A Pride Too Proud: Challenging the Myth of Queer Progress (2/2)
Part 2: Canada as the best place to be queer
BY KHADIJAH KANJI
Photograph by Mercedes Mendez/Unsplash.
When LGBTQ+ asylum seekers enter Canadian borders, they aren’t just trying to leave a place incompatible with their safety and well-being, they are also trying to arrive somewhere that is. For many I met through my research work, Canada is this imagined safe haven.
This Canada is one without any legal prohibitions on sexual/gender practice; where queers have access to every state institution—including marriage and adoption; where minorities are legally protected from discrimination.
This Canada has community centres and social services dedicated to queer needs; film festivals, bookstores, and clubs dedicated to queer culture and community. It has annual Pride parades—at which even the Prime Minister makes an appearance. This Canada is one of the first countries to validate the refugee status of persecuted sexual and gender minorities abroad. This Canada is a good place to be queer, and to be a queer and racialized migrant.
And yet, despite this impressive list of national affirmations for queerness, LGBTQ+ asylum seekers become LGBTQ+ Canadians in a context that, statistically, doesn’t foretell their safety, security, and well-being.
Two-spirit, trans, and queer people in this country are more likely to be poor and homeless, to experience mental illness, addiction and to die by suicide, to be victimized by bullying and hate crimes, to be underserved and discriminated against institutionally (most notably in healthcare), and to be underrepresented in positions of political office.
How can one jurisdiction contain both of these realities—of globally unmatched acknowledgements and protections for queers and disproportionately negative lived experience?
PRIDE AND SHAME: MUCH OF THE SAME
“Gays” haven’t always existed. Of course, humans have forever engaged in sex and romance with those of same/similar genders. But the aggregation of these feelings and behaviours under the identity of gay has a much more recent history.
In fact, the very notion of sexuality—that our sexual practices constitute a key part of who we are—isn’t timeless. David Halperin, a professor of queer theory at the University of Michigan, finds that “most premodern and non-Western cultures . . . refuse to individuate human beings at the level of sexual preference.” He likens sexual desire and behaviour in these contexts to our tastes for chicken versus beef: we have preferences, but they’re irrelevant to our personhood. “Far from being a necessary or intrinsic constituent of human life”, he argues ““sexuality” seems indeed to be a uniquely modern, Western, even bourgeois production.”
The meaning we attach to sex, desire, and romance is socially-produced and hence relates to other social phenomena. Modern sexuality has arisen, in part, out of colonial and racial discourse, which “queered” colonized and racially-dominated populations (classifying them as sexually perverse and gender deviant) in order to dehumanize them and justify their subordination. John D’Emilio, a scholar of history and gender studies, traces the specific emergence of gay and lesbian identity in the West to the 20th century, as capitalism became the dominant economic system.
As he describes, pre-capitalist economies were organized around the heterosexual family unit, a mostly self-sufficient household that produced for its own consumption, and which thus required the biological reproduction of the domestic labour force. Under capitalism, people became independent labourers and consumers—thus uncoupling sexual behaviour from the economic imperative to procreate, and making viable the pursuit of non-reproductive same-gender romantic relationships. The concurrent capitalist phenomenon of migration to big cities facilitated the emergence of a gay community. In response to these social changes, doctors theorized on homosexuality as a medical pathology, a “condition . . . that was ‘inherent’ in a person, part of his or her ‘nature.’”
“Homosexuality” and “homophobia” are coconstituted. “Homosexuals” exist precisely for the sake of homophobia, as there is no need to define someone according to deviant sexual desire and lifestyle outside of the need to pathologize and persecute them on that basis. Gays and lesbians are oppressed in the very act of their invention.
Our movements for queer liberation are premised on queer identity categories. We take for granted the naturalness of “gays,” for example, and seek social acceptance for that identity via “Pride.” But queer Pride isn’t the opposite of queer shame. It is a differently-directed manifestation of a common logic, same premise but different conclusion. Pride can’t eliminate transphobia and homophobia because it nonetheless validates the inherent Otherness of those who practice nonheterosexual sex and non-binary gender. Pride and shame, like homosexuality and homophobia, are co-sustaining.
“The Canadian state is fundamentally violent and exclusionary, where a small minority of people benefit from the majority of the world’s material, social, and political resources.“
Indeed, years of Pride, and yet queers are still routinely subject to interpersonal bullying and harassment, professional discrimination, and familial eviction. Over 90% of Canadians are “comfortable” with LGBT people, and yet there isn’t an equal percentage of queer children who feel affirmed when coming out to their families. This reflects the bifurcation produced through Pride: queerness is something we celebrate politically and socially, but reject personally. Pride can penetrate public discourse, but it is less able to disturb the intimate anxiety that our children will be “different.”
According to one report, the country of Bhutan “has no LGBT nonprofits, no LGBT bars or bookstores, no LGBT institutions whatsoever . . . [yet] Bhutan’s small LGBT population has experienced very little persecution or violence.” The robustness of queer identity, culture, and community is not a pre-requisite for queer safety, and we can’t evaluate queer life elsewhere based on that metric. Conversely, we can’t treat queer shame here exclusively through queer Pride.
