Making Queer and Trans of Color Counterpublics

The Research Project: Enacting politics through art: Encounters between queer and trans of color organizers and the Canadian City

Accessibility and Disability Justice Organizing

Disability justice movements have had an important influence on accessibility organizing within Toronto-based queer and trans of color community organizations. Given the interconnectedness of different mechanisms of oppression, it is not surprising that racial, gender, and sexual minorities are engaging in disability justice work as a kind of intersectional approach to community organizing. Following Kimberly Crenshaw’s (1989) seminal work and the scholarly and activist contributions of feminists of color (Gutierrez & Lewis, 1994; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Smith, 1995), I mobilize intersectionality as a means through which to understand the interconnected nature of different modes of social difference. Intersectionality attends not only to the existence of overlapping social identity categories but also to how the way in which these interconnections are structured and experienced as lived realities can generate important theoretical and practical insights. ² In this section, I outline the community and legal contexts in which disability is foregrounded and show how these contexts are consequential for how accessibility organizing comes to be structured. In so doing, I also illustrate the underlying theoretical foundation of these efforts and how their conceptual framing of disability plays an important role in how accessibility efforts are organized.

The fact that QTPOC are engaging in disability justice work has important implications for the study of the interconnected nature of the politics of difference. By examining the interconnectedness of the mechanisms of social difference based on disability, race, gender, and sexuality, we can more clearly understand the significance of queer and trans of color organizers seeking to make their initiatives more accessible to people with disabilities. For many critical disability scholars, it is the notion of disability that serves as the basis upon which other subordinate populations are subject to mechanisms of exclusion. Siebers (2008) maintains that disability frequently anchors the status of marginalized identities:

disability functions according to a symbolic mode different from other representations of minority difference. It is as if disability operates symbolically as an othering other. It represents a diacritical marker of difference that secures inferior, marginal, or minority status…the pathologization of other identities by disability is referential: it summons the historical and representational structures by which disability, sickness and injury come to signify inferior human status. (p. 6)

An example of a queer and trans of color community initiative working on addressing issues of disability is Unapologetic Burlesque, a queer, antiracist, consensual community performance initiative. Unapologetic was cofounded by kumari giles and Shaunga Tagore partly out of their dissatisfaction with their experiences in Toronto’s mainstream burlesque scene. Among many things, they were frustrated with performers of color continually being sidelined to minor roles, the limited opportunities to perform non-cisheterosexual storylines and the difficulty of various groups such as people with disabilities to participate either as audience members or performers. As a result, they created Unapologetic as a way of democratizing the means of cultural production and as a return to the politically subversive roots of this genre, which initially operated to counteract normative modes of gendered sexuality. They conceptualized burlesque not necessarily as a sexualized practice involving the removal of clothing but as a means of storytelling for various marginalized groups (Unapologetic Burlesque, n.d.-a). ⁴

For Unapologetic, the motivation to address issues of disability in their organizing work came from the commitment to meeting the articulated needs of community members. I became intimately aware of the disability dimensions of Unapologetic’s accessibility work because I took on the role of Unapologetic’s accessibility coordinator at kumari and Shaunga’s request. ⁵ In meeting with them to discuss their request, I learned that this push for accessibility had come from community members who had attended Unapologetic’s second event. They had shared with kumari and Shaunga that the content of some of the performances were emotionally intense and that they were left with difficult feelings that they struggled to address on their own. kumari explained that Unapologetic took this feedback very seriously. They wanted to make their events accessible to people with mental health issues but needed others to work with them given their limited personnel. I responded that I would be happy to help but that I was hesitant to do so because I had no prior experience with accessibility work. kumari and Shaunga restated their desire to work with me and suggested that I get in contact with and learn from those who were already doing this kind of organizing and provided me with a list of contacts as a starting point.

