Expanding the Boundaries of Pride

This post was co-authored by a recent graduate of Trent University, Arthmiga Rajasundaran.

During annual Pride festivals and celebrations, it is not uncommon to hear the refrain that Pride began as a riot, not a parade. This sentiment underscores the connection between today's festivities and the long history of fighting for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Indeed, in many places around the world, such rights remain unheard of, and even in North America, they are not guaranteed to remain forever. With the close connection between Pride, LGBTQ+ identity, and the awareness of a history of discrimination and societal exclusion, one might expect to find great acceptance and celebration of diversity within LGBTQ+ communities. Unfortunately, despite the fact that LGBTQ+ individuals come from all genders, generations, ethnicities, abilities, and nationalities, that doesn't mean all feel equally welcome in LGBTQ+ spaces. One such group includes queer, South Asian women.

In an article published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Sonali Patel explores the experiences of a small group of queer, South Asian women living in Toronto. Across interviews with nine women, themes of rejection, mistreatment, and feeling invisible were common. Describing the local LGBTQ+ community as being predominantly white, participants felt that the LGBTQ+ spaces within their reach tended to stigmatize cultural differences and were poor sources of support for anyone not fitting the community's western expectations.

Many LGBTQ+ people turn to others who share their sexual or gender identities as a means of compensating for a lack of familial support. This practise is so common that it is lovingly referred to as building a 'chosen family' of like-minded others who will provide the tangible, emotional, and often even fiscal support that can evaporate when someone comes out to their family of origin. As acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities grows, fewer people are outright rejected and disowned by their families of origin, but chosen families remain an important source of community support as they still provide a level of acceptance and understanding that may not be available from family members who do not have personal experience as a sexual or gender minority.

Double Jeopardy Rejection

Given the importance of chosen family, rejection from LGBTQ+ communities can carry a particularly hard-to-swallow sting for those who find themselves in need of a chosen family but rejected from the very communities from which such support is usually drawn. Participants in Patel's study described experiences of feeling like they did not fit in with either of their communities: their South Asian community or local LGBTQ+ spaces. This was exacerbated by the importance of family honour within South Asian culture, leaving many to feel as though their coming out was a threat to such honour. Indeed, for some, there was great concern that sharing their identity with their family could result in formal and permanent exclusion.

Such concerns unsurprisingly increase the desire to find support within the LGBTQ+ community, and yet when they did, participants described experiences of invalidation and disbelief. For example, participants noted that some White LGBTQ+ individuals they knew were surprised that a South Asian woman could be queer. Participants, therefore, described a sense of unspoken pressure to downplay their cultural traditions and traits in favour of trying to fit in with White, Western representations of queerness.

Increasing Visibility

Blending in may help some find a sense of community when it is needed most, but for many, the cost of doing so is too high. To live authentically, one needs to be true to the many different facets of their identity, and erasing one facet unwillingly in order to gain acceptance for another often leaves a person feeling alone and unknown. Denying one's culture—in this case, South Asian culture—may temporarily help queer women gain access to local queer spaces, but it can perpetuate the lack of representation within those spaces. Such lack of representation is reinforced by media portrayals of the LGBTQ+ community, in which it is either rare for characters to be both brown and queer or, if they are, the crux of the narrative focuses on the tension between those two identities.

Nonetheless, it is challenging to place the burden of increasing visibility on those who are themselves excluded. Queer South Asian women in the study described facing an inner battle between wanting to express themselves in a true and authentic way, including aspects of their culture and ethnicity, while also feeling the need to present themselves in a way that would conform to Western ideals of queerness. While the tension created by having dualling identities that place different aspects of one's self in conflict with each other is always challenging to overcome, the broader LGBTQ+ community can do much to help ease and erase the experiences of such tensions.

In Patel's article, one suggestion is to increase funding for inclusive programming that welcomes queer South Asian women so that they can find others with similar experiences. Many other such subgroups exist within the broader LGBTQ+ stratosphere, but at the end of the day, if we want Pride festivities, and all of our LGBTQ+ spaces, to be truly inclusive, we need much more than targeted enclaves of difference. From increasing visibility in the media, to thoughtfully designing LGBTQ+ community spaces and events in ways that are inviting to individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds, there is much that can be done to increase the reach of the rainbow and to ensure that any individual who needs or wants a chosen family among their local LGBTQ+ community can find one without sacrificing or hiding any other aspects of their identity.