Transnational blackness at Toronto Pride: queer disruption as theory and method. Issue 11 (2nd November 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Davis, Khyree D.
• Is Part Of: Gender, place and culture. Volume 28:Issue 11(2021)
• Page Start: 1541
• Page End: 1560
• Publication Date: 2021-11-02
• Subjects: Black lives matter -- disruption -- black queer -- transnational -- black geographies; Human geography -- Periodicals; Feminism -- Periodicals; Géographie féministe -- Périodiques; 305.305
• DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2020.1819208
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0966-369X

Abstract

Abstract: On July 3, 2016, the Toronto Pride parade began its procession down Toronto streets. Before it would end, Black Lives Matter – Toronto organizers would disrupt the event with a protest. This collective of Black queer and trans organizers demanded the attention of Toronto Pride and its participants in a manner which challenges the normalization of state-presence and involvement in Pride, Toronto Pride's own anti-Black histories, as well as myths surrounding the multiculturalism of Canada's society and government. Black Lives Matter – Toronto's use of the Black Lives Matter global network, its own membership's diaspora positionalities, and its deployment of protest within a homonationalist context all work to forward a Black queer diaspora and geopolitical critique of homonormativity and anti-Blackness enacted and practiced by mainstream gay spaces, like Toronto Pride, and settler-colonial states, like Canada. Embracing this disruption as theoretical and deploying similar methodological disruptions within the text, this project reveals that Black Lives Matter – Toronto and their protest function as transnational resistance against an international project of anti-Blackness at the same time it operates in a distinct local-national context.