In the case of homelessness, trans and queer youth compared to cisgender and straight youth disproportionately face homelessness because their identity has made living at home with their parents an unsafe or available option (Abramovich 2017, p.4). According to statistics drawn from the United States, LGBTQ2S identifying individuals make up 5-10% of the population, yet, make up 20-40% of homeless youth (Quintana 2010, p.6). Such statistics can be assumed as similar in the Canadian context. This website entry draws on the work of the recently published book of essays “Where am I going to go? Intersectional Approaches to Ending LGBTQ2S Youth Homelessness in Canada and the US” to articulate why shelter spaces developed solely for queer and trans youth are important. When I use the term queer and trans youth, I am referring to all queer and trans youth, with specific awareness of the two-fold marginalization of queer and trans of youth of colour. As articulated throughout “Where am I going to go?” and throughout the websites and newspaper articles dedicated to this topic, there is a recurring experience of youth homeless shelters and services being inaccessible and unsafe for queer and trans youth. Drawing on the work of Marlon Bailey, this entry argues that forging spaces of safety for queer and trans youth is necessary because these spaces are rarely available to them in existing cultural and social spaces (Bailey 2014, p.491).

As the publishers articulate, “the goal of this book is to take homelessness research and relevant policy findings to new audiences” (Abramovich 2017, p. III). While this book incorporates the research done across North America, due to the intention that dialogues introduced in this book will inform public and government funding and policy, it is relevant to future program development in Vancouver. This will in turn reflect the implementation of programs for queer and trans youth. With this understanding in mind, I provide an overview of the book’s strengths and limitations to illuminate how this research may influence and shape the government’s role in queer and trans homelessness services.

This book begins by arguing for the dismantling of the criminalization of homelessness (Abramovich 2017, p.X). In challenging discourses that frame homelessness as criminal behaviour, this book moves away from blaming individuals for their experience of homelessness, and fosters a critique of the structural factors that result in homelessness among queer and trans youth. To further destabilize power imbalances within mainstream discourses and program development around homelessness, the book works to center voices of homeless LGBTQ2S youth. For example, the scholars are informed by interviews and surveys with homeless LGBTQ2S youth.

Due to this website’s focus on queer and trans of colour events and services in Vancouver and the surrounding lower mainland, it is essential that this entry points to the lack of dialogue around the intersection of race. Within the books 22 essays, only 4 specifically focus on race; one on Indigenous youth in British Columbia and the other three on Black youth in the US.

This book was published in Toronto, but takes a translocal approach by presenting the role of scholars from across North America. Drawing on Bacchetta et al.’s work on the translocal (2015), this entry proposes that translocal networks between queer and trans youth dismantle normative frameworks for homelessness services. Furthermore, it is essential to acknowledge that homelessness is an experience of migration that occurs around the world. Many queer and trans youth that face homelessness have moved, be it from different countries or from a rural setting to the urban city of Vancouver. Therefore, while the homelessness situation in Vancouver is exacerbated by our current unaffordability, fentanyl crisis and socioeconomic inequalities, homelessness in Vancouver cannot be understood as simply a local issue. Ultimately, there are lessons to be learnt from the larger network of spaces researched in this book. As Bacchetta et al. (2015) argue, the interventions performed by queer and trans of colour foregrounds them as geographical subjects in local locations that are often open only to white cis/straight populations (p. 773). The work of providing shelter for queer and trans youth goes beyond providing physical safety. The act of giving youth permanent addresses opens the door for their ability to apply to jobs, school and social services. Further, these programs participate in “transformative placemaking” (Bacchetta et al. 2015, p. 773) whereby queer and trans youth of colour use their experience of “forced and voluntary (im)mobility, travels and translation” (p. 775) in their process of community (and) spaces making, and in doing so, ensure their presence in the city is not forgotten or pushed out by more privileged narratives or experiences.

Lastly, this entry acknowledges the complicated dynamic of homelessness services existing on unceded territory at the same time that the colonial project continues to dispossess Indigenous People’s from their land. Further, as the book states, Indigenous youth make up around 6% of Canada’s population, but statistics from surveys show they may be over half of all homeless youth (Saewyc 2017, p. 14). Contemporary homelessness and poverty amongst Indigenous bodies is a present day form of colonial dispossession and highlights that colonialism is an ongoing process.

References:

Abramovich, A., & Shelton, J. (2017). Letter to the reader. In. A. Abramovich & J. Shelton (Eds.), Where am I going to go? Intersectional Approaches to Ending LGBTQ2S Youth Homelessness in Canada & the U.S. (pp. 13-40). Toronto: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. Retrieved 6 Nov. 2017.

Abramovich, A., & Shelton, J. (Eds.). (2017). Where Am I Going to Go? Intersectional Approaches to Ending LGBTQ2S Youth Homelessness in Canada & the U.S. Toronto: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press.

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.

Bailey, Marlon. (2014). Engendering space: ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in Detroit. Gender, Place and Culture, 21(4): 489-507.

Saewyc, E., Mounsey, B., Tourand, J., Brunanski, D., Kirk, D., McNeil-Seymour, J., Shaughnessy, K., Tsuruda, S., & Clark, N. (2017). Homeless & Street-Involved Indigenous LGBTQ2S Youth in British Columbia: Intersectionality, Challenges, Resilience & Cues for Action. In. A. Abramovich & J. Shelton (Eds.), Where am I going to go? Intersectional Approaches to Ending LGBTQ2S Youth Homelessness in Canada & the U.S. (pp. 13-40). Toronto: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. Retrieved 6 Nov. 2017.

Quintana, N., Rosenthal, J, & Krehley, J. (2010). On the Streets The Federal Response to Gay and Transgender Homeless Youth. Retrieved from https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2010/06/pdf/lgbtyouthhomelessness.pdf

 

 

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.

 

 

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/