Reconfiguring time,love,and money: Adjusting chronotopic realities among queer and trans of color community organizers in Toronto,Canada

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Toronto, Canada this article considers how queer and trans of color community arts initiatives come to exist as temporal phenomena. Given the association of racial, sexual, and gender nonnormativity with temporal backwardness, these organizations serve as a useful site to examine how temporal regimes are composed. Drawing on the work of grassroots queer and trans of color community arts initiatives, I show how the short-term, youth-based nature of these efforts is intimately tied to mechanisms of state funding and to the feelings-based relationships that characterize community work. I argue that in their bid to transform their initiatives into sustainable, intergenerational organizations, queer and trans of color organizers must work to change the affective and political economic contexts in which these initiatives exist. By positing the commensurability between “love” and “money” and using the framework of temporality to draw them into the same analytic space, I contribute to existing studies on emotional labor by disrupting Enlightenment logics that separate “spirit” from “matter.” Ultimately, I examine the political ramifications of enacting normative models of temporal development to explore a queer approach to change over time.

Keywords

Queer and trans of color temporality political economy affect community organizing

Introduction

In the fall of 2013, I was seated in a large office in downtown Toronto, Canada, leafing through an outdated fashion magazine while waiting for Twysted to meet me for an interview. As one of the founders of the Toronto Kiki Ballroom Alliance (TKBA), Twysted helped to establish the TKBA as a skills-based initiative designed to encourage those interested in the ballroom scene¹ to participate without being intimidated by the sometimes harsh and competitive nature of the balls themselves. His response to my question, “If this was your study, what would you be interested in learning?” provides the starting point for this article, which attempts to think through the temporal nature of Toronto-based queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) community arts initiatives. In his characteristically boisterous way, he asked, “What creates longevity? What actually lasts in Toronto? And what makes it last as far as the queer scene goes? That’s the problem I’m having, finding a way to extend the Alliance, to create a legacy.” This article examines the challenges that the TKBA and other Toronto-based QTPOC arts initiatives face in their community work and considers how these organizations come to exist as particular temporal phenomena.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with different Toronto-based QTPOC community arts organizations, I show how the ways in which they negotiate their temporal dilemmas are intimately tied to (1) questions of financial remuneration within state-funded programming and (2) the feelings that they have for their work and each other. I argue that in their attempts to transform the temporal nature of their initiatives, QTPOC organizers seek to reconfigure the affective and political economic contexts in which they operate. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I do not approach time as the inert and universal backdrop to human life. Rather, I am interested in time as a symbolic process that is continually produced through everyday practices as a consequence of the interaction between individuals and their environment (Adam, 1990; Munn, 1992). As will be illustrated later, QTPOC organizers are not only concerned with the sustainability of their initiatives but also with how these initiatives have particular affective and generational characteristics. For this reason, I am interested in examining not only how time is constructed but also the particular kind of time that is produced. Bakhtin’s (1981: 84) concept of chronotope or “the intrinsic interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relationship” is particularly well suited to this task as it is not only concerned with quantitative metrics like duration, but also with more qualitative dimensions such as the rhythm by which events unfold.

Time holds particular significance for those who are simultaneously gender, sexual, and ethno-racial minorities. Queer subjects are often constituted in (Freudian) terms of “arrested development” and in opposition to conceptions of linear progressive time (Freeman, 2010; Love, 2007; Stockton, 2009). Rohy (2009) argues that processes of racialization are central to these associations of temporal backwardness with queerness. Rohy (2009: x) states

the notion of homosexuality as ‘archaic’ emerges from the invention of modern sexual identity by sexological theories that borrowed not only their rhetoric but also their fundamental logic from scientific racism …[thus] as the African American was judged as backward or uncivilized, the homosexual was deemed a victim of arrested development.

The work of queer and trans people of color thus serves as an important site through which to examine time and how temporal regimes are composed.

