Psychic geographies of queer multiculturalism: Reading Fanon,settler colonialism and race in queer space

Introduction

In the city of Toronto, which often lauds its official slogan ‘diversity our strength’, the gay village ¹ is the site of intense racialization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirit and additional (LGBTQ2+ ² ) youth of colour and Indigenous youth. In this paper I implement a joint critical race and queer geographical approach to explore the everyday social and cultural encounters with racism, and processes of racialization, that homeless Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth experience in Toronto’s gay village. I base my analysis in the work of Frantz Fanon and his insights into the psychological, relational and embodied experiences of race and colonialism to identify how queer iterations of Canadian multiculturalism inform the cultural logics of Blackness and Indigeneity, and how this becomes anchored in the space of the village through subtle, everyday forms of (non)representation and social relations which seek to maintain Black and Indigenous subjects knowable within white queer settler spaces.

The field of geography has witnessed few applications of Fanon’s work, despite the possibilities of a ‘Fanon-inflected spatial semiotics’ (Burnett and Milani, 2017: 558) to identify racialized power dynamics in colonial spaces. As Kipfer (2007: 708) emphasizes, ‘Fanon not only suggested that colonialism and racism must be understood in spatial (as well as historical) terms, he also indicated that the transformation of … colonial space must be understood as a historico-geographical process …’. Framing colonial space as both historically and geographically contingent enables productive possibilities to emerge from engaging Fanon’s critiques of France’s colonial occupation of Algeria (and, more indirectly, Martinique) in conversation with contemporary settler colonial geographies in Canada.

Placing Fanon in conversation with Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth voices illuminates both the logical and unexpected connections that can be made within the multiple geographies of ‘colonial and metropolitan racisms’ (Garcia, 2006: 50) already present in his work. More broadly, the project of theorizing Blackness and Indigeneity together highlights the ways in which ‘Indigenous and Black women, youth, queer, Two-Spirit and trans individuals continue to be subjected to interconnected forms of gendered colonial and anti-black violence in settler colonial contexts’ (Daigle and Ramírez, 2019: 81). By considering the contemporary mechanics of settler colonialism in the lives of Black and Indigenous peoples in Canada, this article aims to confront ‘the binary and dialectical thinking that … render[s] Black people and Indigenous people as an antagonism’ (King, 2019: 7), and instead observe the production and treatment of Blackness and Indigeneity together as an interrelated function of contemporary settler colonial Canada. This is both aided and challenged by the theoretical foundation in Fanon’s work, in which Blackness and Indigeneity are synonymous, as Fanon’s Indigenous (or Native, in his words) subjects are colonized Black peoples of Algeria and Martinique. The colonized subject, for Fanon, is also the Black subject, which in this paper presents a generative destabilization of current understandings of Indigeneity in the Canadian context.

There are certainly tensions here, as some of Fanon’s arguments regarding the psychic condition of colonization are at odds with current Canadian settler colonialism, notably around assimilation, recognition and violent resistance – a productive distinction that Coulthard (2014) explores in Red Skin, White Masks (see also Alfred and Corntassel, 2005; Daigle, 2016; Fabris, 2017; Hunt, 2015; Simpson, 2014a, 2014b, 2017). Coulthard both encourages and critiques a Fanonian framework in understanding the politics of recognition for Indigenous peoples in contemporary Canada. In particular, Coulthard finds a level of inflexibility in Fanon’s understanding of cultural empowerment as a limited and transitional form of anti-colonial resistance, which cannot adequately capture current efforts for Indigenous sovereignty. However, other aspects of Fanon’s theorizing present unique interventions in Canadian settler colonialism, particularly around the psychic and social structure of white colonial culture, and the production of racial hierarchies and subjects. The colonial ‘spiral of domination’ (Fanon, 2004: 14) creates new histories and cultural outputs that ‘spell out the specificity and richness of Western values’ (Fanon, 2004: 8) while demeaning Indigenous traditions and ways of life. For Fanon, white colonial culture is spatially embedded in built and social environments in ways that reinforce stories and histories of colonialism as the originary culture of a given location, while overriding and erasing Indigenous peoples from the colonizer’s worlds. As Fanon (2004: 17) emphasizes, ‘the colonized are caught in the tightly knit web of colonialism’ which permeates discourses, social relations and the psyches of those living in a settler colonial state. Consequently, I understand Blackness and Indigeneity as distinct but deeply connected within the white settler colonial imaginary, and in particular to ‘the ways that White humanity and its self-actualization require Black and Native death as its condition of possibility’ (King, 2019: 21).

