(Politically) Black at Toronto Pride : queering diaspora, borders, and disruption

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 theories and methods out of Black queer (diaspora) studies, geographies, and performance studies, 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