By illustrating the affective and political economic dimensions of QTPOC’s temporal work, I use time as a framework to bring together domains that have typically been kept separate in Enlightenment thought. Drawing feelings and money into the same analytic space violates Cartesian logics that distinguish “spirit” from “matter”(Keane, 2003). The complexities of this distinction are a major preoccupation in feminist analyses of the politics of caring labor (Gregg, 2009; Hochschild, 1983; Weeks, 2007). Yet while scholars have attempted to address these problems by, for example attempting to apply financial value to emotional work (Folbre, 2001; Ironmonger, 1996) or claiming that caring labor cannot be accounted for within conventional economic systems (Rose, 2004), these approaches nevertheless reproduce Enlightenment discourses by continuing to distinguish between affect and materiality. By closely attending to the temporal work of QTPOC organizers, I shed new insights onto existing scholarship on the politics of feelings-based work by illustrating that feelings and money are not radically different things, but phenomena that can be brought together in different kinds of social arrangements (Latour, 2005).

The Project: Enacting politics through art

The findings in this article are drawn from the study, Enacting politics through art: Encounters between queer and trans of color organizers and the Canadian city. This project attempted to understand the role of the arts in the relationship between urban government institutions and queer and trans of color community arts organizations. The data were drawn from three sources. One source was two years of ethnographic fieldwork among queer and trans of color community arts initiatives in Toronto, Canada between 2012 and 2014. Organizing initiatives were chosen on the basis that they provided community arts programming and were run largely by and for QTPOC. I participated in and/or attended the events and programming of 13 of these initiatives and came to work closely with three of them as a community organizer. I was able to gain access to these initiatives largely because of my close connection to QTPOC organizing circles both as a participant and as an organizer prior to the study. The second source of data was 63 semi-structured interviews with queer and trans color community organizers and program participants (n = 55) and state arts administrators (n = 8). Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. The third source of data included two community feedback sessions (n = 16) in which study participants were invited to give input on the preliminary research findings. For both the ethnographic fieldwork and the community feedback sessions, I wrote detailed fieldnotes within 24 hours of the event at hand to document the observation/participation process.

I analyzed the data collected using a constructivist grounded theory approach. This approach required an iterative process in which data analysis took place as data collection was occurring. I used a preliminary process of open coding for the interview transcripts and fieldnotes from the fieldwork and community feedback sessions. I then analyzed the data using a constant comparison method making use of focused and axial coding. Finally, I wrote memos throughout this process in an attempt to make sense of the data analysis as it was occurring. The findings on time, love, and money elaborated in this article were one of the many results of this project which elaborated the consequences of QTPOC’s creative attempts to build community within the constraints imposed by state institutions.

Navigating chronotopic realities: Chronobiopolitics meets queer affect

Through an analysis of Toronto-based QTPOC community arts organizations, I examine how temporality is constructed through political economic transactions and community-level affective exchanges. I attend to two dimensions of temporality: (1) the bare existence or sustainability of organizational forms, and (2) the generational character of these initiatives such that they come to be associated with young people. I show how state-funded programs and the feelings that organizers have toward their work and each other are manifest in how time in both of these dimensions are composed. In so doing, I extend existing scholarship on temporal politics by illustrating how an attention to queer affect can offer new insights into the contingency of state-imposed forms of temporal discipline.

I mobilize Luciano’s (2007) concept of “chronobiopolitics” to analyze the temporal nature of the mechanisms of governance and Spinoza’s approach to affect to examine the role of feelings in QTPOC organizing work. Drawing on Foucault’s (1978) notion of biopower (or the population-level processes of regulation focused on the mechanics of life), Luciano insists that time is a crucial element in processes of government. She thus argues that the government of human life entails the installation of different temporalities through a larger body politic. For instance, the attempt to control population birth rates is not only a matter of sexual management but also a matter of temporally regulating levels of reproduction. Spinoza (1992) defines affect as the body’s capacity to affect and be affected. While his identification of affects such as love, hatred, and envy would be familiar to students of western psychology, they would otherwise find it difficult to understand his approach to these phenomena. Because Spinoza adopted a metaphysical monism that rejects the Cartesian split between feelings and human materiality, his approach to something like hope entails an understanding of affect not only as an interior individual psychological state but as a force that has consequences for the body in its entirety. It is also worth pointing out that, as “capacity” hope cannot be strictly determined as a property of any one body but is also influenced by the context in which this body exists. For this reason, hope may be a property of things like weather patterns and employment rates as much as it may be a consequence of individual functioning. It is by drawing theories of affect and temporal governance into the same frame of analysis that allows us to account for the intersecting social forces that shape the way in which QTPOC community work unfolds.

