are forced to assume a lifestyle that benefits the market and values of economy (Ferguson, 2003). Who is deserving of inclusion and acceptance is dependent on the enhanced or subdued ability of citizens to assimilate in and adapt to cultural norms, which Aihwa Ong (1999) called “variegated citizenship” (in Chávez, 2010, p. 138). Therefore, both Queer people and migrant people challenge and threaten “family values” and the familial status quo, and they are often cited as the source of a multitude of social problems, such as the marriage crisis (Chávez, 2010).

Furthermore, when queerness becomes inherently radical and taken up my white discourses of oppression, queer people are imagined as white, and Black/other people of colour are imagined as homophobic and backwards due to their race/religion, banishing queer people of colour from mainstream queer activism (Bacchetta, El-Tayeb & Haritaworn, 2015; Haritaworn, Tauqir, & Erdem, 2008). Additionally, these imaginations can perpetuate the “dual process of incorporation and quarantining” (Puar & Rai, 2002), which also erases people of colour from Queer activism. Rather than focusing on the binary of heterosexual/Queer, Queer activism should pay attention to the varying identities within the Queer community, regarding race, class, and gender (Cohen, 1997). Consequently, the Pride parade as a form of queer activism serves to promote the social visibility of Queer people through occupying space, and a person’s representation in a Pride parade relies on “commercialism and commodification of identities,” (Enguix, 2009, p. 24). Sonia E. Alvarez (1997) writes about the “NGOinization” of social movements (including Pride), which describes how these movements rely on corporate funding for mobilization (in Agathangelou et al., 2008). In this way, social movements backed by socially marginalized groups are forced to coincide with global capitalist relations to eliminate their own social marginalization. Pride parades emphasise consumption and, as a result, racialized Queer people and Queer people of low socioeconomic status are underrepresented (for example, because they cannot afford elaborate costumes, cannot take time off from work to participate, or because they cannot/refuse to support capitalism; Greensmith & Giwa, 2013). With regards to the BLM movement being viewed as social, systematic, structural power, this is due to the fact there is the perception that it bullied Pride and it hijacked the parade. This is unfortunate because the entity consists of a group of marginalized individuals whose mandate is to defend disenfranchised groups against the police and racism. Additionally the use of languages such as “bullies” and “hijackers” regarding the organisation, by multiple mainstream media is problematic and dangerous. This is bearing in mind that Blacks already live in cultural and institutional racism. Additionally, whites who opposes the authorities are not associated with such languages. Therefore the media is displaying anti-black practices (The Globe and Mail, 2016).

In another aspect, blackness as deviating from normality relates to the grand discourse of anti-Black racism through representation within media as spoken about by Khan of Black Lives Matter. Khan documents the fact that between 2005 and 2015 the federal black inmate population grew by 69% (Maclean’s, 2016). This is the fastest growth rate of any group including Aboriginals. What is more startling is that the Black populations makes up 2.9% of the population yet there is a 10% inmate representation in the federal prison (Maclean’s, 2016). Some these “inmates” are immigrants who arrive in Canada to visit their family member but they do not fit nation-state’s definition of a moral and good citizen. And therefore begs the question who is allowed to enter the border of the state and who belongs. As a result they are detained in jail awaiting a decision by the courts. It is for this reason that the organization speaks for Blacks and Aboriginal because their issues are intrinsically linked (Maclean’s, 2016). For example, on April 2016 First Nations communities “occupied the offices of Canada’s Indigenous Affairs Department to demand action over suicides as well as water and housing crises in their communities” (Democracy Now, 2016). These series of protests took place days after “the Cree community of Attawapiskat declared a state of emergency over attempted suicides” (Democracy Now, 2016). These protests were not constrained to one region in Canada, but were “set-up occupations inside and outside the offices of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada in Toronto, Regina, Winnipeg and Gatineau, Quebec” (Democracy Now, 2016). Black Lives Matter activists stood in solidarity with Indigenous protectors, after just weeks earlier launching their “15-day encampment outside police headquarters following news there would be no criminal charges for the police officer who fatally shot a South Sudanese refugee named Andrew Loku” that last July (Democracy Now, 2016). First Nations activists also showed up in solidarity, standing alongside BLM and their allies, in the same place Indigenous activists show up each year to protest the state and police complicity within the devastating issues surrounding the systematic ignoring of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (Democracy Now, 2016). To comprehend the relevance of Indigeneity and Indigenous resistant and sovereignty within the BLM movement, there must be an understanding that BLM organizes with the comprehension that they do so on stolen and often unceded Native lands. In addition, the police brutality and state sanctioned violence which targets Black/ Muslim and non-Muslim bodies, stems from the same institutions which developed policing as a way to guard the colonial state (Democracy Now, 2016). This form of colonial-stemmed policing ensured that Indigenous folks did not leave the locales of reserves and that the settlers would be so-called “protected” from the savage Others (Democracy Now, 2016). The struggle of deportation, Islamophobia, badge accompanied gun violence which hovers over Black trans, queer and cis bodies is parallel to the state sanctioned horrors faced by Indigenous folks who are attacked by swat police when protecting their waters/ lands from pipelines and corporations, and the passing off of murdered and missing loved ones. Black and Indigenous struggles therefore are intrinsically interlocked, making this relationship the core of the BLM’s politics of resistance and struggle on stolen lands.

Work Cited:

Agathangelou, A. M., Bassichis, M. D., & Spira, T. L. (2008). Intimate investments: Homonormativity, global lockdown, and the seductions of empire. Radical History Review, 100, 120-43.

Alvarez, S. E. (1997). Latin American feminisms ‘go global’: Trends of the 1990s and challenges for the new millennium. Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements. S. E. Alvarez, E. Dagnino, & A. Escobar (Eds.). Boulder: Westview.

Bacchetta, P., El-Tayeb, F. & Haritaworn, J. (2015). Queer of colour formations and translocal spaces in Europe. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(5), 769-78.

Chávez, K. R. (2010). Border (in)securities: Normative and differential belonging in LGBTQ and immigrant rights discourse. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 7(2), 136-155.

Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of Queer politics? Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 3, 437-65.

Democracy Now.(n.d.). Occupied Canada: Indigenous & Black Lives Matter Activists Unite to Protest Violence & Neglect. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/20/occupied_canada_indigenous_black_lives_matter

Enguix, B. (2009). Identities, sexualities, and commemorations: Pride parades, public space and sexual dissidence. Anthropological Notebooks, 15(2), 15-33.

Ferguson, R. A. (2003). Introduction: Queer of colour critique, historical materialism, and canonical sociology. In Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Colour Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Greensmith, C. & Giwa, S. (2013). Challenging settler colonialism in contemporary Queer politics: Settler homonationalism, Pride Toronto, and Two-Spirit subjectivities. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 37(2), 129-48.

Haritaworn, J., Tauqir, T., & Erdem, E. (2008). Gay imperialism: Gender and sexuality discourse in the ‘war on terror’. In Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/racialiality. A. Kuntsman & E. Miyake (Eds.). York: Raw Nerves Books.

Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer times. I. Grewal, C. Kaplan, & R. Wiegman (Eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Puar, J. K. & Rai, A. (2002). Monster, terrorist, fag: The war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots. Social Text, 72(20), 117-48.

Schwartz, Z. (2017, July 06). How Black Lives Matter co-founder Janaya Khan sees Canada. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/how-black-lives-matter-co-founder-janaya-khan-sees-canada/

The Built Environment. (n.d.). TALKING BACK: How whitestream media f*cks up when talking about Black Lives Matter. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://www.mediacoop.ca/audio/talking-back-how-whitestream-media-fcks-when-talki/36096

Examining Heteronormative Power Relationships in Chinatown’s Former Bachelor Societies

The origins of Vancouver’s Chinatown are rooted in racist legislation like the Chinese Immigration Act (Apology for Historical Wrongs, n.d.). Enacted in 1923 and repealed 1947 (only 70 years ago), it discriminated against Chinese people by restricting their entry into Canada through policies such as a $50.00 head tax, which in 1923 was equivalent to $708.70 CAD today (Apology for Historical Wrongs, n.d.). Other discriminatory laws included an 1876 Provincial Act in British Columbia that denied Chinese males voting rights (Apology for Historical Wrongs, n.d.).

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu documents the effects of similar exclusionary immigration laws in 19^th century America in “Asian American History and Racialized Compulsory Deviance”, stating that they created gender imbalances manifesting in the lack of nuclear families, and the creation of bachelor societies (Wu, 2003). Wu uses the term “compulsory sexual deviance” to describe a groups’ failure to obtain heteronormative ideals as a result of state legislation (Wu, 2003). This compulsory sexual deviance, along with large anti-Chinese sentiment from non-Chinese groups, kept Chinese immigrants confined in their own communities, as they were localized sources of support and familiarity – these communities would become known as “Chinatowns”.

Laws like the Chinese Immigration Act also reinforced compulsory sexual deviance by heavily restricting the immigration of Chinese wives and children (Chinese Immigration Act, 1923, 2017), which in addition to anti-miscegenation laws, resulted in the systemic isolation of male Chinese-Canadian immigrants in Canada and the creation of bachelor societies (Wu, 2003). These bachelor societies can still be located in historical buildings in Downtown Vancouver, one being the May Wah Hotel on East Pender Street (Historic Study of the Society Buildings in Chinatown, 2005). The May Wah Hotel offered living space for renters, all of whom were Chinese, as well as social areas such as gambling halls, and temporary accommodations that could be used for engaging with sex workers (Historic Study of the Society Buildings in Chinatown, 2005). The forced all-male make up of early Chinatown resulting in bachelor societies like the one documented at the May Wah Hotel is an example of homosociality, a term coined by Eve Sedgewick to describe the social bonds between people of the same sex (Hammarén and Johansson, 2014).

The power dynamics of the laws that forced the creation of homosocial, and possibly heterosexual racialized bachelor societies can be analyzed using Cathy Cohen’s discussion of “straight queers” in “Punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens: the radical potential of queer politics?”, where she describes them as heterosexuals who find themselves on the outside of heteronormativity (2005), which many of these Chinese immigrants did as result from compulsory sexual deviance.

By understanding “queer” as “non-normative” and reflecting on the non-(hetero)normative lifestyles led by many of the residents of the May Wah Hotel – including the bachelor societies, the difficulty in obtaining heteronormative ideals like monogamy and nuclear families due to racist legislation, and engagement with sex workers (Historic Study of the Society Buildings in Chinatown, 2005) – one is able to see how different components of identity, such as race, intersect to make it so not all heterosexual people benefit from heteronormativity (although it’s crucial to acknowledge that non-heterosexual people are unable to access the straight privilege heterosexual people have). It’s also important to note that it wasn’t these peoples’ ethnicities that caused them to have fewer rights than other Canadian citizens, but the Canadian government’s explicit targeting of their racialized bodies, notably after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, which exploited many of those same bodies for labour. The effects of compulsory sexual deviance are still felt by later generations – this is demonstrated when Wu mentions Nayan Shah’s concept of “queer domesticity” which describes early 20^th century dynamics of Chinese families in San Francisco who perpetuated the same heteronormative familial depictions many were cut off from before, in order to better assimilate into western settler communities (Wu, 2003). This need to present an image that made it easier to fit in with dominant power structures further marginalized non-heteronormative Asian-American identities and lifestyles, including bachelor societies and prostitution (Wu, 2003). Examining “queer” as not only being exclusive to the LGBT community through such specific sites like the May Wah Hotel helps us locate other marginalized positions where Cohen says that radical potential is found, and hopefully allow us to utilize that potential with multiple intersections in mind (Cohen, 2005).

Citations:

Apology For Historical Wrongs Against Chinese British Columbians.(n.d.). Retrieved from https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/british-columbians-our-governments/our-history/historic-places/documents/heritage/chinese-legacy/written-submissions/lee_howe.pdf

HISTORIC STUDY OF THE SOCIETY BUILDINGS IN CHINATOWN. (2005). Retrieved from http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/historic-study-of-the-society-buildings-in-chinatown.pdf

Chinese Immigration Act, 1923. (2017). Retrieved from www.pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/chinese-immigration-act-1923.