The domination of white settler culture and means of producing the figures of Black and Indigenous Others are reinforced by a collective unconscious – a concept Fanon develops from Jung – which operates as a cultural framework that instructs regional and national norms, feelings and expectations around race. For Fanon, this collective unconscious informs the creation and treatment of Blackness and Indigeneity in colonial states. I build upon this concept by placing it in dialogue with queer Canadian multiculturalism, which describes the participatory role of LGBTQ+ cultures, politics and spaces in multicultural celebrations, and how queerness contributes to the re-centring of white settler culture within broader Canadian multicultural outputs. While applying Fanon to a queer context is not straightforward, some have found relevance in Fanon’s ‘compelling analyses of structural abjection, (non)recognition, and psychic/corporal violence’ (Stanley, 2011: 2–3; see also Coly, 2015; Keeling, 2009; Musser, 2012). Although Fanon does not explicitly engage with homosexuality or queerness in his theorizing of the psychic conditions of race and colonialism, ‘the Fanonian suffering body has gender, sexuality, class, and race, as well as a particular position in … colonial space’ (Burnett and Milani, 2017: 554). By centring ‘the actual encounters and sensualities of bodies’ (Saldanha, 2010: 4) in his work on racialization and colonialism, Fanon provides a rich foundation in which critical race, settler colonial and queer geographical inquiries can overlap. The complex webs of psychological, social and embodied oppression that Fanon weaves compel us to further understand how gender and sexuality are bound to racialized subjects in white – and specifically, queer – colonial worlds.

In this article, I present how subtle, everyday manifestations of a collective queer multicultural unconscious inform racialized socio-spatial relations and encounters within Toronto’s gay village, and its impacts on Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth. Specifically, I utilize Fanon to trace the (non)recognition and cultural alienation that Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth experience in the village, and theorize how queer settler colonial space reinforces white settler colonial control over Indigenous representation. I follow this with an exploration of how Black phobogenesis – Fanon’s description of white anxiety of, and erotic desire for, encounters with Black subjects – emerges in the social relations that some Black LGBTQ2+ youth experience in the village. Analyzing Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth’s experiences of settler colonialism and racialization in Toronto’s village exposes the nuanced and elusive forms of racism present within mainstream white queer cultures, and identifies how urban queer geographies can actively perpetuate anti-Black racism and settler colonialism.

As an uninvited white queer and trans settler living, conducting research, and writing this article in the territory of the Anishinaabe, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga, Haudenosaunee and Métis peoples, my role as both a researcher and the author of this paper requires discussion. Generally, the majority of youth of colour and Indigenous youth who participated in my research readily shared detailed and intimate accounts of their lives and experiences – an act which is often helpful when trying to access support services, healthcare and affordable housing. Youth were not probed to discuss their experiences of race and/or Indigeneity with me unless they initiated the conversation during our interviews. Those who brought up these topics did so with a specific and expressed intent to share their experiences with a broader audience beyond myself as the researcher, and it is with this objective – of illuminating the routine, subtle violences that Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth so willingly shared – that I write this paper. Throughout this manuscript I predominantly engage with and cite Indigenous scholars, scholars of colour, and work from critical race and Indigenous studies, to combat the unaccounted use and erasure of this literature within (and beyond) queer geography. As part of this citational practice, I place canonical queer urban geographical texts aside as an attempt to offset the whiteness of queer geographies and illustrate how race and Indigeneity can operate as sites and frameworks of queer spatial analysis.

Throughout this paper I draw from interviews conducted in 2016 to 2017 with 29 homeless LGBTQ2+ youth in Toronto about their relationship to Toronto’s gay village. All youth participants had recently experienced homelessness in and around the city; however, the majority were temporarily housed at the time of their interviews. Of the 29 participants, 19 identified as people of colour, most of whom spent less time relating their housing status to our conversations about the village, and focused more considerably on their experiences of race in the neighbourhood; as such, this paper does not focus on how the village interplays with youth’s housing status. Additionally, the research focus on the village meant that other queer neighbourhoods and forms of queer placemaking across Toronto were minimally discussed during interviews, which is reflected in this paper’s focus on the village.

More specifically, this paper draws upon initial interviews with eight Indigenous youth and three follow-up auto-photographic walking interviews with Black youth. As I have detailed the experiences of anti-Black racism among a larger sample of homeless Black LGBTQ youth in Toronto’s village elsewhere (Rosenberg, 2021), I focus on these three interviews as they offer in-depth, tangible examples of social encounters that embody core concepts from Fanon’s work – specifically, Black phobogenesis and the collective unconscious – as they unfold within queer urban environments. While mental mapping and photography served as additional methods in the interview process, the Fanonian-based analysis I employ focuses on the racialized dynamics that occur in socio-spatial relations that are not strongly represented in these artistic methods; hence they do not appear in this paper’s analysis. Instead, this paper attends to content that emerged conversationally in the interview process, including youth’s interactions with the environment of the village, their relationships to forms of (non)representation in the neighbourhood, and the social encounters they experience in this queer environment.

Twenty-first century Fanon: Racialized desire and anxiety

The grip of Fanon’s writing rests in his powerful enunciation of the multifarious psychic, emotional and relational dynamics of the process of racialization in the context of colonial power, providing a rich ‘psychoanalytic framework [which] illuminates the madness of racism, the pleasure of pain, the agonistic fantasy of political power’ (Bhabha, 2004: 58). What is of particular use for the purposes of this paper is Fanon’s framing of colonial and racialized desire, anxiety and the ways in which the collective unconscious informs race relations that persist beyond his moment of writing, and into current social and cultural iterations of race.

