Queer Unsettlements: Diasporic Filipinos in Canada’s World Pride

This article examines how queer diasporic migrants subtend the hierarchizing practices of Canadian multiculturalism and settler colonialism. As a case study, it focuses on “Cabinet of Queeriosities,” a contemporary art exhibit that featured the work of Julius Manapul, and Miss Gay Philippines Canada, a beauty pageant that featured Filipino/a contestants competing from across the greater Toronto area. By tracing the complex articulations of nonnormative intimacy, kinship, and sexuality that emerge from these two events, I begin to map the political possibilities of centering on queerness within Filipino/a Canadian migration research. I consider how diasporic forms of sexuality unsettle multiculturalism’s logics for policing inclusion and delineating difference. As diasporic arrivants, queer Filipinos/as index a repertoire of colonial histories that problematize the racializing mechanisms that continue to sustain settler colonialism. They enact messy utopic pursuits that create new possibilities for imagining collectivity, community, and belonging in Canada, beyond the pluralist narratives of diversity often maintained by the state.