HOMONATIONALISM AND THE STATE’S QUEER SOLDIER
Jasbir Puar, queer theorist and professor of women and gender studies at Rutgers University, famously coined the term “homonationalism” to describe the phenomenon of (certain) Western queers’ identification with the state. Canada has proudly granted recognitions and protections to queers and, in turn, certain queers have returned the favour through patriotism. Canada loves (certain) queers, and (certain) queers love Canada.
The Canadian state is fundamentally violent and exclusionary. It is founded upon, and sustained by, the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the erection and enforcement of borders that make entire people illegal, the exploited labour of people from the Global South, enslaved populations, migrants, and the working-class poor.
Canada is sustained by the physical and economic domination of the non-West through trade deals, international corporations, and war. It is buttressed by an unsustainable level of resource extraction that makes our planet decreasingly viable for future generations, and especially for those in the Global South.
That state-sponsored violence is reinforced in wide-scale environmental destruction, the abuse of non-human animals through factory farming, and policing mechanisms that target those who are already punished.
Through these systems, a small minority of people gain control of, and benefit from, the majority of the world’s material, social, and political resources.
The recognition of queers as queers within the state hasn’t substantively altered these violent relations, but simply removed sexuality and gender identity as a barrier to benefiting from them. Indeed, queers can now marry, and can thus access the state’s validation for certain forms of domesticated partnership compatible with capitalist relations. Queers can join the military, and can thus contribute to the physically violent, materially destructive, and socially/culturally/emotionally ruinous project of foreign intervention and war.
The gains of Western LGBTQ+ movements have primarily benefited those queers whose only barrier to enfranchisement was queer rights—namely, those who are White, able-bodied, neurotypical, citizens, middle/upperclass, monogamous, or who can approximate those subjectivities. As Alexandra Chasin, professor of literary studies at The New School for Liberal Arts points out, rights are necessary but insufficient towards justice. “Without a lawyer to argue them on one’s behalf, without an education that effectively makes one aware of them . . . rights alone may be cold comfort,” she argues. In this context, actualizing our rights is dependent upon an economic, physical, political, and social security that is unavailable to many queers.
LGBTQ+ progresses have not only kept intact these ongoing exclusions—of non-privileged queers and non-privileged non-queers—but they have obscured them. Ultimately, this fortifies the state—by investing a new class of citizens in its sustenance, and glossing over ongoing violence through the distraction of “queer inclusion.” The recent pushback within queer communities against “politicizing” Pride (by discussing anti-Black racism, police brutality, and Israeli apartheid, for example) reflects this homonationalist impulse: (certain) queers identify heavily with the state and its apparatuses, are comfortable with the status quo, and wish to sustain other forms of exclusion.
Homonationalism is of global utility. Leticia Sabsay, assistant professor of gender and contemporary culture at the London School of Economics, notes that while President Bush justified US foreign intervention in a more overtly aggressive manner, President Obama deployed a “rhetorical commitment to the promotion of human rights, freedom and democracy . . . the motive of protecting LGBT people across the world started to play a central role in the justification of his foreign policies.” US violence abroad can be justified both benevolently and hawkishly—different discourse, same effect. The Obama era was, in many ways, more violent than the Bush one, yet the nostalgia for his office attests to the homonationalist utility of queers in disavowing Western imperialism.
Western queer-o-filia, however, is conditional and limited. Despite expressing “deep concern” for the well-being of LGBTQ+ people globally, President Obama forcibly removed a trans undocumented migrant from the White House during a Pride celebration event in 2015, after she called on him to “release all LGBTQ+ immigrants from detention and stop all deportations!” His response to her was: “You’re in my house . . . . Shame on you.” Queer rights are human rights—so long as they bolster, rather than undermine, US hegemony.
IDENTITY POLITICS AND CAPITALISM
A critical task of the North American settler-colonial project was queering Indigenous peoples—delegitimizing and disbanding their extended kinship networks, which were incompatible with the privatized and individualized responsibility required for the imposition of European political and economic systems. In this sense, queer was fundamentally collectivist, anti-capitalist, and irreconcilable with Western governance norms. Today, queers not only replicate the capitalist-preferred family form, but have actively fought to be validated by the state in doing so (i.e., to marry).
As described above, gay identity was born out of capitalist relations and is therefore compatible with them. Dominant queer discourse that valourizes “coming out” (i.e. freeing ourselves from the burdensome norms of family and community, and discarding of those who can’t accept us for who we are) parallels that of capitalist discourse, which also attaches wellness to individualistic self-actualizing via the free market. As Chasin writes, “capitalism contributes to the formation of individual identity, which in turn contributes to the formation of identity-based social movements.” Gay identity, the aspirations it has born, and the fruits of its efforts, haven’t queered the state, but straightened out the queer—evacuating queerness of its radicality by making it suitable to the settler-colonial and capitalist status quo.