Hammarén, N. & Johansson, T. (2014).Homosociality. SAGE Open 4(1), doi:10.1177/2158244013518057.

Barman, J. (2013). BEYOND CHINATOWN: Chinese Men and Indigenous Women in Early British Columbia. BC Studies, 39–47. Retrieved from search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/1438645427?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=14656.

Cohen, C. J. (2005). Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens. Black Queer Studies, 21–51. doi:10.1215/9780822387220-003.

Wu, J. T.-Z. (2003). Asian American History and Racialized Compulsory Deviance. Journal of Women’s History 4(3), 58-62. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/203247139/fulltextPDF/DE1CBA79C5E94425PQ/1?accountid=14656

Ballegeer, S. (2010, June 14). May Wah Hotel, Chinatown, Vancouver [Digital image]. Retrieved November 7, 2017, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/uncle_buddha/4718223240

Thursday Writing Collective

The Thursday Writing Collective began in 2008. When asked about its philosophy in an interview, its founder, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, a local writer, replied, “We firmly believe that everybody has a right to be heard, and we work together to make sure that we do that in an equitable, safe and exciting manner.” (Bender, 2015) It is a weekly free writing class that anyone can attend consistently or drop into. It takes place at the Carnegie Centre, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which it defines on its website as “an area challenged by poverty-related issues.” (Bender, 2015)

Anyone who’s spent time there, or anywhere that could potentially be define that way, likely understands the variegated way that “poverty-related issues” present themselves, the multitude of other issues they connect to, exacerbate, or in some cases, stand in for. Which is to say, understands that one type of obstacle cannot be, and should not be separated from others. In the case of the Downtown Eastside, “poverty-related issues” can be understood complexly to mean, among other things: addiction, systemic racism, cissexism, misogyny, transphobia, queerphobia, gentrification—all of which contributes to what can be a very material lack of resources of all kinds: medicinal, rehabilitative, economic, housing, to name a few. This is meant to demonstrate that anyone who is facing challenges like the ones I’ve listed, and many I have not, is welcome at the Thursday Writing Collective. This means that the communities this program is intended for are not necessarily QTBIPOC, but given what we know about the struggles faced, especially by QTBIPOC youth, and how frequently they are denied resources, it is not hard to imagine this community being an integral part of this program.

What’s more is that the program is run by local artists and activists, meaning these are individuals who are, in many ways, intimately acquainted with the particular and diverse difficulties facing this community. It is not a program designed for a community from its outside.

While there is no statement on the Collective’s website about their stance towards QTBIPOC individuals there are multiple instances of its organizers emphasizing that the space is meant for everybody or anyone, much like the one cited above. That said, almost all of us have had the experience of entering a space we think will be safe for us only to promptly find out it is not. In the absence of an explicit policy we can look at the collective’s organizers, events and endorsements for clues as to their level of inclusivity. They are frequently publishing excerpt of, blog posts by, or simply praise for, queer writers. One such case is the writer Erold Almelek, who’s poem, “strange, queer, extraordinary, peculiar” appears both in English and in Turkish on the Collective’s website (and in one of their chapbooks.) (admin, 2014) In an interview titled Talking Queer Vancouver Writers, Bisexuality, and Community with Vancouver Author Leigh Matthews, Matthews is asked to name “some of the most amazing queer Vancouver writers,” she names one of the Thursday Writing Collective’s central teachers. (Stepaniuk, 2017) Of course, these observations don’t automatically mean that any queer person, especially an Indigenous or racialized one, would definitely feel comfortable here. However, given what we know about the excitement and consideration expressed towards queer folks and differently marginalized peoples as well, I think it would be safe to assume that this would be the kind of environment in which discomfort can be addressed, and hopefully, resolved.

In ‘Gays Who Cannot Properly be Gay’ Queer Muslims in the Neoliberal European City, Fatima El-Tayeb spends some time discussing the activist group Strange Fruit. They describe the group as having had an intersectional practice “in which identities and discourses were eclectically appropriated, rearranged and transformed without a single model of ethnic, gender, or sexual definitions becoming normative.” (El-Tayeb, 90) They go on to write of the groups successes and the strategies that they think brought them about, one of which being that they combined, “local, peer group focused activism […] with a global perspectives” which El-Tayeb posits resist “divide and conquer politics that […] pit ‘gay’ against ‘migrant.’” (El-Tayeb, 90)

In the case El-Tayeb explores it becomes clear that while it is always important to have spaces and initiatives that are explicitly meant for certain communities, some progress can be made, and can be made well, through collaborations between marginalized communities. I submit that this is what The Thursday Writing Collective provides an opportunity for. In that same interview with its founder, she describes the process of writing as “a type of freedom many of us don’t experience in our daily lives.” (Bender, 2015)

While writing about Ballroom culture in his article Engendering space: Ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in Detroit, Marlon M. Bailey suggests that Ballroom culture can do a lot, but it cannot erase all our differences and the difficulties that spring from them. He writes, “Instead, I argue that members ‘make do’ with what they have in an effort to forge lives that are more livable” (Bailey, 503)

This is what the act of writing together and learning from one another as the potential to do.

