![]() We remain committed to challenging and disrupting our own normative desires toward something more transgressive. This also includes those of us sitting on the panel – we and our contributors. Our book launch was a lovely demonstration of these tensions, with people in attendance who both participate in normative LGBT politics of inclusion and non-normative queer and trans folks who do really amazing transgressive work. OmiSoore: And in doing so we’re re-framing the conversation about the kind of political work that is often overlooked by mainstream LGBT activism. Our book speaks back to this by situating “gay rights” as a field of power itself, by questioning the terms of national belonging, and by disturbing inclusion in a liberal-equality-rights paradigm. This idea of “queerly Canadian” is a discourse that’s really invested in Canada as a safe haven. Another book was published around the same time that we were writing ours called Queerly Canadian, and for OmiSoore and I that text really encapsulates what our book is trying to intervene in: there’s this notion of “queerly Canadian” that understands sexual minorities, namely the “homosexual,” as having once been on the outside of the nation and the national imaginary, only now to be included within terms of national belonging. The chapters within our book speak to this in many ways we seek to rethink terms of belonging – what it means and what it could look like. Jacqui Alexander writes that citizenship is too fraught and too subject to state manipulation for it to act as a primary basis from which radical political mobilization can be carried out. Suzanne: To add to that: the book is an effort to critically think about the parameters of legal and cultural queer inclusion in Canada and its profound relationship with processes of exclusion and un-belonging. ![]() Who is obscured and how are we implicated as a result of these normative animations? Our book explores the non-normative queer spaces obscured by some of these normative desires. OmiSoore: It is an intervention that disrupts the normative ways of thinking about gay and lesbian-ness (or the “homosexual,” if you want to think of it that way), thus it is also an intervention into belonging and citizenship – both sexual and national – and the ways in which these are animated. ![]() Her work has appeared in Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture Journal of Intercultural Studies Canadian Journal of Women and the Law darkmatter and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice. You can follow her on Twitter which discourses and socio-political processes does this text intend to intervene? How do you imagine it extending beyond academic contexts? Her teaching and research interests lie at the intersections of critical race feminisms and law, gender, and sexuality. She is currently working on her manuscript, tentatively titled, “The Complexity of Blood: Canadian Blood Donation and the Queerness of Blackness.” You can follow her on Twitter Lenon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Lethbridge. OmiSoore’s research examines the discourses and deployment of blood narratives, as they intersect with Black diasporas, racialized sexuality and the continued signification of HIV/AIDS. OmiSoore Dryden is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Thorneloe University, part of Laurentian University. Dryden and Suzanne Lenon, to discuss the book as well as their own relationships to queerness, social movements, and what it looks like to resist and build alternatives to liberal notions of inclusion. Robyn Letson and Jasmine sat down with its editors, OmiSoore H. Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging, a recently published anthology, brings together a group of radical queer scholars to examine the ways in which homonationalism plays out in the Canadian context. ![]() Since its first articulation in 2007, Jasbir Puar’s concept of “homonationalism” has been widely used by queer theorists and activists to understand, resist, and build alternatives to the cooptation of queer existence by neoliberalism. ![]()
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