In the process of meeting with accessibility organizers, I came to learn that Unapologetic’s work on accessibility was part of a larger trend within queer and trans of color organizations. Masti Khor, an artist, community organizer and performer with Unapologetic explained:

I think that access is becoming a huge deal in QTPOC communities because of disability justice and the work that Stacey Milbern, Mia Mingus and Leah [Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha] do and have been doing for a long time now…. It’s been influential in our communities in the past few years and as more crips of colour come out as being disabled…it’s less and less okay to not have ASL…[we won’t have a] politicized QTPOC event…at places that aren’t wheelchair accessible. But 2 years ago it was okay to do that. It’s awesome we’re growing politically and that’s exactly where we should be going. I’m really proud of us and part of that access is around emotional pieces too; issues of mental health and taking care of each other.

In this exchange, Nik and Syrus express their frustration with Pride Toronto’s progress on securing ASL interpreters for Blockorama and point to the AODA as a way of illustrating the legal ramifications of accessibility efforts around disability. Because BlacknessYes! works in partnership with Pride Toronto to host Blockorama, the legal stipulations that they face around accessibility are quite different from the situations of other queer and trans of color community organizing groups who, given their informal status and more tenuous links to formal institutions, are not legally obligated in the same way. Nevertheless, I bring up BlacknessYes! and the AODA guidelines, as an entry point to discuss the specificity of disability legislation in the province of Ontario to unpack the way in which accessibility work is conceptualized and practiced.

While earlier legislation such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario Human Rights Code drew attention to the disadvantaged position of people with disabilities, disability activists, and community organizations have more recently identified the need for greater efforts to remove barriers to full participation for people with disabilities within Canadian society (Beer, 2010). The AODA came about as a result of their work to improve the living conditions of people with disabilities. It passed into law through the Ontario legislature in 2005 and it states:

Recognizing the history of discrimination against persons with disabilities in Ontario, the purpose of this Act is to benefit all Ontarians by

Disability scholars have linked policies like AODA to a social model of disability. In this model, disability is conceptualized in terms of a dichotomy between individual and private impairment on the one hand and a structural public disability on the other (Shakespeare, 2013). As opposed to a medical model in which disability is seen as an individual deficit, the social model conceives of disability as the relationship between people with impairment and a disabling society. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp state

this paradigm insists that disability is not simply lodged in the body, but created by the social and material conditions that “dis-able” the full participation of a variety of minds and bodies. Disability is thus recognized as the result of negative interactions between a person with an impairment and his or her social environment. (2013, p. 54)

Accessibility as Community Outreach

Investigating how queer and trans of color organizers work to secure disability justice through an examination of the conceptual and juridical underpinning of these efforts does not constitute an exhaustive analysis of how accessibility operates within community organizations. In addition to looking at how accessibility work is mobilized, it is also important to examine how this work is received, understood, and negotiated within community contexts. In this section, I highlight the different responses that audience members offered to the accessibility efforts implemented at one of Unapologetic’s events in order to illustrate that community organizers must be attuned to the consequences of how these efforts are put in place. Building on the critiques offered by audience members that Unapologetic’s accessibility work was potentially alienating for newcomers, I turn to the literature on community organizing which points to the importance of adopting both an inward and outward orientation to building community ties to illustrate that accessibility work may involve efforts to reach beyond existing community structures.

On December 16, 2013, Unapologetic Burlesque hosted the “Superqueer Holiday Potluck Dinner” at the Gladstone, a boutique hotel in the west end of downtown Toronto. The show asked participants to reconsider/re-envision/re-imagine holiday celebrations, which are often difficult events for queer and trans people in navigating family belonging. That night, one of the show’s accessibility volunteers urgently approached me and the kumari during the intermission to tell us that several audience members indicated that someone wearing heavily scented products was sitting in the front two rows which were reserved for people with chemical sensitivities. I quickly looked over to the front of the room and saw that indeed several audience members were squirming uncomfortably, holding their noses, and breathing through their mouths: it was clear that the chemicals in the scented products were causing them to become ill. In brainstorming how to deal with the situation, kumari volunteered to make an announcement reminding audience members of the need to come to the event fragrance free and to ask those wearing scented products to move to the back of room so as to prevent harm to those with chemical sensitivities. After kumari made this announcement, audience members shuffled themselves around the room and, given the calmer energy of the show and lack of further reports from accessibility volunteers, the issue appeared to be resolved.

