Unsettling (white) Pride: Gay Liberation Day on unceded Yuggera Ugarapul and Turrbal country

Abstract

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 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.