Fanon argues that the demands and desires of the white colonizer instruct a process of identification that demarcates the Self versus the Other within the psyche and body of the racialized and colonized subject. The demands, desires and fears of the white colonizer construct this process of identification, which becomes internalized in the psyche of the colonized and racialized subject, and produces an experience of double consciousness in which the subject is split into two conflicting selves, one that is struggling for self-definition while the other ‘is imposed from the outside, white, world’ (Black, 2007: 396). ³ The psychic experience of Othering that Black and Indigenous peoples experience is directly informed by white settler beliefs, ideals and cultural outputs which exist within the collective unconscious. For Fanon, the collective unconscious formulates an unspoken architecture that produces social and cultural understandings of race, and routinizes white psychological and emotional responses to racial encounter – specifically with Black Indigeneity.

Fanon focuses on two of these responses which are directly informed by the collective unconscious and its stereotyping of Blackness: that of anxiety and desire, which he charges are bound together in the sexualized craving of feared ‘objects’ that emerge from and around the Black subject (in particular, Black men’s sexuality). In Fanon’s framing, desire and anxiety are inseparable affective responses that occur within the psychological and relational processes of the white settler collective unconscious, which are heightened in moments of racial encounter. Fanon (2008: 129) argues that in the white colonial imagination, the Black subject becomes a ‘phobogenic object’, or a figure (notably stripped from their humanity, hence Fanon’s linguistic choice of ‘object’ rather than ‘subject’) which incites anxiety and fear within the white colonizer. Importantly, the psychic structure of phobia is overdetermined, meaning that phobic objects and subjects exist as possibility through routinized processes of becoming feared, which are drawn from the collective unconscious. As Fanon (2008: 133, original emphasis) explains, a phobic subject

does not come out of the void of nothingness … . The phobia is the latent presence of this affect on the core of [the subject’s] world; there is an organization that has been given a form. For the object, naturally, need not be there, it is enough that somewhere the object exists: is a possibility.

As the figure of the Black man becomes phobogenic, Fanon argues that he – as a Black man – is no longer seen as human but rather a sexualized symbol, a marker of the Black phallus, of Black masculine sexuality which, as directed by the cultural unconscious, overwhelms the white subject. While Fanon does not account for queer desire in his theorizing of phobogenesis, he explains heterosexual phobogenic encounters between white women and Black men, arguing that contact with the phobic Black subject becomes eroticized, inciting ‘hallucinating sexual sensations’ (Fanon, 2008: 154) of both fantasy and neurosis. In these encounters, the phobogenesis of Fanon’s Blackness is pre-dated and has already occurred regardless of his actions, informed by the collective unconscious of white colonial society. Anxiety and desire thus instruct racialized encounters in white colonial culture, maintaining an affective response through the possibility of contact with the Black subject. Such moments of racialized encounter couple fear and pleasure together, where sexual reverie of the Black subject becomes bound with sexual anxiety.

Fanon’s theorizing of desire and fear in racial encounters links to additional understandings of the process of racialization as informed by whiteness, and offers insight into desire beyond the sexual and Black masculinity. hooks (2001), for example, argues that race functions as a source of pleasure for white people through the act of consuming the racialized Other. This consumption invokes imperialist nostalgia of racial domination through processes of white colonizers becoming cultured, open-minded and permanently altered through the act of subsuming racialized subjects. Fantasies of desire, seduction, and power (hooks, 2001: 369) manifest in the act of consumption, which allows white subjects to re-perform the violence of imperialism and colonization upon racialized subjects while simultaneously masking this violence as benevolence. As hooks (2001: 377) writes, it is ‘by eating the Other … [that whiteness] asserts power and privilege’, as the act of consumption sustains the narrative of race as white pleasure, and of white consumption as benign. In doing so, whiteness subsumes the racialized Other while simultaneously denying the role and presence of racism and racial suffering.

Reconfiguring Fanon into the lives of LGBTQ2+ Black and Indigenous subjects thus requires an understanding of the role of desire and anxiety – or, of racialized phobogenesis – as not only a sexual process but also one that offers emotional gratification through making racialized subjects known, legible and politically neutralized. For Fanon and hooks, the collective unconscious manoeuvers these positive affective circulations for white colonizers by filtering racialized subjectivities through whiteness. It is ‘the deep cultural fear of the black [subject] … in the psychic trembling of Western sexuality’ (Bhabha, 2004: 59), lodged and always reinforced by the collective unconscious, that culturally alienates Blackness in order to dismantle the Black subject and body, and produce the psychic condition of racialized Otherness. Culture, through ‘the heterogeneous assemblage of the texts of history, literature, science, myth … image and fantasy’ (Bhabha, 2004: 61), creates the white colonial condition of cultural alienation and the figure of the racialized Other. In Bhabha’s (2004) reading of Fanon, whiteness operationalizes culture to funnel the representations, forms of legibility and self-understandings of racialized peoples. The Othered subject exists ‘from where it is not’ (Bhabha, 2004: 67, original emphasis), much like Wolfe’s (2006) notion of a settler logic of elimination that marks Indigenous peoples as existing through their absence, as past and not present. Drawing from these frameworks, in what follows I explore how Canadian multicultural formulations manifest in queer geographical settings, and how this enables unique queer reproductions of white settler colonialism to proliferate in the social and cultural spaces within Toronto’s gay village.