The workings of Asian Arts Freedom School (AAFS) clearly demonstrate these complex relationships between affect, temporality, and political economy. Inspired by the freedom schools established by African American communities in the US, this group was formed in 2005 as an arts-based radical history and activism program for Asian youth in Toronto. It serves as a space where Asian youth can find support, contribute to their communities, and develop their artistry (the organization has since broadened its mandate to include youth of color and indigenous youth more generally). While issues of gender and sexuality are not specifically addressed in its mandate, it has always been a program whose staff and participants have been primarily, if not exclusively, gender and sexual minorities. AAFS is one of the many grassroots initiatives in Toronto that enacts a local intersectional citizenship practice by politicizing the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality among others dimensions of social difference (Grundy and Smith, 2005). It was in the 2013 spring cycle of AAFS that I first became aware of the challenges that the group faced in terms of securing its long-term viability and how these challenges were linked to state-based funding and matters of love.

On a blustery Sunday afternoon in May, Jeff hosted the third session of this cycle in his apartment in the west end of downtown Toronto. Jeff and Shaunga, who co-coordinate AAFS programming, had planned the day’s session to encourage participants to talk about their visions for community. They asked Rose to facilitate the workshop given her long-time involvement with the initiative since its inception and her extensive experience as an artist, community organizer, and activist. Over the next two hours, she led a discussion that touched on the issue of money and the longevity of AAFS. She said:

It’s great to do art and talk about what we’re going through, but at the end of the day you need to make a living. You’re going to have to survive …that doesn’t mean we have to make a lot of money but we have to be aware, because everyone just stops doing this work and gets other jobs. [They say], ‘I’m gonna get a corporate job, I’m done’. [But] It doesn’t have to look like that.

Later, she asked about the future direction of AAFS’s Drag Musical program and when Patrick, the program’s coordinator, said that he still was not sure what was going to happen, the following exchange ensued

Rose: So, you haven’t plotted out how far in advance … you don’t know if that’s happening yet?

Patrick: Funding, we’re waiting on funding.

Rose: Okay. Is there a five-year plan for Freedom School? Is there a one-year plan, a two-year plan? Is that part of what needs to happen, or no? What’s the contingency plan for Freedom School if the money runs out and you don’t get funding? … I think grants are a good thing but I think we also have to take a step back and ask, “How do we create sustainable models that aren’t grant funded?”

In facilitating this discussion, Rose draws attention to the political economic dimensions of temporality within community arts programs. The issues of funding that she mentions are particularly significant within Toronto, which is home to a set of political economic arrangements that have facilitated an increase in government funding to community arts (Ford-Smith, 2001). Largely targeting “marginalized groups,” community art programs are said to address a host of social issues including urban economic development, crime, unemployment, and social alienation (City of Toronto, 2011). Informal queer and trans of color community groups like AAFS constitute a considerable proportion of the initiatives that receive this funding and many have built initiatives to provide refuge against the oppression that characterizes QTPOC’s daily lives.

It is important to note that community art initiatives like AAFS are funded almost exclusively through public sources as avenues of private funding for these initiatives in the city are practically nonexistent. Government institutions thus play a large role in determining the organizational characteristics of these groups, including their temporal nature. The temporal manifestation of groups like AAFS is determined in part by what Gibson et al. (2007) refer to as the “project-based funding regime,” a particular kind of state financial support in which initiatives are granted short-term funding that is limited for use within a specific project (as opposed to supporting the work of the organization as a whole). Gibson et al. (2007: 421) maintain that because project-based funding is unsustainable, community organizations

find themselves perpetually applying for more funds in order to finance programs … having to apply for funds and not knowing whether proposals will be approved is quite stressful and destabilizing. Organizations and their workers are required to maintain services knowing that, in this project funding regime, there is no guarantee of what will happen once funds run out.

