The Quarantine Review, Issue 3

Sheeza Sarfraz, J.J. Dupuis, Sheeza Sarfraz, J.J. Dupuis

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781459748361
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie nordamericane

The third issue of a digitaljournal created to alleviate the malaise of social distancing with exceptional writing and artwork.

The Quarantine Review celebrates literature and art, connecting readers through reflections on the human condition — our lived experiences, afflictions, and dreams. As we face a pandemic with profound implications, the essays within offer a variety of perspectives on the current predicament, encouraging readers to reflect on the world we knew before and contemplate how society can be reshaped once we emerge. Through The Quarantine Review, Dupuis and Sarfraz hope to give voice to the swirling emotions inside each of us during this unprecedented moment, to create a circuit of empathy between the reader, the work itself, and the wider world beyond the walls of our homes.

This issue features writing by Eric Chase Anderson, Jill Andew, Keisha N. Blain, Roseanne Carrara, Khadijah Kanji, David Leonard, Wajahat Mahmood, Tsedale M. Melaku, Jeff Parent, Harsh Trivedi, Andrew Wilmot, and artwork by Nicola Woods.

ESSAY

A Pride Too Proud: Challenging the Myth of Queer Progress

Part 2: “Canada as the best place to be queer”

Khadijah Kanji

When LGBTQ+ asylum seekers enter Canadian borders, they aren’t just trying to leave a place incompatible with their safety and well-being, they are also trying to arrive somewhere that is compatible. For many I met through my research work, Canada is this imagined safe haven.

This Canada is one without any legal prohibitions on sexual/gender practice; where queers have access to every state institution—including marriage and adoption; where minorities are legally protected from discrimination.

This Canada has community centres and social services dedicated to queer needs; film festivals, bookstores, and clubs dedicated to queer culture and community. It has annual Pride parades—at which even the Prime Minister makes an appearance. This Canada is one of the first countries to validate the refugee status of persecuted sexual and gender minorities abroad. This Canada is a good place to be queer, and to be a queer and racialized migrant.

And yet, despite this impressive list of national affirmations for queerness, LGBTQ+ asylum seekers become LGBTQ+ Canadians in a context that, statistically, doesn’t foretell their safety, security, and well-being.

Two-spirit, trans, and queer people in this country are more likely to be poor and homeless, to experience mental illness, addiction and to die by suicide, to be victimized by bullying and hate crimes, to be underserved and discriminated against institutionally (most notably in healthcare), and to be underrepresented in positions of political office.

How can one jurisdiction contain both of these realities—of globally-unmatched acknowledgements and protections for queers and disproportionately-negative lived experience?

PRIDE AND SHAME: MUCH OF THE SAME

“Gays” haven’t always existed. Of course, humans have forever engaged in sex and romance with those of same/similar genders. But the aggregation of these feelings and behaviours under the identity of gay has a much more recent history.

In fact, the very notion of sexuality—that our sexual practices constitute a key part of who we are—isn’t timeless. David Halperin, a professor of queer theory at the University of Michigan, finds that “most premodern and non-Western cultures … refuse to individuate human beings at the level of sexual preference.” He likens sexual desire and behaviour in these contexts to our tastes for chicken versus beef: we have preferences, but they’re irrelevant to our personhood. “Far from being a necessary or intrinsic constituent of human life”, he argues ““sexuality” seems indeed to be a uniquely modern, Western, even bourgeois production.”

The meaning we attach to sex, desire, and romance is socially-produced and hence relates to other social phenomena. Modern sexuality has arisen, in part, out of colonial and racial discourse, which “queered” colonized and racially-dominated populations (classifying them as sexually perverse and gender deviant) in order to dehumanize them and justify their subordination. John D’Emilio, a scholar of history and gender studies, traces the specific emergence of gay and lesbian identity in the West to the 20th century, as capitalism became the dominant economic system.

As he describes, pre-capitalist economies were organized around the heterosexual family unit, a mostly self-sufficient household that produced for its own consumption, and which thus required the biological reproduction of the domestic labour force. Under capitalism, people became independent labourers and consumers—thus uncoupling sexual behaviour from the economic imperative to procreate, and making viable the pursuit of non-reproductive same-gender romantic relationships. The concurrent capitalist phenomenon of migration to big cities facilitated the emergence of a gay community. In response to these social changes, doctors theorized on homosexuality as a medical pathology, a “condition … that was ‘inherent’ in a person, part of his or her ‘nature.’”

“Homosexuality” and “homophobia” are co-constituted. “Homosexuals” exist precisely for the sake of homophobia, as there is no need to define someone according to deviant sexual desire and lifestyle outside of the need to pathologize and persecute them on that basis. Gays and lesbians are oppressed in the very act of their invention.

Our movements for queer liberation are premised on queer identity categories. We take for granted the naturalness of “gays,” for example, and seek social acceptance for that identity via “Pride.” But queer Pride isn’t the opposite of queer shame. It is a differently-directed manifestation of a common logic, same premise but different conclusion. Pride can’t eliminate transphobia and homophobia because it nonetheless validates the inherent Otherness of those who practice non-heterosexual sex and non-binary gender. Pride and shame, like homosexuality and homophobia, are co-sustaining.

Indeed, years of Pride, and yet queers are still routinely subject to interpersonal bullying and harassment, professional discrimination, and familial eviction. Over 90% of Canadians are “comfortable” with LGBT people, and yet there isn’t an equal percentage of queer children who feel affirmed when coming out to their families. This reflects the bifurcation produced through Pride: queerness is something we celebrate politically and socially, but reject personally. Pride can penetrate public discourse, but it is less able to disturb the intimate anxiety that our children will be “different.”

According to one report, the country of Bhutan “has no LGBT nonprofits, no LGBT bars or bookstores, no LGBT institutions whatsoever … [yet] Bhutan’s small LGBT population has experienced very little persecution or violence.” The robustness of queer identity, culture, and community is not a pre-requisite for queer safety, and we can’t evaluate queer life elsewhere based on that metric. Conversely, we can’t treat queer shame here exclusively through queer Pride.

HOMONATIONALISM AND THE STATE’S QUEER SOLDIER

Jasbir Puar, queer theorist and professor of women and gender studies at Rutgers University, famously coined the term “homonationalism” to describe the phenomenon of (certain) Western queers’ identification with the state. Canada has proudly granted recognitions and protections to queers and, in turn, certain queers have returned the favour through patriotism. Canada loves (certain) queers, and (certain) queers love Canada.

The Canadian state is fundamentally violent and exclusionary. It is founded upon, and sustained by, the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the erection and enforcement of borders that make entire people illegal, the exploited labour of people from the Global South, slaves, migrants, and the working-class poor.

Canada is sustained by the physical and economic domination of the non-West through trade deals, international corporations, and war. It is buttressed by an unsustainable level of resource extraction that makes our planet decreasingly viable for future generations, and especially for those in the Global South.

That state-sponsored violence is reinforced in wide-scale environmental destruction, the abuse of non-human animals through factory farming, and policing mechanisms that target those who are already punished.

Through these systems, a small minority of people gain control of, and benefit from, the majority of the world’s material, social, and political resources.

“The Canadian state is fundamentally violent and exclusionary, where a small minority of people benefit from the majority of the world’s material, social, and political resources.”

The recognition of queers as queers within the state hasn’t substantively altered these violent relations, but simply removed sexuality and gender identity as a barrier to benefiting from them. Indeed, queers can now marry, and can thus access the state’s validation for certain forms of domesticated partnership compatible with capitalist relations. Queers can join the military, and can thus contribute to the physically violent, materially destructive, and socially/ culturally/emotionally ruinous project of ...