Bibliography:

Bender, D. (2015, October 21^st) Finding Joy in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with Thursday’s Writing Collective. Retrieved from: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/thecollective/the-collective-thursdays-writing-collective-1.3106481
El-Tayeb, F. (2012). ‘Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer muslims in the neoliberal european city. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 19(1), 79-95. doi:10.1177/1350506811426388
Bailey, M. M. (2014). Engendering space: Ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in detroit. Gender, Place & Culture, 21(4), 489-507. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2013.786688
Palaniuk, C. (2017, April 12^th) Talking Queer Vancouver Writers, Bisexuality, and Community with Vancouver Author Leigh Matthews. Retrieved from: http://www.insidevancouver.ca/2017/04/12/talking-queer-vancouver-writers-bisexuality-and-community-with-vancouver-author-leigh-matthews/

The Capilano Review Issue 3.31

The Capilano Review is a literary magazine that’s been running since 1972. They print three issues a year, and more recently have made their issues available as PDFs online at a reduced price. They even publish online chapbooks and occasionally hosts artists-in-residence and organize generative, warm readings and seminars for the public. There is no shortage of praise for this publication. Local environmentalist and poet, Stephen Collis, is quoted on their website as having said, “Every issue provokes and in some small way moves Canadian culture forward.” (“The Capilano Review: About Us,” n.d.) The magazine’s reach, however, is not merely local. It is internationally recognized and publishes artists from various parts of the world. Though their Canadian focus is certainly worth recognizing, I think they are by no means a national project, but rather imbricated in a literary community that is mired in Canadian nationalism and willfully ignorant of the violence it inflicts. A closer examination of the issues themselves, especially the more contemporary ones, demonstrates a critical departure from the status quo.

They frequently have guest editors for specialized issues. The Winter 2017 issue was guest-edited by local poet and activist listen chen. In their Editor’s Note they write, “My approach to this issue was to seek out work that responds to various conflagrations, with attention to plurality, because the difference between reifying lines and interrupting them can be pretty subtle.” (chen, 2017) Later in the note, they go on to discuss a particular contribution to the issue by Dion Kaszas and Afuwa, stitching back the land, writing that it: “reminds us that possibility is material and embodied.” (chen, 2017) Even from these small excerpts it is clear that this issue was approached and curated with nothing short of deep care and thought for systemically underrepresented communities. What follows is an issue teeming with insights—writing, drawings, photographs—all of it actively resisting the erasure of marginalized voices.

Anyone who follows more established literary magazines knows that this is already a much more varied selection than what you can usually expect. Moreover, the contributors to this issue were largely people who are situated at the nexus of multiple forms of oppression and prejudice—queer and trans people of color and Indigenous folks. People who’s, if we were to follow Guyartri Gopinath’s thinking in Impossible Desires, very existence undermines the dominant narrative by which they are rendered impossible subjects. If, as Gopinath suggests, “heterosexuality is a structuring mechanism of both state and diasporic nationalism,” (Gopinath, 25) we might also add cissexism and white supremacy to our (ever expanding) list of “structural mechanisms.” If the bodies that contradict these structural ways of seeing and knowing threaten their power, then their testimonies, perspectives, artwork, insights and care extend that rupture even further.

No small summary could adequately describe the breadth of the work contained in this issue. However, even a small analysis reveals its potential to disrupt. My favorite piece, by Ya-Wen Ho, occurs only partially in English. The rest is told in Mandarin. Intermittently, interpretations of those passages are offered. While bilingual work is not entirely uncommon, it is often dismissed by those people who can only understand one, or none, of its components. People still have trouble letting what they don’t know speak to them.

Later in the issue three poems appear by Gwen Benaway. In the first, entitled Chaser, which reads: “you like girls/like me, it’s ok/to want a body /unfinished, in (trans)it” (Benaway, 2017) This is a poem that manages to be very explicit about its intent and feeling without ever sounding familiar. This is a poem articulating an intimate experience—revealing the structural mechanisms at work that frequently infiltrate even our closest relationships.

In another section there is a striking monochromatic comic by Lee Lai entitled dreams about surgery. It contains no words—yet we are immersed in this dream, in which a figure is attacked by a dog who tears at their chest, and left to interpret its significance without the help of explicit language. It has been argued that art, and poetry in particular, is an inefficient way of addressing injustice because of its tendency towards ambiguity. In order to address a problem one must be able to conceive of said problem in the first place. While I do, ultimately, agree with that, I also believe there is a way in which poetry is able to address concerns we were not even fully cognizant of, and then some, exactly because of its unpredictable, underdetermined form. I have given only three examples out of the whole issue in order to show that, not only is each piece and artist saying something with their different approaches, but the pieces are all saying something together, about what kinds of people are existing and creating.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the issue was not received well by everyone. The launch of issue 3.31 was the most underattended event of theirs I have personally been to. It was also, in my opinion, a striking and intimate evening. There was a Facebook event for the reading on which a long time reader commented “Worst issue ever just saying.” Unfortunately, I can’t cite it because it has since been deleted, but I saw it, and so did many others. What becomes clear in light of exchanges like that one is that a trans, queer, two-spirit, POC, and/or Indigenous focus is viewed by certain people as a sign of a decline in the quality and relevance of this publication. Luckily, this could not be further from the truth. If anything, The Capilano Review’s engagement with and elevation of ideas and artists like these is a big reason to continue to support it.

If we believe Collis’ claim that I shared in the beginning of this entry, that TCR “provokes and moves Canadian culture forward,” (and I think there is good reason to believe that it does) then the turn it took in issue 3.31, and to a lesser degree in other issues, is a necessary one for the disruption of the various systems of oppression that are functioning with force and precision within Canada every day.

Bibliography:

– “The Capilano Review: About Us” (n.d.) Retrieved from: https://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/about/

– chen, (2017) Editor’s Note. (Issue 3.31, pg. 7) Vancouver, British Columbia. Print.

– Gopinath, G., & e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection Backlist. (2005). Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and south asian public cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.

– Benaway, G. (2017) Chaser. (Issue 3.31, pg. 44) Vancouver, British Columbia. Print.

Gay Gentrification and Space in Chinatown

On September 19^th, 2017, Yulanda Lui sent an open letter to the organizers of Babes on Babes, a nightlife event targeted towards Vancouver’s queer community featuring “a collective of artists, DJs, and promoters with the desire to showcase and celebrate local and international Queer talent” (Lui, 2017). In this letter, Lui had expressed her desire to attend the party, but explained that she was unable to due to being unsettled by the location that Babes on Babes decided to host their event at, that being Fortune Sound Club, located on East Pender Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown (Lui, 2017). This is a neighborhood that, according to a 2006 census, has a median income just over a third of the income of the city as a whole, and is facing rapid gentrification that pushes out its residents, many of whom are low-income Chinese immigrants and elders (Givetash, 2016). Fortune Sound Club does not serve the needs of the community surrounding them, and instead attracts and profits off of a more affluent demographic that does not necessarily face the same barriers to maintaining a livelihood as the residents who call that place home. Lui’s open letter explaining her refusal to attend the event is her direct attempt to make Babes on Babes aware that their choice to support and work with businesses like Fortune Sound Club makes them complicit in the gentrification of Chinatown, and also gave them an opportunity to own up to how their actions are harmful to the local community (Lui, 2017).