The short-term, project-based nature of these public grants means that community organizers are not able to engage in long-term planning. For instance, in the earlier conversation between Rose and Patrick, the Drag Musical had applied for one-time project funding from the City of Toronto’s arts funding body, the Toronto Arts Council (TAC), even though it is, in fact, a yearly program. Additionally, the limited funding amounts provided by public grants are not able to adequately remunerate organizers for the often full-time commitment that they invest in their initiatives. While human service workers are intimately familiar with challenging working conditions as a consequence of stringent political economic arrangements (Baines et al., 2017; Duschinsky et al., 2016; Rudman et al., 2017), the grassroots nature of QTPOC initiatives means that these organizers often exist in an even more precarious state as they are unable to rely on resources present in more institutionalized environments. For instance, AAFS does not have a designated location and coordinators often scramble to find spaces (community centers, their own homes, etc.) where they can hold their sessions at minimal to no cost. The longevity of informal queer and trans of color community arts programs like AAFS is constantly threatened by the nature of the public arts funding system on which they depend.

Yet, queer and trans of color organizers are concerned not only with the sustainability of their initiatives in terms of economic exigencies but also in terms of their affective orientation toward their work. Even though QTPOC organizers acknowledge they are not always adequately paid for their efforts, they speak of their love for this work as what keeps them going. The positive feelings-based attachment that organizers have for their work allows these efforts to continue even in the face of material scarcity (at least for a time). Patrick shared,

A lot of people work really hard to make these programs work. [In] these community programs we don’t get paid the most money, but there’s so much love. And if you’re not loving it, you’re not going to be in it, because it’s not going to pay your rent all the time. That might be called the life of an artist but it could [also] be called the life of a community organizer. You have to love what you do.

In pointing to the financially insecure and emotional nature of the relationship between arts organizers and their work, Patrick’s insights resonate with Gill and Pratt’s (2008) research on the significance of feelings and economic insecurity within the arts industry in general. While they maintain that cultural workers typically experience precarious working conditions, “research [on creative industries] speaks of deep attachment, affective bindings, and to the idea of self-expression and self-actualization through work” (Gill and Pratt, 2008: 14). The challenges of forming emotional attachments to difficult conditions resonate with Berlant’s (2011) attempt to come up with what she refers to as a properly political concept of love. She states, “Love is one of the few situations where we desire to have patience for what isn’t working, an affective binding that allows us to iron things out” (2011: 658).

However, while organizers argue that love and not money is often the primary motivation for community work, the combination of too little money and too much love over time can lead to burn out, something that caring professionals are intimately familiar with (Cruikshank, 1989; Maslach, 2003; Schaufeli and Buunk, 2003). For instance, Heidi was the co-coordinator of the Drag Musical with Patrick but decided to leave the program. When I asked her about this decision she shared,

the positive and negative aspect of working in a grassroots program is that it’s your passion and it gives you life. But it’s hard to create boundaries of when to draw the line and how much to give. In the first cycle [of the Drag Musical], I gave my all; I put my heart into it. But this cycle, it was hard to balance everything. We are not able to do this work full-time and so it’s something we have to balance with other work.

Patrick and Heidi’s experiences illustrate that the short-term nature of community art initiatives is not solely determined by chronobiopolitical mechanisms like project-based funding programs, but also by the intense affect that creative workers strive to maintain in relationship to their organizing efforts.

Yet the temporality of queer and trans of color community arts in Toronto is marked not only by its short-term nature but also as a generational phenomenon with a particular relationship to the life cycles of its participants. In much the same way that the temporary character of QTPOC arts programming is related to an affective political economy, the generational aspect of queer and trans of color community organizing is likewise inseparable from affective and chronobiopolitical considerations. Gein, one of the cofounders of AAFS draws attention to the youthfulness of community arts in the context of what she perceives as the lack of intergenerational connection within Toronto-based QTPOC circles.

I don’t know how you can do this in your research but I think … recognizing the whole thing about generations. People wanting more connections between generations … I am starting to become conscious of this because as I get older, even when I started [Asian Arts] Freedom School, people started seeing me as a mentor and as an elder in some ways … it was even weird for me to think about that because it was strange. I was young too, right? But now that I'm getting a bit older and the distance is coming I realize that in 15 years or 20 years, I will be an elder. But since we haven’t had that, we don’t know how that interaction works, right? I don’t know how to be an elder and people don’t know how to receive an elder in the community … Because in other communities, it’s there. It’s there for generations, and people are used to it and they grew up with it. Whereas in our communities, it wasn’t there.