Canadian multiculturalism and the village

The 1971 Canadian Multiculturalism Policy, subsequently followed by the Multiculturalism Act in 1988, emerged as a national policy to harmonize cultural tension among groups of European immigrants and the Québécois nationalist movement (Goonewardena and Kipfer, 2005: 671). As a legal framework, multiculturalism encompasses a vast collection of state policies and interventions which have been critiqued for their political structuring of race in terms derived from the white settler colonial state. Beyond this legal framework, the social and cultural ideology of Canadian multiculturalism is both founded upon and reproduces a white Canadian ‘we’ who ‘decides on the terms of multiculturalism and the degree to which multicultural Others should be tolerated or accommodated’ (Bannerji, 2000: 42). Such a ‘vehicle for racialization’ (Bannerji, 2000: 78) and strategy to manage racial difference through whiteness fragments communities of colour, aims to inhibit collective political resistance among communities of colour, and operates as ‘a self-interested politics of domination’ hinged upon white benevolence (Hage, 2000: 246; see also Thobani, 2007).

A powerful tool of multiculturalism is culture itself, which identifies and contains racialized difference through notions of cultural diversity. Race as difference carries the political potential to identify and politicize experiences of racism and retains a possibility for political provocation with the state and whiteness. However, when repositioned as cultural expression, this political charge is neutralized, and cultural diversity ‘buttress[es] the project of nation building and national unity in Canada’ (Mackey, 2002: 66; see also Brown, 2008; McLaren, 1995) through reaffirming a white Canadianness. As such, multiculturalism operates as a state-oriented project of de-racialization that ‘masks existing structural inequalities and white privilege under the guise of celebration, inclusion and spectacle’ (Yep, 2012: 973) rooted in culture. People of colour and Indigenous peoples are charged with the task of ‘cultural’ integration by modifying racialized difference to fit into notions of ‘Canadianness’ and, importantly, whiteness (Haque, 2012: 149, 198). Cultural iterations of multiculturalism thus function as projects of nationalism and whiteness (Mackey, 2002; O’Connell, 2010), whereby racialized difference is morphed into ‘a cultural mosaic based on celebrations of superficial aspects of diverse cultures’ (Brown, 2008: 376) and used to fix whiteness as originary and universal (Puwar, 2004).

As an additional optic of cultural difference, queerness has become operative within the liberal state as a further means of presenting an ‘untarnished image of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance’ (Puar, 2007: 26). While rooted in sexuality and gender, queerness as multiculturalism reinforces, and produces new versions of, figures of the racialized Other through homonormativity, wherein queerness functions as an economic and political arm of the (white, settler colonial) state (Puar, 2007, 2013; Wahab, 2015). Through this state alignment, queerness ‘is not defined against nationalism but through and with it’ (Awwad, 2015: 33, original emphasis; see also Gentile and Kinsman, 2015). Homonormative politics reveal the racialized politics behind who becomes marked as ‘excessive to, and whose removal is constitutive of, the Gay Village and other spaces designated as “gay,” “queer,” or LGBT’ (Haritaworn et al., 2018: 9). Notably, homonormativity has a strong presence in Pride Parades, and in Toronto the Pride Parade enables various state actors to converge through grandiose displays of queer culture, ranging from the inclusion of political parties, to police, to Ontario Corrections.

Among homeless Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth, the village is most frequently discussed in association with Pride, despite that many youth spend time in and around the village outside of the June celebrations. ⁴ This linkage is likely enhanced by the recent political activism by Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO), specifically during the 2016 and 2017 Pride Parades in which activists demanded that Pride Toronto remove uniformed police officers from marching in the future, among other calls for racial justice. BLMTO’s activism emphasized the links between homonormative politics, state violence and the broader, mainstream queer community, which increased tension and anxiety around race and racism within the village. Such tensions further contribute to the multicultural treatment of race within the everyday spaces and social relations in the village. In the remainder of this article, I present multiple ways in which multiculturalism manifests in the village through the experiences of Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth, specifically through the unique iterations of a collective queer multicultural unconscious.

Of myths and memorials: Representations of queer settler colonialism

Only two of eight Indigenous youth participants spend time in the village, while the remaining six spend the majority of their time in Indigenous-specific organizations throughout Toronto and are rarely in the village other than during Pride. Cheech and Mak, for example, are frequently at the Native Canadian Centre in downtown Toronto, and others, including Mak, Sherry, Tyrell, Jennifer and Bradley spend time in ODE, an Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth organization. Similar to non-Indigenous youth, housing-precarious Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth avoid the village largely due to concerns about safety and substance use. Mak explains that the village is a place where you can land in ‘bad situations’, such as being coerced for sex with money and/or drugs, and/or sexually harassed, and youth largely attribute this to the party culture of the village. Mak elaborates that, ‘you go out there and someone would be either hitting on you or trying to grab up on you or something’. Among Indigenous youth, Shaho, Mak, Bradley, Tyrell and Jennifer share experiences of being sexually harassed in the village.

