Pride and Capitalism: Resisting Commodification and Acknowledging Settler Privilege

Our Resilient Bodies presents an intro to contemporary problems faced by mainstream Pride movements. How did Pride come to be seen as a big party for wealthy White cis gay men, while failing to serve the needs of those who experience the majority of homophobic and transphobic violence? What other kinds of problems are associated with the large influence of corporations in promoting and funding Pride?

This workshop will explore the connections between corporate investors, the theft of Indigenous land, and the exclusion/marginilization of queer people of colour, trans people and nonbinary queer people from Pride. Capitalism is an economic system very often critiqued abstractly but rarely broken down.

In this workshop, we will deconstruct capitalism’s defining features in order to understand how this economic s ystem works and how it privileges settlers at the expense of many marginilized communities. We will analyse our own positions as settlers and discuss how we can work through this position to resist capitalist violence.

—ACCESSIBILITY INFO—

There is a ramp leading up to the side of the building. (The pavement bump was fixed, but a new wooden bump has taken it’s place). No automatic door.

Bathrooms are wheelchair accessible, single stall, and gender neutral.

We’ll be meeting on the first floor.

—FACILITATOR BIOS—

Charly Kelly is an American Sign Language-English Interpreting student who is trans, queer, and ace. They grew up in New Brunswick, which is unceded M’ikmaq territory. They were the chairperson of the Fredericton Gender Minorities Group from 2014-2015, where they presented many Trans 101 lectures and worked to provide a safe space for many rans people in Fredericton. In 2014, they were the keynote speaker at the Pride in Education Conference held in Fredericton. They are excited to get back to activism and workshopping after a year of school.

Olive Bestvater is a political theory student and hetero cis-gendered settler from Treaty 6 territory Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She has been involved in SK’s activist community in varying capacities for five odd years. Projects that she’s been inovlved with include an unsuccessful campaign for a Saskatoon PIRG, co-presidenting the Socialist Students Association, and helpng with the International Women’s Movement’s annual photography showcase which challenges media representations of women of colour. Olive has been involved with a handful of workshops on capitalism taking place all over so-called Canada. Her minor in Critical Perspectives on Social Justice and the Common Good has focused extensively on the colonial impacts of global capitalism. Everything Olive knows about Indigenous resistances and realities is a result of the influence of a strong community of radical Indigenous students in Saskatchewan actively challenging capitalist dominance across the world.