Chronobiopolitics play an important role in how community arts initiatives are related to the lifecycle of their participants. Arts funding in Toronto is characterized not only by its short-term and public nature but also by the way in which it specifically targets young people. In its most recent iteration of a cultural agenda, Creative Capital Gains, the City of Toronto (2011: 18) contends

[young people] devise innovative ways to create; nevertheless, enthusiasm and ‘sweat equity’ rarely suffice to sustain fledgling youth-led cultural enterprises. Sustained funding is essential to their growth and development. Young people want to participate in youth-led cultural activities as creators, consumers, audiences and leaders.

This prioritization of youth arts can also be found within the TAC (2013: 3), which states, “culturally diverse youth arts organizations will be given enhanced opportunities to enter the funding stream” in its programming.

Farrah, a community organizer who has taken part in various Toronto-based QTPOC arts initiatives, explicitly makes a connection between the generational nature of community efforts and state funding regimes.

Farrah: Arts and queer communities are made for younger people, for people of color, right? There’s very much a celebration of young bodies, young voices, which I think is important but it’s also about how do we do inter-generational conversations.

Author: So when you said that arts programs are made for queer young people “… How is that …?”

Farrah: [interrupts] Funding. I think ArtReach [pause] It’s one of the easiest, well not easiest, I don’t want to say easiest. But it’s the most accessible funding to get … And it’s great money. You get $10,000 [CAD] … [But] there is a point where, “I gotta have a kid and feed my family and settle down and I don't have time for all these things” … But we need to build that [art] in because, I think in your 30’s you still need to make art.

In elaborating the connection between funding programs and the generational nature of community arts, Farrah specifically refers to ArtReach Toronto, a government-supported funding organization “designed to support arts initiatives that engage youth who have experienced exclusion in under-served areas of Toronto” (ArtReach Toronto, n.d.). The $10,000 that she mentions refers to ArtReach’s yearly granting mechanism in which youth initiatives can apply to receive funding for arts-based projects. In her characterization of community arts as a distinctively generational phenomenon, Farrah echoes Gein’s desire for greater connection between younger and older queers in the City.

Yet the fact that queer and trans of color community arts in Toronto is largely a phenomenon associated with young people cannot be explained solely by turning to chronobiopolitics. At the same time that QTPOC organizers acknowledge the power of affect to drive their efforts, the workings of affect also have the potential to rip these efforts apart. This affective undoing of queer and trans of color community initiatives has specific implications for the relationship between these initiatives and the life course of QTPOC organizers. As one organizer put it,

when friends break up and partners break up, communities fall apart. And the reason why there is so much youth organizing is because people are coming out, they organize and then they date, find a partner, break up. And after a significant break up of a community organizer, communities fall apart.

The conflicts that divide young queer and trans of color social circles as well as the community arts initiatives that they create are often so enduring that it is frequently up to younger generations of QTPOC organizers to establish programming to “make up for” the gap left by their predecessors. It might seem somewhat absurd to link the generational nature of queer and trans of color organizing to something as supposedly mundane as the breakup of an intimate relationship. However, QTPOC organizers very much recognize the destructive power of the negative affects produced through conflict and the enduring nature of the consequences of these affects among close friends/partners

This was a prominent point of conversation at the event That’s So Gay, which involved an interview between event curator Elisha Lim and Trinidadian-born artist Michèle Pearson Clarke regarding Clarke’s work It’s Good to Be Needed (Bronstein, 2013). Clarke described her work as a series in which she photographed queer women who are exes but who are not friends, holding hands with each other. She said that the inspiration for this project came partly from her desire to disrupt the pervasive notion that all queer women are friends with their ex-partners. In talking about the difficulty of trying to find participants for the project, Clarke shared that she learned tremendously about the affective power of breakups in her exchanges with (potential) subjects. In sharing a fictional anecdote of walking into a bar full of community members and feeling as though one is not able to talk to half of the room because of their (potential) allegiance to one’s ex-partner, Clarke viscerally illustrated how the separations that exist among queer women catalyzed by breakups can be deep and enduring. As she was speaking, Clarke’s words resonated with what appeared to be a mostly queer audience with individuals murmuring their assent and slowly nodding their heads in agreement. Through her work, Clarke draws attention to the affective dynamics in queer communities where conflict among friends and former lovers dissolves the bonds not only between the specific individuals involved but also among those more distantly connected to them. It is the dissolution of these more distant bonds that are consequential for the continued existence of queer and trans of color art initiatives. While the inability to sustain love in the context of limited financial resources can help to explain the temporary nature of queer and trans of color community initiatives, the affective power of interpersonal conflicts can help to explain the generational character of these initiatives as primarily associated with youth.