For some Indigenous youth, the whiteness of the village and the lack of Indigenous representation serve as additional reasons to avoid the area. Bradley emphasizes that the neighbourhood caters to white people, and as a result, ‘I just don’t want to go there, more or less … It’s another reason why I don’t go around there’. While other Indigenous youth do not state this as explicitly as Bradley, Mak, Jennifer, Sherry and Tyrell also gesture to this whiteness of the village in their interviews, impressing a sense of cultural alienation and lack of belonging as Indigenous people in this queer environment. This can serve as a reason why the majority of housing-precarious Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth spend most time in, and seek out, Indigenous spaces that are not specific to LGBTQ2+ people, rather than non-Indigenous queer spaces in the village. For example, the only reason Indigenous youth share for using the main LGBTQ+ organization in the village, the 519, was when it was hosting ODE for a few months every Friday. Youth would attend ODE meetings at this location where they would run Indigenous-specific programming, as well as cook and eat food together. When ODE moved to another location, however, Indigenous youth no longer used this non-Indigenous LGBTQ+ organization.

Visible forms of (non)representation in the village are also important factors to the sense of whiteness. The village is home to a statue of settler Alexander Wood, constructed in 2005 and sponsored by the Church-Wellesley Village Business Improvement Area, who has come to be ‘celebrated as an early gay pioneer’ (Jackson, 2017: 91). Wood was a Scottish merchant who served as a lieutenant in the York Militia, senior planning officer, and later a treasurer, and had been involved in a rumoured and unconfirmed same-sex scandal during his time in Toronto. Owning 50 acres of Indigenous land in the recently purchased territory from Treaty 13 in 1805, Wood’s role as a queer settler is memorialized in the statue’s prominent location in the village, alongside the two streets (Alexander and Wood) named after him. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants pay little attention to this statue, impressing the normalization of settler colonial remembrance within queer landscapes. Simultaneously, the village is decorated with several murals adorning the outer walls of buildings and alleys, some of which display gender non-conforming, racialized and disabled people; however, only one includes Indigenous representation (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Mural on the outside wall of the 519 depicting World Pride 2014 in Toronto.

This mural depicts Toronto’s 2014 World Pride celebrations, a moment when Canadian queer multiculturalism was presented on a global scale, and includes a smaller figure on the upper-left side wearing traditional Indigenous ceremonial attire. Although this mural faces a park that almost all youth photograph during our interviews, including those who are Indigenous, none comment on this Indigenous representation.

The most explicit displays of Indigenous representation in the village occur during Pride, towards which most Indigenous youth feel ambivalent. Rather than attending the Pride Parade or Pride events with an entry fee, Indigenous youth spend their time in different small parks located throughout the village. Tyrell is the only Indigenous youth who discusses the Pride Parade in our interviews, and he specifically references the 2016 and 2017 Pride Parades in which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marched alongside former Liberal Party leader and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, current Liberal Toronto Mayor John Tory, and Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde. Tyrell was excited to see Trudeau marching in Pride, and that ODE had been invited to participate in the 2017 Pride Parade as an honoured group. ⁵ The 2017 Pride Parade was also Grand Marshalled by the Cree queer and Two-Spirit artist Kent Monkman; however, youth participants do not discuss his participation in the Parade.

As a large-scale demonstration of state-affirming queer culture, Toronto Pride’s multicultural displays mask the ongoing settler colonial violences against Indigenous peoples while heralding Indigenous artists, leaders and small organizations as honoured participants in the Parade. Such high-profile demonstrations retain state control over Indigenous representation and operationalize this representation as a symbol of Canadian multiculturalism. This echoes Fanon’s argument that recognition in a colonial context is dictated by the colonial state and its social and cultural outputs. In settler colonial Canada, this formulation demonstrates ‘the forms of racist recognition driven into the psyches of Indigenous peoples through the institutions of the state, church, schools, and media’ (Coulthard, 2014: 41). With Pride’s entanglement in celebrations of national identity centred around cultural diversity, the colony not only remains intact but is strengthened by queer settler celebration. However, as noted earlier, the village augments this queer multicultural Indigenous recognition with Indigenous erasure and colonial memorialization within its spatial and institutional structures. Combined with the collective queer multicultural unconscious that accumulates from Pride celebrations, the village shapes an ambivalent queer culture that erases Indigenous peoples, cultures and land while celebrating settler colonialism through a ‘world of statues’ (Fanon, 2004: 15), venerating a colonizer whose efforts further entrenched and facilitated the growth of the Canadian settler colonial state, and Indigenous dispossession and genocide.