Exterior of Fortune Sound Club, located in Vancouver’s Chinatown.

It is important and telling to note that even after Lui communicated with Babes on Babes’ event organizers the event happened anyways, and continues to be hosted at Fortune Sound Club. Babes on Babes’ role in the gentrification of Chinatown is easily comparable to the figure of the Queer Gentrifier as discussed by Bacchetta, El-Tayeb, and Haritaworn in “Queer of Colour Formations and Translocal Spaces in Europe.” (2015). Described as enterprising “pioneers”, Queer Gentrifiers establish their creative spaces in pre-existing homes of residents who usually do not have an equal access to racial and class privileges (Bacchetta et. al, 2015). The non-intersectional methods used to create queer space end up excluding others, as seen through members of the creative class that move into low income places and push out the residents in a local neo-colonialist fashion. Lui also writes about Fortune Sound Clubs’ displacement of local business in this same, neo-colonialist fashion, when it replaced Ming’s Chinese Restaurant in 2009 in her letter – this is not only a physical displacement, but also a detriment to the local economy (Lui, 2017). The unequal power dynamics that are used in creating space and simultaneously making space unavailable to others speaks to the importance of making sure one’s “inclusive” activism is actually inclusive and open to improve on criticism in order to respect and do better by their community, rather than just performing their cause.

The Queer Gentrifier model directly highlights the irresponsibility of focusing only on uplifting one community independently from others, and the resulting harm inflicted upon those other oppressed groups. While Babes on Babes likely means well by trying to create a space for marginalized queer folks, and the opportunity to showcase their talents and celebrate their identities is done at the cost of embodying one of the many forces gentrifying Chinatown under the guise of so-called “revitalization”. Bacchetta, El-Tayeb, and Haritaworn’s observation of the pattern of attempting to legitimize racial and colonial violence in the names of protecting, or in this case, making LGBT spaces points to the fact that being oppressed does not give groups permission to oppress others. By choosing to stand for one marginalized group of the backs of others, Queer Gentrifiers also ignores members of the queer community that face other oppressions caused by the multiplicity of their identities. Like Lui, we need to be aware of the politics of the location of our activism, and take a stand to demand for real inclusivity.

Citations:

Lui, Y. (2017). Letter to Babes on Babes by Yulanda. Retrieved from www.facebook.com/events/1944507529207526/.

Givetash, L. (2016, August). Dying neighbourhood’: Vancouver’s Chinatown grapples with affordability, development. Www.thestar.com. Retrieved from www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/08/20/dying-neighbourhood-vancouvers-chinatown-grapples-with-affordability-development.html.

Bacchetta, P. et al. (2015). Queer of colour formations and translocal spaces in Europe. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(5), 769–778. doi:10.1177/0263775815608712.

No Title. ThisIsBlueprint.com, http://thisisblueprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fortune-sound-club/23490/fortuneexterior-redtint.jpg

[Exterior of Fortune Sound Club in Vancouver’s Chinatown]. (n.d.). Retrieved November 6, 2017, from http://thisisblueprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fortune-sound-club/23490/fortuneexterior-redtint.jpg

Transnational Space as the Convergence of Queered Intimacies: Neoliberalism and Filipinx Nannies in Vancouver

The Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) makes available the possibility of Canadian permanent residency to temporary foreign domestic workers. Since the 1980’s a large portion of Live-In Caregivers are Filipina migrant women who enter Canada as temporary workers (Walia 2010, 76). Many of these women work as nannies, raising the children of affluent Canadians, while their immediate family responsibilities remain in the Philippines. Convinced by the promise of opportunity and better futures coveted by nations like Canada, temporary domestic workers find themselves in vulnerable positions, constrained by the policies of the immigrant they are susceptible to the abuse and exploitation their employer and the Canadian State, more generally. According to the Philippines Women’s Centre of BC caregivers endure “unpaid or excessive work hours, additional job responsibilities, an expectation to be on call at all times, forced confiscation of travel documents, gross violations of privacy, and sexual harassments and assault (Walia 2010, 76).

Queering the Family:

My usage of queer, is intended to contest what is typically considered to be normal and remove queer from its usual identificatory function; queer is not simply isolated to the L, G, B, or T. From Cathy Cohen’s expansion of the term queer to “unpack and politicize the very idea of normal” (as cited in Catungal, 2017). Therefore, the Filipinx caregiver is a queer subject as her experience of heterosexuality is not considered to be normative. Her queerness allows us to (re)think the normalcy of family—and their associated intimacies, desires, social lives and forms that are called up and performed when familial categories are invoked (Catungal, 2017)—at a local level while simultaneously situating ourselves in consideration with a broader global context. Prompting us to reflect upon the intersections of the local and global spatiality, and queerness allowing us to locate the fissures within normative categories of family and citizenship in a neoliberal context.