Crafting alternative chronotopes

Ultimately, the temporality of queer and trans of color community arts initiatives must be understood in relation to the short-term, youth-focused public funding available to them alongside their organizers intense affective orientation toward their work and each other. Yet QTPOC community arts workers express dissatisfaction with the chronotopic form of their initiatives. As illustrated earlier, QTPOC organizers like Twysted and Gein want longevity and intergenerational connection to be part of their work. In the final section of this article, I analyze this tension between the idealization of sustainability and intergenerational connection on the one hand and the reality of the ephemeral and youthful nature of QTPOC community arts initiatives on the other. Drawing from Freeman’s (2010: 16) insights that “temporal misalignments can be the means of opening up other possible worlds,” I consider how queer and trans of color organizers work to construct alternative chronotopic realities. I argue that these organizers may transform the temporal nature of their initiatives by attending to the affective and chronobiopolitical contexts in which their work occurs.

In their attempts to change their initiatives from short-lived youth programming to sustained intergenerational organizations, queer and trans of color community workers do not seek to negotiate around the limitations imposed by existing space-times (Ansell et al., 2015) but rather to transform the chronotopes themselves. In her analysis of pedagogical moments at the Russian Theatrical Academy in Moscow, Lemon’s (2008) work is constructive in conceptualizing how QTPOC organizers can begin to do this. In one example, Lemon focuses on how a teacher disagrees with the way in which one of his students has performed a personal ad placed by a young woman. While he agrees with the student’s analysis that the woman’s motivation for placing this ad is boredom, he disagrees with the conclusion that the woman is only seeking material gain. Offering his own opinion, he states, “she wants to end the absurd temporality of repeated dull actions. To make time as measured by clock and calendar disappear … to exit boredom, to leave it with explosive force” (2008: 256). For the teacher, love and financial gain do not necessarily exist in opposition to each other. He forwards the possibility that the woman placing this ad seeks to solve her chronotopic dilemma (boredom) by “combining variables that are usually kept on opposite sides of the equation ‘I will be your faithful girlfriend and help you spend your money’” (2008: 256).

In much the same way that the instructor interprets the motivation for placing this ad in the desire to bring about a different space-time through reconfigurations of love and money, I contend that QTPOC community organizers may enact different temporal realities by transforming the affective and political economic contexts in which their initiatives occur. On the one hand, altering the way in which these initiatives are funded could change their temporal nature. It is possible that the greater availability of resources in support of particular social forms may increase the likelihood of these forms coming into existence. If government institutions were to replace short-term funding with “core” or long-term funding initiatives and change granting procedures to ensure the accessibility of arts funding to people of all ages, it would not be altogether surprising to see an increase in the longevity and generational diversity of QTPOC community arts programs. This is not to say that the work of enacting such chronobiopolitical changes would be without its challenges, but that it is not difficult to envision a broad outline of what these changes would need to be.

Yet resolving the issue of financing alone would not unilaterally bring about the chronotopic transformations that QTPOC seek. In response to Shaunga’s comment about wanting to win the lottery to establish a community arts center during the AAFS workshop discussed earlier, Rose asked,

why is it always about winning the lottery and putting a lot of money in it? … We think that we need money to do it but do we need that much money? I don’t know…. Because even if you won the million dollars … you’re going to have some issues still, right? [laughs] How can we challenge ourselves to think beyond [money]?