Through a strictly Fanonian framework, Indigenous representation is an assertion of colonial control ‘aimed at molding a class of law-abiding Aboriginal citizens with identities that are formed vis-à-vis the colonial state and capitalist industry as opposed to their place-based Indigenous ontologies and laws’ (Daigle, 2016: 264). As the village and larger queer community almost entirely witness Indigenous representation through Toronto’s Pride Parade, this framework positions Indigenous queerness through queer settler Canada, enforced and supported by corporations and politicians who are stakeholders in ongoing efforts of Indigenous dispossession. Such performances of ‘reconciliation’ seek to place Indigeneity within mainstream LGBTQ+ culture as a form of settler homonationalism, which reproduces Indigenous peoples as ‘already disappeared from the modern and settled spaces’ (Morgensen, 2010: 119) in which queerness is located, and only recognized within the village in large displays of Canada’s claims to diversity. The village cultivates a queer settler space that mythologizes Indigenous LGBTQ2+ peoples as past rather than present, while memorializing queer settler histories. In doing so, a collective queer multicultural unconscious is cultivated that perpetuates Indigeneity as both an impossibility in everyday queer geographies like the village, and as emergent, erasing the thousands of years in which Two-Spirit peoples have existed and been celebrated within different Indigenous cultures. Queer settler colonialism is reinforced through queer spatial territorialization and Indigenous (non)representation (Dhoot, 2015), which is directly informed and reinforced by the collective queer multicultural unconscious. Such queer settler iterations contribute to Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth’s ‘dislocation from place’ (Barker and Pickerill, 2012: 1712) in the village, and reaffirm the neighbourhood as a site of queer settler colonialism and multiculturalism.

In thinking through Fanon, who argues that Indigenous peoples develop psycho-social attachments to colonial representations of Indigenous peoples, the cultural condition of a collective queer multicultural unconscious is totalizing. As Coulthard (2014: 139–140, original emphasis) summarizes of Fanon, rather than

emancipatory and self-confirming, [colonial] recognition is … cast as a “suffocating reification,” a “hemorrhage” that causes the colonized to collapse into self-objectification … [and] often provoke[s] within the oppressed a desire to “escape” their particularity, to negate the differences that mark them as morally deficient and inferior in the eyes of the colonizer.

Queer Black phobogenesis and articulations of refusal

As we walk together and take photographs during our second interview, Chocolate Baby Daddy (CBD) explains that they ⁶ rarely experience feelings of belonging in the village. They take very few photographs during our walking interview, reflecting the minimal attachment they have to the neighbourhood, and explain that they feel invisible in the village because its spaces are predominantly catered to white people. ⁷ Similarly to Bradley and Mak, CBD emphasizes that, ‘[the] majority of [the village] is not for me’ as a Black person. Instead, when they feel visible in the village it is usually when their Blackness is overemphasized and fetishized as an exotic marker of culture. For instance, CBD explains that when they have met white queer people in clubs in the village, ‘I had [white] people meeting me for the first time and twerking ⁸ because they think … “oh my gosh you’re so cool,” and start twerking. Things like that really made me feel like an outsider’.

CBD’s recollection resonates with Walcott’s formulation of the ways in which Black queer culture is venerated, captured and reformulated as white; in this process, ‘what often goes missing is the antecedent blackness of the [queer] style … [that] is reinvented as “white”’ (Walcott, 2007: 237). For Walcott (2007: 238), Black queer people inhabit contradictory spaces as both ‘tastemakers and outsiders’ in mainstream (white and multicultural) queer culture. While queer culture is generated from Black experiences, cultures and expressions, Black LGBTQ2+ people are Othered through the act of white queer consumption, which reproduces race as queer culture. In CBD’s experience, their Blackness is consumed and regurgitated as a cultural commodity, a measure of ‘coolness’. CBD’s Blackness becomes a pleasure exchange through the act of consuming Blackness as culture, delineating CBD as a cultural transmitter who then becomes subsumed by the white queer people twerking at them. Such consumption produces a benevolent white queer multicultural subject consuming race as culture, inducing a pleasure response through cultural appropriation and racial caricatures of Black histories, bodies and diasporic expressions.

In keeping with Fanon, this exchange may also serve as an anxiety response to CBD as an unknowable subject, particularly as they rest at an intersection of Black masculinity and gender nonconformity, an undecipherable body that incites, in CBD’s own words, both invisibility and close attention. If we understand the act of consuming the Other through Fanon’s phobogenesis, CBD’s phobogenic presence may be eased through white consumption, swallowing and digesting their Blackness through mainstream queer multiculturalism. Such an act neutralizes their Black masculinity and gender non-conformity as unsettling, political and visibly Other in a moment when Blackness is destabilizing the amnesic understanding of queer anti-Black racism in the village.

Similar phobogenic encounters are also present in Jordan and Mikey’s auto-photographic walking interview. Fifteen minutes into our interview, Jordan points out that we are being followed by a young, non-Black man. Neither Jordan or Mikey are surprised, and Mikey quips, ‘Look at why he’s following us around for … Probably picking up a delicious Black man’. Shortly thereafter, a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation approaches us for our opinions about a group of queer Toronto Police officers who issued a public call for the city to de-fund Pride Toronto after committing to BLMTO’s recent demands to ban uniformed Police from marching in the Pride Parade. While Mikey and I respond, Jordan remains silent, and after being prodded for a response, Jordan states, ‘I’m tired of having the conversation. I think the points are obvious, that I don’t feel like stating them today’. The reporter continues to push Jordan for an answer, who finally responds,

I wouldn’t say anything [in response to the call] … I don’t feel like it’s about me, I feel like there’s a bigger picture and I’m not the person to speak to that bigger picture. I’m not the voice of the young nation. I’m not.