Audience member responses to these and other instances of Unapologetic’s accessibility work were mixed. On the one hand, as I walked throughout the venue after the show thanking audience members for coming, I received several compliments on the show’s accessibility. A prominent disability justice activist glowingly shared that Unapologetic’s accessibility work was “right up there with Sins Invalid” a community performance project well known for its disability justice work (Sins Invalid, n.d.). On the other hand, I spoke to Scott a few days later who shared some of his reservations about Unapologetic’s approach to accessibility. Working at the gender and sexuality office of a local college, Scott invited members from the college’s queer of color student group to the event thinking that it would be a good opportunity to introduce them to a community event outside of a university setting. Having debriefed with the students after the show, he shared with me some of their reactions as people who had never before participated in a queer and trans of color community art event. Overall, he gave the feedback that the event was set up in such a way that was confusing and somewhat off putting to the students who attended.

For instance, Scott introduced one of his students, Harry, to his friend Kay who had agreed to volunteer as an active listener for Unapologetic at the show. Harry asked Kay why she was wearing a ribbon around her arm and she explained that it was meant to identify her as an active listener and briefly explained to him what her role entailed. As noted earlier, active listeners were recruited as part of Unapologetic’s accessibility efforts to ensure that those who experienced emotional distress (or became affectively triggered) as a consequence of the show might have someone to talk to. Harry was not clear why such a role was needed and laughed when he heard the explanation. Scott explained to me that not everyone was familiar with the concept of “active listener.” Having invested so much time and effort into the accessibility work for the show, I responded somewhat defensively that we described the role of active listeners on the Facebook event page and in the actual space of the venue itself we had put up signs at the entrance and within the performance space explaining what “active listeners” were. Scott did not disagree with me but explained that people have to understand themselves in particular ways in order for these categories to make sense: if you do not perceive yourself as someone who is capable of being emotionally triggered, the notion of an active listener will not be relevant to you. As newcomers to Unapologetic these students were unfamiliar with events that were set up in this way and it is unlikely that they would have felt the need to speak to an active listener (at least in the way that was intended). This conversation with Scott led me to understand accessibility organizing in a much broader way; it not only entailed addressing issues of disability, but also other dimensions that might exclude participation such as being a newcomer to a social scene characterized by complex cultural dynamics.

Scott’s point very much aligns with existing concerns about attending to community newcomers within organizing efforts. Patrick, the facilitator of the Drag Musical, a community performance initiative for queer and trans youths of color explained that community organizing cannot focus on people who are already in the “scene” and that accessibility necessarily included reaching out to others. He states,

for me, community is about expanding it too. It’s not just QTPOC [queer and trans people of color]. I’m part of a larger community that wants to grow…when you are community organizing and building a movement, it’s not just about the people who agree with you, it’s about how to get everyone in.

By positing accessibility as a part of a broader process of community building, the Drag Musical situates accessibility within one of the cornerstones of social work practice: community organizing. In their definition of community organizing, Walter and Hyde (2012) state,

if we perceive community not as an existing unit that needs to be organized differently but as a dynamic and emergent whole embodying varying degrees of community-ness that is continually being built or created, then the building of community will be one of the central concerns and activities of community practice. Community is created or built, or not, with each of our actions; with our consciousness concerning ourselves, others, and the issues; and with our relationships. (2012, p. 84)

In framing accessibility as a kind of community building the Drag Musical is focused not just on any kind of relationship building but on building relationships of a particular type. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social capital has been influential among community scholars and is particularly helpful in analyzing the relational nature of community practice. Bourdieu defines social capital as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition” (1985, p. 248). ¹⁰ Walter and Hyde forward three kinds of social capital and describe how they contribute to community building in different ways: “bonding- strengthening existing relationships; bridging––building new relationships; and linking––fostering linkages between community members and community organizations” (2012, p. 81). Within this framework, the Drag Musical engages in both bridging and linking forms of social capital by reaching out to those who have not previously been involved in queer and trans of color community activities. For this initiative, accessibility is a form of community building in which community organizers work to foster bridging and linking forms of social capital by establishing relationships with community “outsiders.”