Rose’s insights remind us that the bare existence of financial resources in and of itself is not capable of bringing about the changes that QTPOC community organizations desire. Her caution to Shaunga encourages us to think not only about how social actors may use these resources for their own ends, but also how the introduction of these resources into existing social relations may change the way in which these relations are configured.

While recognizing the importance of attending to chronobiopolitical arrangements, the transformation of the affective dynamics necessary to foster sustainability and the involvement of multiple generations is a more complex issue. In her analysis of the AIDS activist organization ACT UP, Cvetkovich (2003) points out dynamics of destructive affective intensity that are quite similar to the workings of queer and trans of color initiatives mentioned earlier and calls for a more measured affective approach to social action. Recognizing that “for a lot of people ACT UP was like a zombie from outer space that ate away at the rest of their life…[and] eventually they got really mad at it and they burned out” (2003: 171), Cvetkovich (2003: 174) concludes, “the key to long-term involvement was not to make ACT UP the center of social life … the preciousness of activist relationships … were specific to the context of activism and in many cases their intensity could not be sustained.”

The notion that supportive political economic conditions and measured affective dynamics can potentially give rise to sustained and intergenerational social forms is borne out by the example of Toronto-based QTPOC community arts initiatives like BlacknessYes! whose existence runs counter to the “flash in the pan” trend so common among other similar programming. BlacknessYes! describes itself as a community-based committee that seeks to celebrate the histories, creativity and resistance of Black, African-diasporic and Caribbean queer and trans people. Its most well-known initiative is Blockorama, an event held during Toronto’s Pride weekend featuring a daylong series of programming of DJs and performers. In 2014, BlacknessYes! hosted the 16th annual Blockorama. I know of no other explicitly queer and trans of color community arts group in Toronto that has existed for this long. Additionally, the BlacknessYes! committee members come from different generations of organizers throughout the City. Between Nik who has been involved with the committee from its inception and me, the newest member who joined in 2013, the other members have been involved with BlacknessYes! for widely differing periods of time. Unlike many of the other Toronto-based queer and trans of color initiatives, BlacknessYes! does not financially compensate its members for their organizing work; all committee members are volunteers. And while BlacknessYes! is responsible for raising funds for its smaller activities, its main initiative is financed through Pride Toronto (which in turn receives most of its funding from the City of Toronto). In contrast to many other queer and trans of color groups, this source of funding is not tied to the political economic prioritization of youth arts. The enduring and intergenerational nature of BlacknessYes! is thus related to economic dimensions of the committee in which its members are expected to volunteer their labor and the funding for its headline event is neither short-term nor youth specific.

But economic considerations do not completely account for the temporal character of BlacknessYes! as questions of affect are also at play. The love that committee members have for their work and the conflicts that they have with each other are not altogether different from the kinds of feeling-based interactions that occur in other queer and trans of color initiatives. However, the spaced-out nature of this work provides an opportunity for the dissipation of potentially destructive affective dynamics. That Blockorama happens once per year means that while BlacknessYes! prepares for this event over a 12-month period, a large majority of the organizing work takes place in the two to three months leading up to the event itself. There is no doubt that conflicts occur within the committee, especially in this intensive work period. In the first year that I was part of BlacknessYes!, one member decided to discontinue his involvement partly because of the severity of such a conflict that revolved at least partly around different approaches to doing community work.

Steve: The challenges in any other situation would be financial; getting money … but [here] it was getting people to pay attention or answer emails or meet you half way with work … It’s actually hard working in a collective of people that is not getting paid, I think that’s a big part of it …

Author: So the drives …

Steve: [interrupts] Are different … I’m used to structure, whether in communication or meeting or dates … and it wasn’t that at all. It was very unstructured and it was new for me … there were challenges that were happening and I kind of got it. But it was my first year and I just want to get this [work] done. I just wanted to be structured and organized and that was what I was fighting [for]

Eventually, Steve brought up his concerns in a BlacknessYes! meeting that quickly became emotionally charged with raised voices and negative remarks made on the personal character of other members. These kinds of affective tensions that build up over a fairly short time period are eased in later months when the committee takes a long break after Blockorama. This break and the slow pace of getting back to work allows for the dispersal of the potentially destructive affective forces built up during more intensive work periods. In talking to another committee member, Craig, about his experience working on Blockorama, he shared,

It can be frustrating. I enjoy it and that’s why I’m still doing it. [But] this last year was really difficult because there was a lot of infighting. There was a lot of tension, there was a lot of anger and I really didn’t like most of it. But I knew what it was going to end up being so I think it was worthwhile. After Blocko[rama] we didn't meet up for a long time and we just needed a break.