In these moments of encounter, Jordan and Mikey identify how their Blackness is operationalized, as they comment on the unwanted attention they receive as both desired and needing to be controlled, contained, known to the non-Black subject. The moment in which Blackness can be identified is the precise moment in which the Black subject becomes ‘responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors’ (Fanon, 2008: 92) – an articulation that resonates strongly with Jordan’s experience. For Fanon, such phobogenic encounters aim to identify the Black masculine figure in order to render them known through whiteness, reaffirming racial hierarchies within the white settler state. Thus, these phobogenic encounters blister with a desire to consume Black feelings, thoughts and bodies that subsequently ‘break up the black [person’s] body’ (Bhabha, 2004: 60) in order to render the Black subject passive, apolitical and non-threatening through white knowing.

Such processes are inherently multicultural in that they neutralize the charge of Blackness as political, rendering Blackness legible through culture, and consequently non-threatening to the racial ‘neutrality’ required for a multicultural (and, for Fanon, colonial) landscape. Observing these phobogenic encounters, it can be argued that the village fosters a collective queer multicultural unconscious produced by the contemporary queer cultural and political logics that govern its landscape and the bodies within it. In a collective queer multicultural unconscious, fear and pleasure synergize in phobogenic encounters that respond to Blackness by aiming to consume and de-politicize its charge, particularly in a space where Black activism is exposing the underlying presence of queer racism.

Yet when Jordan refuses to articulate his feelings to the reporter and vocalizes his reasons why, the charge of his Blackness regenerates. The impact of vocalization also emerges in a story CBD shares with me of a sketch they wrote and performed at Fat Drag Musical, a play that was organized and performed by LGBTQ2+ youth of colour. Creating and performing culture by, with, and for LGBTQ2+ youth of colour, CBD tells me that

I’ve had the opportunity to connect with … really emotional things, … what it looks like to be desirable, what it looks like to be part of the community…. It is really dark moments, some of it is really sad, but I feel so relieved to let some of that out.

According to Fanon, there is minimal potential for political subversion in acts of performance, as it is easily co-opted by white colonizers and relies on tropes of Blackness and Indigeneity dictated by colonial culture (Coulthard, 2014; Hall, 2012). Other scholars, however, read Fanon for moments of liberation that can manifest in performance, including staged acts, as well as impromptu, individual actions (Bhabha, 2004; Davis, 2018; Hall, 2012). Bhabha (2004: 85, original emphasis) interprets that within the racialized figure ‘is a strategy of ambivalence in the structure of identification that occurs … where the shadow of the other falls upon the self. From that shadow … emerges cultural difference as an enunciative category; opposed to relativistic notions of cultural diversity…’. This enunciative category serves as a means of asserting racialized difference outside of Canadian multicultural diversity, enabling the Black subject to ‘[transgress] the familial’ (Bhabha, 2004: 90) during phobogenic encounters. Eluding multicultural processes of becoming familial invites a moment in which Black subjectivity ‘evacuates the self as a site of identity and autonomy and – most important – leaves a resistant trace, a stain of the subject, a sign of resistance’ (Bhabha, 2004: 71). In this sense, Blackness emerges outside of the collective unconscious, outside of a white colonial cultural framework, which allows Blackness to maintain its political charge and disrupt the neutralizing process of white consumption.

In identifying the sources of their objectification and refusing to provide the pleasure of their Black subjectivities, Jordan and CBD expose the underlying logics of multiculturalism aiming to render their Blackness a cultural buffet. When Jordan rejects the labour of representing Black queer voices, he refuses to transform his body into a representation of Black queerness in Toronto, as well as the reporter’s – and public’s – entitlement to, and desire for, Black thought. Similarly, in CBD’s performance where they employ lactose intolerance as metaphor for Black denial of white consumption, they prevent their Black trans body from being commodified and consumed through white desire, and instead insist that Blackness is witnessed as a politics of refusal, as personhood and embodiment outside of, and beyond, white instruction and pleasure. These articulations of refusal ‘alter the mode of objectification … [and] alter the conditions under which [they enter] into a space of objectification’ (Hall, 2012: 280). Through the language of Fanon, Jordan and CBD’s assertions of Black consciousness, or the bodily and psychic schema of Blackness, bypass the collective queer multicultural unconscious, enabling their subjectivities to ‘subvert and problematize the Black person’s role as symbol of the race’ (Hall, 2012: 281). Such articulations manifest Black queer consciousness and being as its own, refusing the direction and perspective of white desire.

Against white pleasure

Throughout this paper I have employed a Fanonian framework to theorize current renderings of Blackness and Indigeneity as they take form in Toronto’s gay village through a collective queer multicultural unconscious. Fanon’s work demonstrates how the domination of white settler culture produces experiences of cultural alienation, placing Black and Indigenous peoples into a ‘zone of nonbeing’ (Fanon, 2008: 2) in which subjective self-consciousness as a racialized person is difficult to attain without a violent overhaul of the existing white settler state and its cultural outputs. In particular, I have applied Fanon as a means of identifying the webs of multiculturalism that structure an underlying collective queer multicultural unconscious, which informs how racialized socio-spatial dynamics manifest within the urban queer environment of Toronto’s gay village.

