Unsettling (white) Pride: Gay Liberation Day on unceded Yuggera Ugarapul and Turrbal country
Access status:
Open Access
Type
ThesisThesis type
Masters by ResearchAuthor/s
Redwood, TaylorAbstract
With grassroots trans/queer organisers/activists having disrupted LGBTQIA+ Pride events in various cities around the world, Pride has emerged as a key site of political contestation within trans/queer communities. In the postcolonising settler common sense, the incorporation of ...
See moreWith grassroots trans/queer organisers/activists having disrupted LGBTQIA+ Pride events in various cities around the world, Pride has emerged as a key site of political contestation within trans/queer communities. In the postcolonising settler common sense, the incorporation of police and corporations in LGBTQIA+ Pride events is seen as evidence of the progress LGBTQIA+ people have made towards inclusion, acceptance, and equal rights. However, others contend that police/corporate inclusion benefits LGBTQIA+ people able/willing to perform middle-class whiteness through the intensification and invisibilisation of racialised violence against those who stray from this (homo)normative ideal. My thesis focuses on how the inclusion of police/corporations in Brisbane Pride has been contested by grassroots community organisers, specifically through the groups No Pride in Police (2016), People’s Pride (2017), and Queer ACAB (2019). I explore what these contestations over the meaning and purpose of Brisbane Pride reveal about the operation of “patriarchal white sovereignty” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) within and beyond the settler colony of so-called Australia. Drawing on media analysis, ethnography, articulation/disarticulation, and semi-structured interviews with fellow community organisers/co-theorists, I argue that progressive politics is a key mechanism used to maintain white colonial domination under conditions of enduring genocide. Progressive politics encourages (white) trans/queer people to further develop their material, emotional, libidinal, and erotic investments in patriarchal white sovereignty – with police inclusion in Pride a paradigmatic example of this investment. Rather than fighting for rights, I suggest liberatory transfigurative politics calls on white trans/queer colonisers to prioritise our responsibility to practice ceding power in order to end the genocidal invasions which ground heterosexualism in this place.
See less
See moreWith grassroots trans/queer organisers/activists having disrupted LGBTQIA+ Pride events in various cities around the world, Pride has emerged as a key site of political contestation within trans/queer communities. In the postcolonising settler common sense, the incorporation of police and corporations in LGBTQIA+ Pride events is seen as evidence of the progress LGBTQIA+ people have made towards inclusion, acceptance, and equal rights. However, others contend that police/corporate inclusion benefits LGBTQIA+ people able/willing to perform middle-class whiteness through the intensification and invisibilisation of racialised violence against those who stray from this (homo)normative ideal. My thesis focuses on how the inclusion of police/corporations in Brisbane Pride has been contested by grassroots community organisers, specifically through the groups No Pride in Police (2016), People’s Pride (2017), and Queer ACAB (2019). I explore what these contestations over the meaning and purpose of Brisbane Pride reveal about the operation of “patriarchal white sovereignty” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) within and beyond the settler colony of so-called Australia. Drawing on media analysis, ethnography, articulation/disarticulation, and semi-structured interviews with fellow community organisers/co-theorists, I argue that progressive politics is a key mechanism used to maintain white colonial domination under conditions of enduring genocide. Progressive politics encourages (white) trans/queer people to further develop their material, emotional, libidinal, and erotic investments in patriarchal white sovereignty – with police inclusion in Pride a paradigmatic example of this investment. Rather than fighting for rights, I suggest liberatory transfigurative politics calls on white trans/queer colonisers to prioritise our responsibility to practice ceding power in order to end the genocidal invasions which ground heterosexualism in this place.
See less
Date
2023Rights statement
The author retains copyright of this thesis. It may only be used for the purposes of research and study. It must not be used for any other purposes and may not be transmitted or shared with others without prior permission.Faculty/School
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of HumanitiesDepartment, Discipline or Centre
Department of Gender and Cultural StudiesAwarding institution
The University of SydneyShare