While Cvetkovich argues that a high level of affective intensity cannot be sustained within social justice initiatives, this point is irrelevant in the case of BlacknessYes!: the fact that Blockorama occurs once a year means that sustaining a certain level of affective intensity is not necessary. The buildup and let down that I describe sidesteps much of the destructive affective dynamics that characterizes other initiatives and that are a major factor in how organizers burn out/break up with each other.

Visioning a queer future

In this article, I show how the temporal form of queer and trans of color community arts initiatives take shape in relation to local affective political economies. I argue that their bid to transform short-term youth programming into sustained intergenerational organizations requires a reconfiguration of the community affective dynamics and chronobiopolitical exigencies in which they operate. By way of a conclusion, I want to offer a kind of caveat by recuperating the subversive political utility of short-term, youth-based organizational forms and by highlighting the challenges that may arise from the institutionalization of temporary social action. The now defunct Toronto-based initiative Desh pardesh functions both as a model for the organizational forms that QTPOC organizers seek to establish as well as a cautionary figure with regard to the consequences that manifesting such an organization entails.

Desh pardesh was a grassroots arts and culture initiative that began in 1988 with the initial goal of raising awareness about South Asian queers within Toronto’s broader queer community (Fernandez, 2006). Over the 13 years of its existence, it became wildly successful. The one-day event with an operating budget of $600 that drew an audience of 200 people became a five-day festival whose workshops and panels as well as music and visual art presentations required a working budget of $150,000 and attracted audiences upward of 5,000 (Fernandez, 2006). Through its institutionalization as a nonprofit and its involvement of South Asian families in its programming, Desh pardesh came to embody the kind of sustained intergenerational initiative that current Toronto-based queer and trans of color organizers seek to achieve. At the same time however, Desh’s work became less politically subversive as its commitment to queer politics came to be replaced with a broader mandate to challenge mainstream audiences around South Asian cultural stereotypes. Fernandez (2006: 25) states “the gradual mainstreaming of the festival over time also meant that it became progressively less radical.” If queer and trans of color initiatives were to follow the same trajectory as Desh, they might be able to attain the sustainability and intergenerational connection that they seek to achieve but potentially at the expense of their mission to enact a local intersectional citizenship practice.

It is precisely because of this political trade-off that queer scholars of temporality have pointed to the utility of youth-based, short-term social forms. In their attempts to counteract the dominance of modernist notions of linear progressive time that emphasize maturity, stability, and longevity, they have highlighted the politically subversive potential of attending to models of temporality that valorize youth and ephemerality (Halberstam, 2005; Muñoz, 2009). The work of Toronto-based grassroots QTPOC initiatives extends this scholarship by gesturing to the possibility of enacting normative models of temporality without the mainstreaming of a transgressive political practice. For groups like AAFS and TKBA, their challenge lies in cultivating sustainability and intergenerational connection without sacrificing their commitment to a subversive politics. In her elaboration of what she refers to as “temporal drag,” Freeman (2000) hints at one way that queer and trans of color initiatives can go about doing this. To the extent that the productive power of drag can be evinced not only when bodies are garbed in clothing associated with a different gender, but also when they utilize accessories that point to a different historical period, temporal drag illuminates mechanisms of delay or how the past continues to pull on the present. In working to transform their initiatives from ephemeral youth-based programming into long-term intergenerational initiatives, grassroots QTPOC groups can sidestep the possibility of political mainstreaming by putting temporal drag into practice. While adhering to temporal models of normative progressive development, queer and trans of color initiatives can also cultivate apparatuses of retrogression in which new temporal forms are wedded to existing political practices. As I have hoped to show in this article, changing the temporality of social forms requires a transformation of the affective political economies in which they occur: matters of time are also matters of love and money.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research on which this article was based was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan.

Note

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