Fanon’s work offers insight into contemporary iterations of queer settler colonialism, particularly how the colonial state infiltrates the village through multicultural celebration, Indigenous (non)representation and settler colonial memorialization. This affirms Indigenous scholars’ critiques of Canadian settler colonial cultures and politics that erase Indigenous peoples as present, and tightly control strategies of Indigenous recognition to ‘reproduce colonial imaginaries of territory … while facilitating the economic and political sovereignty of Canada’ (Daigle, 2016: 268). As part of the expanse of settler colonial geographies, Toronto’s gay village must also be considered a settler colonial space, dictating when and how expressions of LGBTQ2+ Indigeneity manifest, and reinforcing the cultural alienation of housing-precarious Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth. However, while the forms of Indigenous (non)recognition in the village reaffirm colonial strategies of Indigenous domination and contribute to the cultural alienation of homeless Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth in this queer settler space, the Indigenous queer formations that youth point to – such as their participation in ODE which is not anchored to the village – nod to the ‘radical alternatives to the structural and psycho-affective facets of colonial domination’ (Coulthard, 2014: 49) that persist against queer settler colonialism.

A Fanonian framework also illuminates the psychic and relational conditions of Blackness in the village – specifically, how an eroticized fear of Blackness informs a need to maintain Blackness as knowable, controlled and politically neutral. This occurs through pleasure processes which aim to render Black subjectivities known and pacified, re-positioned as subjects through whiteness. As it is easier to consume Black queer histories, thoughts, feelings and subjectivities when Blackness is marked as culture, queer multiculturalism further enables this ingestion of Blackness through its effect of rendering race as culture. However, Jordan and CBD illustrate the potential for Blackness to manifest outside of the collective queer multicultural unconscious and, consequently, whiteness. Enunciative power reasserts race as difference, clashing with the aims of multiculturalism and destabilizing the hold of a collective queer multicultural unconscious.

Reading Black and Indigenous struggles and experiences simultaneously is a politically necessary task to recognize the historical fusion of settler colonialism and slavery, and how anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism were/are both distinct and interrelated branches of white imperialism (King, 2019). While homeless LGBTQ2+ Black and Indigenous youth experience the socio-spatial processes of racialization in the village differently, this paper has presented how a collective queer multicultural unconscious seeks to dictate Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ representation and recognition within the queer urban geography of Toronto’s gay village. In settler colonial Canada, queer multiculturalism requires both Blackness and Indigeneity to be knowable in order to maintain hierarchized structures of white (queer) supremacy. In the everyday socio-spatial relations of the village, this results in limited representation of queer Indigeneity that ‘provide[s] an encounter with Indigeneity safely removed from real life’ (Barman, 2007: 28), while also commemorating queer settler colonialism. Given the focus on queer anti-Black racism in the village taking place concurrently with this research, Black phobogenesis manifests around the politicized Black queer subject, initiating further attempts to render Blackness knowable, and Black consciousness maintained, under the delineation of whiteness.

While distinct, these processes of a collective queer multicultural unconscious operationalize white desire in response to the anxiety of contemporary political activism by Black and Indigenous communities across Canada. As Black and Indigenous activism continues to politically destabilize structures of white supremacy and settler colonialism, racialized encounter becomes increasingly phobogenic, and the need for race to be maintained as pleasure becomes further imminent in the collective queer multicultural unconscious. The cultural and discursive processes that are (re)produced by and within white queer settler geographies assign particular meanings to queer bodies through racialized logics aimed at maintaining white supremacist hierarchies; however, such meanings ‘change over time as new meanings are projected onto spaces’ through forms of activism, advocacy and resistance (Burnett and Milani, 2017: 557). In building on Coulthard’s (2014: 48) critique of Fanon, identifying structures of desire and racialized Othering in queer spaces, and how these forces are resisted, holds potential to nurture oppositional politics which are ‘less oriented around attaining a definitive form of affirmative recognition from the settler state and society, and more about critically re-evaluating, reconstructing, and redeploying’ politically charged forms of culture and recognition among Black and Indigenous communities. Understanding the construction of race and racialized socio-spatial relations in queer urban geographies like the gay village renders visible alternative modes of politicization that exist outside of, and challenge, the logics of Canadian queer multiculturalism and whiteness.

In considering ‘the politics of waiting for a justice that is yet to come’ (McKittrick, 2014: 244), it is necessary to lean into imaginations of Black and Indigenous futures taking place within Canada’s multicultural schema, in order to bear witness to the ways of being and placemaking that emerge without, and against, multiculturalism (Walcott, 2016). Doing so necessitates a combined attention to experiences of race as violence, as well as the small and everyday actions demonstrating a persistent assuredness of something beyond the psychic and bodily harm of racialization in white settler colonial culture. The ways in which Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth articulate their racialized subjectivities against white queer settler colonial logics offer glimpses into optimistic possibilities and geographies, gesturing towards hopeful openings within the space of embodied politicization and Otherness, where difference exposes and undermines ‘multiculturalism’s feel-good promises’ (Burman, 2016: 370) by existing as provocative, political and perverse to the white queer settler imaginary.