Canadian Complicity in Projects of Neoliberalism:

Since the 1980s, Canada has shown a strong preference for sourcing live-in caregivers particularly from the Philippines (Khan 2009, 29). To be more specific, approximately ninety-two percent of LCP registrants in Vancouver were from the Philippines (Pratt, 2012). Canada has taken advantage of the racialized and gendered patterns of LCP recruitment, and utilizes to its benefit the devastating unemployment and poverty rates and labour-export policy of the Philippines (Khan 2009, 29). In addition, persistent stereotypes within Canada which portray Filipino women as obedient, nurturing and complacent posit them as ideal domestic workers (Khan 2009, 29). Scholar Geraldine Pratt remarks on a recruit which states that “domestic workers leaving their children in the Philippines makes the very best nannies because they miss their children so much that they have no choice but to redirect their affections to Canadian children” (Pratt 1997; 2009). Like other wealthy nations, caregiving is a salient feature of the Canadian neoliberal economy. That is, programs like the LCP might be considered the inverse of the transnational phenomenon of outsourcing (Walia 2010, 77). Asymmetric power relations between the Philippines and Canada work to Canada’s benefit—this process is embodied by Filipinx caregivers. Crucially, Filipinx caregivers and their families are sacrificed to ensure the maintenance of the Canadian nuclear family; in the eyes of the state they come to mean a supply of cheap labour that can address, for example, the domestic labour issues (Walia 2010, 77).

Transnational Family:

Canadian nuclear family necessitates a home, in which the home becomes the localized space of correspondence between its members. It is stationary location, that rarely changes and is adorned with meanings, norms and responsibilities. Filipina caregivers come to exist in these spaces, in an artificial home as “not-yet-but-likely-citizens” and whose acceptance is wholly dependent on their ability to maintain the normative Canadian family (Pratt, 2009). In this framework the maintenance and social reproduction of the Canadian nuclear family is predicated on the help of the caregiver and everything she must give-up. Her presence in Vancouver and eventually, her acceptance within citizen is contingent on her capacity to care for, in an intimate motherly manner, for children that are not her own. It is, the Filipina mothers’ presence within the confines of walls that the maternal rolls of these mothers because queer—where the local swiftly slips into the global which collapses the borders of Canada while still being dependent on them. The transnational dynamic of Filipina caregivers means that they occupy and perform maternal roles and responsibilities at both local and global levels. They are transplanted from their homes, and as outsiders placed into families through artificial maternal role to care for and raise the children of affluent Canadians while biological parentage avoids the domestic duties and may instead be productive citizens of the state. At the same time, caregivers must still financially and emotionally provide for and raise their children but from a distance.

Concluding Thoughts:

With this in consideration, I suggest that the examination of Filipinx caregivers within the local context Vancouver offers a valuable entry point to interrogate neoliberal projects and mechanisms that are sustained by programs such as the LCP, and to consider these projects in relation to citizenship and the construction of the Canadian “family.” Contrary to popular depictions of Canada as a benevolent arbiter of human rights, the state continues to be engaged with abusive immigration policies used to exploit the Global South. Moreover, temporary migrant workers have come to constitute a hidden disposable workforce to the benefit of the Canadian populations (Walia 2010, 71). The Live-In Caregiver Programme (LCP) exemplifies the ways in which foreign domestic caregivers endure excessive exploitation via an exclusionary promise of inclusion and citizenship. Moreover, I posit that the experiences of Filipinx women in Canada queer of the normative heterosexual ‘family’ via transnational means— which ultimately links the local spaces of Vancouver to the spaces outside its borders.

Works Cited:

Catungal, J. (2017). Toward queer(er) futures: proliferating the “sexual” in filipinx canadian sexuality studies. Pre-publication copy.

Pratt, G. (2009). Circulating sadness: Witnessing filipina mothers’ stories of family separation. Gender, Place & Culture, 16(1), 3-22.

Pratt, G. (2012). Enterprising women, failing children: living within the contradictions of neo(liberalism). In Families Apart Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love (pp. 1-40). University of Minnesota Press.

Khan, S. A. (2009). From labour of love to decent work: Protecting the human rights of migrant caregivers in canada. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 24(1), 23-45.

Walia, H. (2010). Transient servitude: Migrant labour in canada and the apartheid of citizenship. Race & Class, 52(1), 71-84.

Finding Refuge on Unceded Land

What is the Rainbow Refugee Society?

Rainbow Refugee Society (RRS) is Vancouver based, not-for-profit community group that works to support persons seeking refugee protection in Canada because of persecution based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression of HIV states. In 2011, Rainbow Refugee entered into a partnership Federal government called the Rainbow Refugee Assistance Project (RRAP). Through this national project, Rainbow Refugee has the responsibility of bringing together volunteers, mentors and community organizations across Canada to sponsor LGBT+ asylum seekers. The groups are called Circles of Hope and directly aid refugees to gain entrance into Canada, “[to] settle in a much more accepting and safer country” (Rainbow Refugee, 2017).

Responsibilities of the Circle of Hope in British Columbia:

Before a refugee arrives in Vancouver, the Circle is responsible for: raising funds, completing application forms, creating a settlement plan to support the newcomer for 12 months, communication with the sponsored person and providing encouragement and emotional support. After the refugee arrives in Vancouver, the Circle assist in their transition into life in Canada through the provision of emotional and settlement assistance. They teach asylum seekers about the rights and responsibilities of permanent residents in Canada, and help them to learn English and find employment (Rainbow Refugee, 2017).

Implications of Refuge in a Settler State:

In another post, one of my colleagues discusses in greater length the external consequence of colonialism in constructing the global borders and boundaries of states and citizens, that are implicated in creating the frameworks and conflict that cause queer and non-queer refugees to flee in the first place. It is based on a process that includes some persons and excludes others. The differential inequalities of such a system ensure state power over its citizens, and sustains the global north’s power over the global south.

These inequalities are replicated in the definition and grounds that refugees make their claim are informed by nationalistic thinking. For queer persons to be considered a “legitimate” refugee in Canada (Fobear, 2014) their claims to queerness must fit within the parameters set forth by the state; but even then, the degree of belonging available to refugees is dependent on two things:

Their proximity to the attributes of the ‘proper’ Canadian citizen—cisgender, heterosexual, white, and male.
Their ability to perform the responsibilities of a citizen—or, their ability to assimilate.

Queer asylum seekers of Canada must convincingly and repetitively narratives that assert their proximity to normative notions of gender and sexuality (Shakshari 2014, 103). Subsequently, they must prove the ‘immutability of their character,’ and of their experiences, through essentialist notions required by the state to verify their queer identity. In turn, this forces queer refugees and asylum seekers into singular, timeless and universally homogenous identities that fail to account for varying intersections within experience (Shakshari 2014, 100). Consequently, the narratives of refugees are altered and reduced to the rational and linear definitions sanctioned by the state and reified by diasporic queer organizations that coach queer refugees in ‘homonormativity’(Shakshari, 100)—perhaps, evidenced here through the responsibilities of the Circle of Hope.

