Performing Queer Diasporas: Pelau MasQUEERade in the Toronto Pride Parade

Performing Queer Diasporas documents and critically examines the public performance of "Pelau MasQUEERade," an organized self-identified Caribbean queer diasporic group that includes non-Caribbean queers. Pelau MasQUEERade draws on the cultural and historical aesthetic of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival and the Toronto Caribbean Carnival Parade, and brings its performance to the largely "white" queer space of the Toronto Pride Parade. I situate Pelau MasQUEERade in relation to the Toronto Pride Parade to investigate processes of racialization in queer spaces. My study challenges normative queer narratives about the Toronto Pride Parade that construct sexuality, citizenship and belonging as fundamentally de-racialized processes. I argue that the Toronto Pride Parade serves as an ostensible marker for white queer inclusion and belonging to the Canadian nation-state, placing queers of colour outside of the boundaries of belonging. I bring queer into conversation with diaspora to disrupt seemingly fixed boundaries of race and sexuality and to disturb the whiteness of the Toronto Pride Parade. My study utilizes an interdisciplinary framework. I draw on Caribbean, black/feminist queer diaspora scholarship to demonstrate how Pelau MasQUEERade emerges from a black diasporic tradition but simultaneously establishes itself as a queer of colour group. I further draw on theories of space and performance to illuminate how Pelau MasQUEERade offers alternative ways to re-imagine freedom, desire, and pleasure as a mode of survival. My study draws upon twenty semi-structured interviews with Pelau MasQUEERade participants and Toronto Pride organizers; two summers of ethnographic fieldwork; and an analysis of Internet, magazine and newspaper documents. There are three central aspects to my study: First, I examine how whiteness becomes normalized in Pride through the conflation of white with queer. This conflation enables queer claims for citizenship and belonging but excludes queers diasporics of colour. Second, I explore how Pelau MasQUEERade disturbs the whiteness of Pride by creating a mobile "queer diaspora" space. Third, I illustrate how queer diasporics of colour use performative practices to address exclusion and to create transformative spaces of belonging. Overall, my study illuminates how complex practices of belonging are imagined, spatially negotiated, embodied and articulated through Pelau MasQUEERade's performance.

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