Remembering and Forgetting: Archiving Queer and Trans 'south asian' organizing in Toronto

This work considers the ways memory, history, community and activism come together. It is an autoethnography that speaks to the specificities of queer and trans 'south asian' community organizing and activism in Toronto. Queer/Trans 'south asians' in Toronto can be understood as a heterogeneous set of communities whose individual and group-identify formation is socially and spatially constituted. Using a broadly intersectional social justice lens, understanding how queer/trans 'south asians' conceptualize and express their diasporic, sexualized, gendered, and racialized identities allows for a mapping of how these communities 'make themselves' in social landscapes. Informed by community-grounded, self-critical and anti-racist frameworks, this portfolio uses Desh Pardesh, a political arts festival that took place in Toronto at its peak in the 1990s, and introspection about the nature of the archive to explore queer and trans 'south asian' community organizing. Ranging from theoretical, deeply person and creative, this portfolio is praxis in the complex (and messy) realm of community-oriented and community-focused critical work.