Transnational blackness at Toronto Pride: queer disruption as theory and method

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.