“Queer liberation equals adequate social assistance rates, a minimum wage indexed to the cost of living, and an end to racialized police brutality and incarceration.”
Gayness loves capitalism, and capitalism loves gayness. Today, virtually any good can be purchased with the branding of the Pride flag—a symbol that has become completely detached from its anti-war and collectivist roots. Individualistic identities are born out of capitalism, and the capitalist market is the primary forum for their articulation: we come to know and express who we are through selling it and buying it. Furthermore, “advertising to gay men and lesbians has often promised that full inclusion in the national community of Americans is available through personal consumption,” writes Chasin. Queers can purchase their acceptability; queer progress is thus measured in terms of marketplace representation and public sphere visibility.
Of course, no number of rainbowed corporate brandings, flashy Pride parades, or queer celebrity icons will address queer poverty. And neither will legal protections. As Chasin points out, laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring don’t actually prevent it from happening—discrimination is difficult to prove, and fighting discrimination requires capital, which is precisely what people discriminated against in employment don’t have. Most fundamentally, capitalism is inherently discriminatory, facilitating mass accumulations of wealth for some and desperate poverty for many more. At its best, anti-discrimination legislation merely re-distributes the burdens of a system that is inevitably burdensome for most.
Identity politics orients us away from this structural analysis. For instance, it focuses us on eradicating the ongoing transphobia and homophobia that results in homelessness among queer youth, instead of asking why familial rejection should render someone homeless. Queers are made vulnerable to hatred because of a broader context that fails to provide material and emotional safety outside of the nuclear family.
Identity politics distracts us with the impossible task of ending interpersonal discrimination; it demoralizes us by tethering our right to live to our social acceptability; and it fails all of us by trying to secure queer participation in an illegitimate capitalist system of resource distribution.
We don’t need to end transphobia and homophobia to end queer homelessness—we need to end homelessness to end queer homelessness. This benefits queers and everyone else disadvantaged by our grossly unequal system of wealth distribution, a system that ensures people are deprived, however it decides to distribute that deprivation. Queers don’t need to be universally loved in order to have life—our humanity should be sufficient.
THE GRATEFUL REFUGEE AND THE END POINT OF QUEER PROGRESS
The LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and refugees I have worked with were grateful to be in Canada, but their problems didn’t end upon arrival. They spoke of being unable to afford medication; the limitations in refugee healthcare; experiencing racism; lack of affordable housing; the barriers to employment; and social isolation. Many of them missed back home—the people, the pace of life, their careers, ease of language, the weather.
In order to access legal status, however, they had to curate themselves appropriately for a refugee hearing—making themselves legible under Western queer frameworks, and depicting their home countries in negative terms only. Beyond the refugee hearing, LGBTQ+ refugees are required to perform happiness: grateful to be here, and thus unwilling to discuss current struggles. LGBTQ+ refugees can only access safety by confirming Canada as the gold standard for queer life.
If Canada is as good as it gets, how do we move forward from here?
QUEERING QUEER PROGRESS
If we extract queer liberation from its capitalist-sanitized packaging under “rights,” then it becomes much more exciting than gay weddings and lesbian soldiers. Instead, queer liberation is a world in which everyone can live and love, in security and freedom.
In this reconfiguration, queer liberation necessitates clean air, water, and sovereignty for Indigenous peoples. It means an end to migrant precarity and border control. Queer liberation requires universal housing, food security, pharmacare, childcare, postsecondary education, and public transit. It demands adequate social assistance rates, a minimum wage indexed to the cost of living, a reduction in our work hours, and more public space—community centres, libraries, parks—to congregate. It means an end to racialized police brutality and incarceration, and respect for the planet and non-human animals. Queer liberation unburdens the Global South from Western economic, physical and cultural domination —a dynamic that forces LGBTQ+ asylum seekers to leave their homes, families, friends, and livelihoods for the basics of safety.
Queer liberation is an end to settler-colonial, imperial, racial global capitalism: a system fundamentally incompatible with universal prosperity. As Dr. Cornel West has said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Creating a just world—one that serves all human and nonhuman beings on this planet, including those of us not yet born—is the ultimate expression of love. What could be queerer than that?
This is the second in a two-part essay addressing the Global North versus Global South “civilizational” binary, which uses the treatment of LGBTQ+ others as evidence of Western progressiveness in ways that perpetuate unequal global power relations. This essay discusses the myth of queer progress in the West; the first part, published in the second issue of The Quarantine Review, addresses the myth of Global South transphobia and homophobia.Together, these essays contribute to broadening conversation on systems of gender, sexuality, race, global capitalism, nationalism, immigration, and (neo)colonialism, helping us understand “LGBTQ+ liberation” as freedom from all systems of oppressions.KHADIJAH KANJI (MSW) is the Social Justice Programming Coordinator for an Islamic educational centre, and a board member for a non-profit serving 2SLGBTQ+ youth. She has previously worked in therapy and research, and looks forward to doing more work in this area in the future. Khadijah writes and speaks regularly on issues of race, gender, and sexuality.