Accessibility as Counterpublic Making

The accessibility organizing work of Unapologetic takes place within a broader community context where other queer and trans of color initiatives (like the Drag Musical) are also working through questions of participation and representation. Though these initiatives may be focused on the inclusion of different groups (people with disabilities or community “outsiders”), they nevertheless structure their programming to encourage the participation of their intended population(s). In this section, I shift attention away from the question of whether or not accessibility initiatives meet intended outcomes to examine the broader consequences of accessibility work more generally. I argue that accessibility organizing is a public-making process in which community workers interpellate or anticipatorily imagine the participants they seek to engage. Thus, my interest is not on investigating the success of accessibility initiatives in drawing in already-existing communities, but rather on looking at how these initiatives discursively construct the communities they seek to include. In situating accessibility organizing as a process of public making (Cody, 2011; Warner, 2002), it is important to note that queer and trans of color community initiatives such as Unapologetic and the Drag Musical are not just interested in making any public. With their focus on drawing together ethno-racial, gender, and sexual minorities (among others), their work is more closely aligned with the construction of what Nancy Fraser would term “subaltern counterpublics” (1990, p. 67). Within a context where social difference on the basis on race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability among others are hierarchically arranged, the fact that queer and trans of color organizers are creating subaltern counterpublics challenges dominant modes of social inclusion.

As Scott indicated earlier, the fact that Unapologetic engages in accessibility practices like having “active listeners” at community events is not only potentially off putting to event newcomers, but it also assumes that audience members will understand the role of active listener and engage with active listeners in a particular way. The process that Scott describes––the way in which accessibility efforts work on flesh and blood people as well as discursively construct the audiences they seek to enroll––is the very means through which publics are constructed. In his identification of a public as a space of discourse, Warner (2002) argues that a text can be described as public if it addresses people who cannot be known in advance and who are identified primarily through their discursive participation. Much like the hit or miss nature of the success of accessibility efforts in fostering the involvement of target populations, Warner cautions that becoming part of a public is not a straightforward process,

the magic by which discourse conjures a public into being, however, remains imperfect because of how much it must presuppose…. It appears to be open to indefinite strangers, but in fact selects participants by criteria of shared social space (though not necessarily territorial space), habitus, topical concerns, intergeneric references, and circulating intelligible forms. (2002, p. 75)

In his articulation of the relationship between ideology and subjectivity, Althusser’s (1971) proposes the concept of interpellation, which I identify as the process through which public making occurs. Althusser argues that ideology

functions in a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘hey you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred and eighty degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). (1971, p. 129)

The tension between how accessibility efforts anticipatorily imagine their intended participants and the ways in which flesh and blood individuals engage with these overtures allow us to take seriously Francis Cody’s argument that “the political subject of publicity is deeply entangled in the very technological, linguistic and conceptual means of its own self production” (2011, p. 47). Cody’s elaboration of a “political subject of publicity” highlights one of the challenges of using Althusser’s model of interpellation as a way of understanding the accessibility efforts of queer and trans of color community organizers. While Althusser envisions the process of hailing as the means through which an individual becomes a subject, QTPOC accessibility organizing efforts are not concerned with individual subjectivity per se but rather with the creation of a particular kind of public (subject). In this case, I follow Warner’s (2002) discursive concept of publicity, which is (partly) defined through the hailing of unknown others. Thus, while QTPOC accessibility organizing practices create a particular kind of public, the logics of these practices rest on an understanding that it is not possible to know beforehand hand exactly who these participants might be.

