Love Intersections describes itself as, “a blog and video project dedicated to exploring intersectionality through the lens and language of love. Calling you in instead of calling you out.”
Using multimedia including movies, poems, essays, and academic papers among other narrative forms Love Intersections shares stories with the intention’s of building communities across barriers. I was drawn in by the project of Love Intersections because my own personal activism is also motivated by a deep love. Centering connection and care in our relations is a radical stance in a world that seeks to divide and conquer through with what Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira (2008) call capitalism’s seductions of violence or, “the ways we become invested emotionally, libidinally, and erotically in global capitalism’s mirages of safety and inclusion (p. 122)”. Love Intersections inspires me to continue to enact my own activism from a place of love while keeping a critical eye on injustice.
I want to trace the conditions of emergence that formed Love Intersections and then speak to the ways the founders of the project, Jen Sung and David Ng, can be read as utilizing disidenfications towards the creation of Love Intersections. On the Love Intersections blog, Ng (2014) has a piece entitled “The VSB Gender Policy Debates: Discourses on Race and Solidarity” where he recounts the 2014 Vancouver School Board gender policy revisions and the subsequent disputes that arose. The updated policy required the inclusion of a single-stall, gender neutral bathroom in schools. The policy debates are also where Love Intersections as a project developed. In an interview for Talking Radical Radio (2015), Andy Holmes talks about the friction taking shape as “the polarization between the queer community, it seemed, and the other community, the opposition, the predominantly Asian, Christian moms (6:10).”
The two opposed factions of the debate were seemingly racially divided leaving Sung, Ng, and Holmes in the lurch. In Ng’s blog post he talks about the racialized cultures can be viewed as uncivilized when compared to the progressive West.”>culturalization of homophobia that was in part fostered by media representation. A queer ally even asked him “what is wrong with Chinese people that they are so ignorant?” I find Ng’s incisive critique of European colonization and its spread of Christianization to be especially salient here. The sedimented layers of colonialism and racialization that inform one another are obscured in the process of culturalizing homophobia. Ng asks “why is it that when white Christians are homophobic and transphobic, they are ‘homophobic and transphobic Christians’, …when Chinese Christians are homophobic and transphobic, they are ‘Ethnic Chinese’ Christians who are homophobic and transphobic?” We can see Ng’s commitment to intersectionality in his assertion of settler complicity even in the face of racialization. Racialized migrants in settler nation states like Canada are still settlers, and as long as they have an investment in the nation, whether through citizenship, rights and legal discourse, and/or economic interests they contribute to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people.
I posit that Sung and Ng utilized what Roderick Ferguson calls disidentifications towards both their predominantly white queer allies and the primarily Christian Chinese parents as well. For Ferguson (2004), to disidentify is to “use the code of the majority as raw material for representing a disempowered politics of positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture (p. 4).” By disidentifying with the largely white queer majority who in the heat of conflict espoused anti-Chinese racism and through citing their own selves as queer and Chinese, Sung, Ng, and Holmes dissolve the hermetic constructions of race and sexuality that were circulating in these debates. The assertion of queer and trans POC existence worked to unravel the myths of queer whiteness and Chinese heteronormativity while disidentifying with homophobia within the Chinese community. Ultimately, through utilizing QTBIPOC critique Sung and Ng were able to open up dialogues pertaining to racism in queer communities which they achieved through an attentiveness to love. Through attending to the deep love held by both groups of parents in these debates Sung and Ng created a space for discussion and collective growth which I think all folks doing social justice work can and should take to heart.
REFERENCES:
Agathangelou, Anna, M. Bassicchis and Tamara L. Spira. (2008). Intimate investments: homonormativity, global lockdown and the seductions of empire. Radical History Review, 100: 120-143.
Ferguson, Roderick. (2004). Introduction. In his Aberrations in Black: toward a queer of colour critique, pp. 1-20.
Neigh, Scott. (2015). Love Intersections: Storytelling, queerness, intersectionality, solidarity, and love. Rabble, February 4. http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/talking-radical-radio/2015/02/love-intersections-storytelling-queerness-intersectiona
Ng, David. (2014). The VSB Gender Policy Debates: Discourses on Race and Solidarity. Love Intersections, June 14. https://loveintersections.com/2014/06/11/the-vsb-gender-policy-debates-discourses-on-race-and-solidarity/