What does it mean to be a Refugee on Unceded Land?

It is important to realize that seeking refuge in a “more accepting and safer country” is imbued within a broader framework of violence. Escaping one kind of violence, results in violence of another kind. The desire for inclusion and belonging on the part of refugee person, is part of a project of settler colonialism. Safety and a new home is created on the lands of Indigenous people who continue to be denied nationhood and access to their own lands. However, this is not to say that indigenous communities would disallow refugees from finding refuge on their land, but rather that recognition as refugee is informed by the mechanism of the state—evident in the responsibilities of the Circle of Hope. The relationship between racialized queer subjects and settler colonialism is a complex one. Through political recognition, racialized queer subjects can access colonial power in Canada but remain socially and politically unrecognized as settlers (due to the impossibility of ever being a ‘proper’ citizen)(Jafri, 2013). The result of the settler-desires, belonging to or accessing the benefits of settler societies, does the work of sustaining colonial power (Jafri, 2013) Conclusively, the terms of asylum are decided by the settler state, rather than indigenous communities. As such, the state’s ability to manage the life of certain populations is dependent on “the discipline, control, and ultimately, death and diminishment of the other who stands outside and threatens the interests of the population whose life is worth saving and which may or may not have territorial boundedness” (Shakshari 103). This is to say, that migration to different spaces also posits new considerations to prevent the reiteration of similar violences through the complicity.

Works Cited:

Fobear, K. (2014). Queer settlers: Questioning settler colonialism in LGBT asylum processes in canada. Refuge, 30(1), 47

Jafri, Beenash and Patrick Wolfe. (2013). Desire, settler colonialism and the racialized cowboy. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 37(2): 73-86.

Rainbow Refugee. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2017, from https://www.rainbowrefugee.com/

Shakhsari, Sima. (2014). Killing me softly with your rights: queer death and the politics of rightful killing. In Jin Haritaworn et. al. (eds.), Queer necropolitics, pp. 93-110.

Vancouver’s Our City of Colours Poster Campaign

For 3 weeks between October 26 to November 15, 2015, the City of Vancouver was graced with the presence of 15 faces of actual queer Vancouverite people of colour featured in mock movie posters. Organized by Our City of Colours, a non-profit organization in Vancouver that at its core seeks to raise visibility and awareness of issues in racially diverse LGBTQ2+ communities, each movie poster was displayed in one of 15 different bus-shelters throughout the city. Posters were also deliberately multilingual in languages including Chinese, Arabic, Swedish, Hindi, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, Ojibwe, Tagalog, and ASL.

Locations of Posters at Bus Shelters

The purpose of this campaign was to show people that there are queer people of colour who exist and live happy lives. Although this might seem to be a rather explicitly obvious statement, the reality is that mainstream LGBT films tend to rarely showcase the stories of queer people of colour. For instance, statistics on the demographics of characters in films from a quantitative study in 2014 by Vanity Fair found that among 4610 speaking characters in the top 100 films of 2014, only 19 were lesbian, gay or bisexual. There were no trans characters. Now, these statistics don’t even account for race yet. Among those same 4610 speaking characters, 73.1% were white, 12.5% black, 5.3% Asian, 4.9% Latinx, 2.9% Middle Easter, less than 1% Native American or Pacific Islander, and 1.2% from ‘other’ racial/ethnic groups. Finally, according to Vanity Fair’s study, from the 700 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2014, only 30% of the 30,835 speaking characters were female.

Scholars who discuss issues of representation and subjectivity are cognizant of the importance of finding avenues to express identities – in this case, queer of colour stories. Cultural, queer and performance studies scholar Jose Esteban Muñoz discuss the notion of (dis)identification with sites of cultural capital as a strategy for queer of colour subjects to disseminate their experiences. In other words, Our City of Colours’ poster campaign decided that building off of the existing resources of bus-shelters and the popularity of movies would be a way for queer of colour stories to survive and persist in Vancouver’s larger community.

Politics of representation mediate how people think and respect one another, and for this reason, the representation of queer people of colour is ever-so important. Notice how one of the posters with the title “Colours in the Wild” features a cowboy who happens to be Black. This representation deliberately attempts to undermine the iconography of the hyper-masculine, white cowboy who symbolically represents freedom, modernity, and conquest in a settler-colonial narrative that is juxtaposed with Indigenous peoples to ‘justify’ their colonization. According to Dr. Beenash Jafri, an American, gender, and sexuality studies scholar, “the racialized cowboy…[throws] settler authority into question” (p. 74).

Jafri further articulates in an article titled “Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy” (2013) that settler colonialism is a “project of desire” (p. 73). In other words, settler colonialism is perpetuated through films by constructing some people as desirable while other people, in this case, Indigenous peoples and some racialized people, as undesirable. While discussing the poster campaign by Our City of Colours, racialized queer people in films are limited in their ability to successfully take on roles of colonial power because of their inability to be seen as white settlers. That is to say, the role of the hero, the savior, or the protagonist are roles limited to white subjects in settler colonial narratives. Because of this inability to be desired, racialized settlers navigate an oxymoronic paradox: being denied desirability produced by the valorization of white settler subjects, while still occupying the role of being settlers on Indigenous lands.

To return back to the larger collective of the 15 mock movie posters and their locations across Vancouver, it is worth mentioning that there is a particular type of political geography at play. Scholars like Paola Bacchetta, Fatima El-Tayeb and Jin Haritaworn discuss how the formation of space is often dichotomized as either exclusively queer or exclusively racialized, without the possible existence of these harmoniously intersecting. After all, highly non-white racialized neighbourhoods are often interpreted to be homophobic or transphobic, while queer neighbourhoods are often racially-exclusive. For this reason, it is important to consider that Our City of Colours had one of their posters placed on Bute and Davie Street in Vancouver, which is known to be Vancouver’s “gaybourhood” – a place that is also known for not being incredibly racially diverse either.