In trying to get a sense of what is happening within this public-making process, it is important to consider those who are in the business of creating these publics, their (un)intended audiences and the relationships between them. Thus, QTPOC accessibility organizing does not address unqualified unknown others, but rather unknown others who are nevertheless discursive participants. For instance, Unapologetic Burlesque describes itself as an antiracist, queer, consensual performance series and while it does not attempt to restrict participation in its events, it nevertheless does anticipatorily imagine some social parameters that characterize its participants. As indicated on its website, Unapologetic Burlesque (n.d.-a) states,

performers, audience members and people who make all of this possible include, but are not limited to folks who identify as; queer, youth, people of colour, Indigenous, fat, chronically ill, disabled or with a varying set of abilities/disabilities, and folks from a wide range of class, work and educational backgrounds. We are continuously engaging in dialogue with community members and individual/group reflection processes of who gets access to stage or learning spaces, who gets left out and why, and what structures can be built in order to increase accessibility and representation.

While all accessibility as public-making efforts involve reaching out to unknown others, the fact that these QTPOC organizations are concerned specifically with marginalized groups means that they are not just involved in creating undifferentiated publics but rather what Nancy Fraser (1990) calls “subaltern counterpublics.” She describes these publics as, “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs” (1990, p. 67). Warner (2002) highlights the significance of the creation of counterpublics in relation to the workings of dominant public spheres and argues that in contrast to dominant publics which take their lifeworlds for granted and misrecognize the scope of their address as universal, counterpublics engage in scene making as a means of transformation and not merely replication of the status quo. He contends that the claim to be oppositional is not what makes a public a counter public, but rather

counterpublics are ‘counter’ to the extent that they try to supply different ways of imagining stranger sociability and its reflexivity; as publics they remain oriented to stranger circulation in a way that is not just strategic but also constitutive of membership. (2002, p. 88)

Conclusion

In this article, I examine how queer and trans of color community arts workers engage in accessibility organizing. Through an ethnographic investigation of the theoretical foundations and practical strategies of queer and trans of color accessibility organizing, I identify two different approaches to accessibility: one oriented toward the involvement of community newcomers and the other preoccupied with ensuring the full participation of people with disabilities. Though these approaches differ in the populations they seek to engage, they both entail a process in which community organizations anticipatorily imagine those they seek to include. Following the work of Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner, I identify this process of anticipatory imagination as a kind of counterpublic making in which queer and trans of color community workers construct their own particular kind of stranger sociability. Within a broader context where QTPOC are subject to in various forms of violence, the construction of their own publics operates as a means through which they structure their own belonging in otherwise hostile environments.

The suggestion that queer and trans of color accessibility practices as processes of counterpublic making operate as a critique of dominant modes of social inclusion does not mean that these practices (or the ideologies that animate them) are without fault. As indicated earlier, the way in which Unapologetic implemented its accessibility practices around disability limited the participation of community newcomers. It does not follow however, that these accessibility practices necessarily failed. This is because queer and trans of color accessibility efforts are not outcome based. As Shaunga and kumari indicated in their letter template requesting financial sponsorship from corporations for ASL interpretation, “[though our goal is to] make queer and POC performance spaces accessible and enjoyable to all the communities we care about and who deserve space, we still have a lot of work to do. This work is ongoing.” Accessibility organizing as (counter) public making is a continual open-ended process.

This process-oriented approach to accessibility, combined with the fact that queer and trans of color accessibility efforts exist within a hierarchical relationship with more dominant forms of social inclusion, has important implications for social workers. In their attempts to construct their own spaces of belonging, minority community groups operate against the exclusionary tendencies of more powerful institutions. For instance, as illustrated earlier, Unapologetic Burlesque was formed to counteract the racism and cis-heterosexism within Toronto’s mainstream burlesque scene. The subordinate position of Unapologetic and other community groups in relation to dominant institutions makes them potential sites for social work intervention. Rather than attempting to transform existing human service organizations or establishing new programs to combat mechanisms of social exclusion (or in addition to these efforts), social workers can support the work of minority community initiatives in their bid to establish new modes of belonging. By directing attention away from social work agencies and prioritizing the existing efforts of disadvantaged communities, social workers adopt an empowerment-oriented,strengths-based approach by taking a supportive (as opposed to leadership) role in social change efforts and locating the driver of this change within the communities most affected.