Pride Parades in Queer Times: Disrupting Time, Norms, and Nationhood in Canada

Abstract

This article uses queer-of-colour scholarship to examine Canadian resistances to homonationalism that target the colonial temporal logic upon which this ideology depends, a logic that Elizabeth Freeman refers to as “chrononormativity.” I specifically argue that chrononormativity is the attendant posture of homonationalism, as it is through the former that the latter is able to bring about imperialist queer formations. Then, building on this framework, I examine the ways in which Black Lives Matter—Toronto’s (BLM-TO) now (in)famous disruption of the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade provided a much-needed divergence from the chrononormative temporalization of homonationalism in Turtle Island and beyond. In particular, I argue that homonationalism is reified in Canada through temporalizing techniques that work to establish queer futurities forged around racializing narratives of Western progress and change, whereby Canadian Pride Parades operate as one such technique. The concerted whitewashing and linearization of pride parades make them into perfect sites in which to symbolically orientate white queers toward an emerging horizon of possibility, promise, and liberation born out of the biopolitical genealogies of colonialism and white supremacy. Accordingly, I conclude that, when BLM-TO occupied the Toronto Pride Parade in the summer of 2016, they disrupted this process, thereby animating new forms of queer belonging and being that work to uproot queer politics from the mythologies of a history grounded in white supremacy and Western ascendency.

A Collective Grievance, A Collective Acquiescence

“…This results in genuine empathy being distorted into performances of empathy that are then practiced as a means to ending racism. The consequence of this is that white people's feelings are protected instead of integrated: contra to performances of empathy, the process of accountability should feel uncomfortable, if not painful, and located inward as it ruptures the core of white consciousness and ego in the Westsupremacy (Anane- Bediakoh & Ali, 2020;Da Costa, 2020;Jackson, 2020;Tuck & Yang, 2012). It is when this unsettling selfreflective accountability takes place that white people can meaningfully direct that accountability outward.…”