All things considered, why should it then matter that people see themselves, their experiences, stories, and lives represented in film? For many people, to see oneself reflected in popular media humanizes their existence and presents to a larger audience the opportunity to connect on an interpersonal level. Our City of Colours and their mock movie posters campaign starring queer people of colour ultimately acted as a social commentary on the lack of diverse representation in popular films. I can only hope that those who live at the intersections of identities that are under-represented if represented at all, can one day be able to express untold stories, untold hopes, and ultimately, loving desires.

The 15 Movie Posters from Our City of Colours’ Website

Works Cited:

Jafri, B. (2013). Desire, settler colonialism and the racialized cowboy.American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 37(2): 73-86.

Munoz, J. E. (1999). Performing disidentifications. In his Disidentifications, pp. 1-34.

Paola B., Fatima, E., & Jin, H. (2015). Queer of colour formations and translocal spaces in Europe. Environment and Planning D, 33(5): 769-778.

Vanity Fair. (2014). Editorial by Joanna Robinson. August 5^th, 2014. “New Report Uncovers

Staggering Inequality for Anyone Not Young White, Straight, and Male in Hollywood.”Retrieved from: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/ 08/inequality-women-race-sexual-orientation-movies

Our City of Colours Website. Retrieved from: http://www.ourcityofcolours.com/posters/

From West to West: Colonial Roots of Queer Refugees

Rainbow Refugee, a Vancouver-based non-profit charity founded in 2000, is an organization that offers programs to “support and assist LGBTQ+/HIV+ refugee claimants in BC’s Lower Mainland through facilitated peer support, referrals, system navigation, and accompaniment.” Every 2^nd Thursday of each month at 7:30pm Rainbow Refugee hosts drop-in meetings open to the public at Qmunity located in Downtown Vancouver at 1170 Bute Street. At these meetings, important information regarding LGBTQ+/HIV+ refugee claimants is discussed in order to help refugees successfully gain refugee status in Canada. It should be known that Rainbow Refugee also is partnered with the Federal Government’s Immigration, Refugees Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to develop private sponsorships to ensure successful refugee claimants. Such sponsorships also provide financial aid to refugees to help settle in Canada. For refugees who flee their home country because they are persecuted on the basis of their sexuality, gender identity, or HIV+ status, finding a community in Vancouver that provides support for people who cannot divorce their simultaneous identities as being not only refugees but also, for being queer, is of vital importance.

Rainbow Refugee (Photo from Rainbow Refugee’s Facebook Page)

That being said, for many queer refugees who flee their home for their own safety, what if “home” had already been penetrated by colonial forces? To give context to why queer refugees exist, as of May 2017 out of the 124 countries in the world, 72 of them criminalize same-sex sexual relations (ILGA). In a report conducted in 2014, 57% of all countries that criminalize same-sex sexual relations were once British colonies. Furthermore, 70% of all former British colonies continued to criminalize forms of homosexuality.

If we recognize residual colonial laws criminalizing same-sex sexual relations are often the culprit behind why many queer refugees must flee their countries, then states such as Canada, the United States, and Britain must take the responsibility to accept them. After all, are queer refugees not simply traversing from ‘West to West’? From being excluded from a home country tainted with homophobic colonial laws to then being excluded from host countries that are rooted in colonial powers. Drawing the connection of colonial laws or colonial forces that have negatively impacted refugees are significant because all refugees implicated in such colonial systems are therefore deserving of their entrance through the borders of new countries.

Yet, various scholars who study the intersection between queerness, race, and migration identify unique barriers that queer refugees face. Karma R. Chávez discusses the notion of “cultural citizenship” as a way for queer immigrants and refugees to normalize themselves to be seen as less threatening within a largely white and heteronormative society. In Rainbow Refugee, queer refugee-seekers are expected to demonstrate in law courts not only that they are legitimately queer, but also, that they are positively contributing to Canadian society. This performative act of belonging to Canada is a standard unique to queer refugees that they are expected to demonstrate. In “Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire” (2008) Agathangelou et al. discuss the neoliberal underpinnings of the notion of a “global lockdown” that physically confines and targets refugee camps and immigrant detention centres. In our current globalized world, it is integral to resist ideas of queer and non-queer refugees as non-belonging subjects in Western states if Western states are to blame in the first place for being perpetrators of political and climate instability. Here, note that I am referring to non-queer refugees as equally deserving because they too become queered in discourses of national belonging. To borrow from Cathy Cohen, an anti-racist feminist queer scholar, this idea that to be queer encompasses more than sexuality, but of dis-belonging and subjugation through being interpreted as non-normative, is important in my reconceptualization for a plea for all refugees to be seen as legitimate, not just queer ones.

And not to mention, what about queer refugees who flee countries that do not have a British or European colonial history? There comes a point where all refugees have lives that matter because, in a globalized world, the problems of one country are inextricably linked to the external pressures, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation perpetrated by the world’s most economically ‘advanced’ nations: Western states as a product of neoliberalism and global capitalism.

Ultimately, diasporic queer refugees expose the contradictory notion of having to redeem themselves in a state like Canada or the United States when in fact similar anti-same-sex sexual relations laws in Canada and the United States have only until more recently been decriminalized. It is important for people to start recognizing how interconnected our world is, and how a history of colonialism cannot be erased when thinking about refugees, especially queer refugees.

Works Cited:

Agathangelou, A., Bassicchis, M. D., &. Tamara, S. L. (2008). Intimate investments: homonormativity, global lockdown and the seductions of empire. Radical History Review, 100: 120-143.

Chavez, K. (2010). Border (in)securities: normative and differential belonging in LGBTQ and immigrant rights discourse. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 7(2): 136-155.

Cohen, C. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens: the radical potential of queer politics? GLQ, 3(4): 437-465.

Qmunity Website. Retrieved from: https://qmunity.ca

Rainbow Refugee Website: Retrieved from: https://www.rainbowrefugee.com