Reconfiguring time, love, and money: Adjusting chronotopic realities among queer and trans of color community organizers in Toronto, Canada

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Toronto, Canada this article considers how queer and trans of color community arts initiatives come to exist as temporal phenomena. Given the association of racial, sexual, and gender nonnormativity with temporal backwardness, these organizations serve as a useful site to examine how temporal regimes are composed. Drawing on the work of grassroots queer and trans of color community arts initiatives, I show how the short-term, youth-based nature of these efforts is intimately tied to mechanisms of state funding and to the feelings-based relationships that characterize community work. I argue that in their bid to transform their initiatives into sustainable, intergenerational organizations, queer and trans of color organizers must work to change the affective and political economic contexts in which these initiatives exist. By positing the commensurability between “love” and “money” and using the framework of temporality to draw them into the same analytic space, I contribute to existing studies on emotional labor by disrupting Enlightenment logics that separate “spirit” from “matter.” Ultimately, I examine the political ramifications of enacting normative models of temporal development to explore a queer approach to change over time.