Original Article

Affilia: Journal of Women and Social

Work

Making Queer and Trans of 2018, Vol. 33(1) 8-23

ª The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permission:
Color Counterpublics: Disability, sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0886109917729666
Accessibility, and the Politics journals.sagepub.com/home/aff

of Inclusion

Matthew Chin1

Abstract
Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines the accessibility organizing
efforts of queer and transgender of color community initiatives in Toronto, Canada. I argue that
these efforts constitute a kind of counterpublic making in which queer and trans of color organizers
discursively construct the marginalized populations that they seek to include. In contrast to
approaches to accessibility that prioritize conventional service institutions as the locus of social
transformation, this article illustrates the significance of social workers supporting the work of
existing community initiatives in their drive toward an intersectional politics of inclusion.

Keywords
accessibility, community organizing, counterpublics, disability, gender, race, sexuality

The accessibility of social services to various individuals, groups, and communities is a central
concern to social work. Given the field’s emphasis on social justice and advancing the well-being of
vulnerable and oppressed populations, social work is committed to ensuring that people can partic-
ipate in initiatives that will improve their lives. In its Statement of Ethical Principles, the Interna-
tional Federation of Social Workers (2012) maintains that social workers “should promote the full
involvement and participation of people using their services in ways that enable them to be empow-
ered”. While not addressing questions of access per se, the Statement’s emphasis on “full involve-
ment and participation” means that social workers must be attentive to service accessibility.
Accessibility is also an important consideration within the ethical mandates of social work associa-
tions at the national level such as the Canadian Association of Social Worker’s Code of Ethics,
which states that social workers should “uphold the right of people to have access to resources to
meet basic human needs”(2005, p. 5).
The most prominent way that social work has attempted to operationalize accessibility within its
field of practice is to transform service organizations, programs, and personnel with the goal of

1
Graduate School of Social Service, Fordham University, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:
Matthew Chin, Graduate School of Social Service, Fordham University, 113 W 60th Street, New York, NY 10023, USA.
Email: mchin17@fordham.edu
Chin 9

maximizing the participation of intended target populations. In spite of its many criticisms (Abrams
& Moio, 2009; Ben-Ari & Strier, 2010; Johnson & Munch, 2009), the field’s preoccupation with
cultural competence or the extent to which social services are able to meet the needs of clients across
different domains of social difference (Lum, 2010; Rothman, 2007; Williams, 2006) is the most
widely recognized manifestation of social work’s concern with accessibility. Though initially
focused on the inclusion of ethno-racial minorities, cultural competence has since broadened to
include a concern with addressing sexism, ageism, ableism, and cis-heteronormativity among other
issues within service delivery. Weston Donaldson and Tammi Vacha-Hasse’s (2016) analysis of the
degree to which staff working in a long-term care facility are able to meet the needs of their lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender residents is a current example of how cultural competency is mobi-
lized within social work practice.
In this article, I shift the discussion on the relationship between social work and accessibility
away from how service organizations can become more accessible to marginalized populations and
toward an investigation of how different marginalized populations attempt to become more acces-
sible to one another. Such an approach is in keeping with social work’s emphasis on empowerment
or the “process of increasing personal, interpersonal or political power so that individuals can take
action to improve their life situations” (Gutierrez, 1990, p. 149). Rather than turning to traditional
social work organizations as the default means through which disadvantaged groups can achieve
improved well-being, I focus on how these groups work to support one another in the drive for
greater self-determination. In so doing, I shift power away from dominant social work institutions as
the locus of social transformation and attend to the way in which power is generated among
marginalized groups.
In examining how minority populations engage in accessibility work, I focus specifically on
queer and trans of color community arts organizers. Given the multiple forms of marginalization to
which these organizers are subject, they serve as a particularly compelling group through which to
examine approaches to accessibility as they might otherwise be expected to petition as opposed to
grant access to programming and services. In this article, I investigate how queer and trans of color
organizers approach accessibility by examining both the theoretical foundations of their work and
the way in which accessibility practices take shape within their community organizing. I identify
two different approaches to accessibility: A disability justice approach focused on the inclusion of
people with disabilities and an outreach-based approach that prioritizes the involvement of com-
munity newcomers. Though these approaches differ in the populations they seek to include, their
similarities lie in the way they anticipatorily imagine the groups they attempt to engage. I argue that
this process constitutes a kind of counterpublic making, or a reconfiguration of dominant modes of
belonging which queer and trans of color community organizers attempt to achieve through their
accessibility practices. In making this argument, I draw on queer and trans of color scholarship (de
Vries, 2015; Ferguson, 2003; Haritaworn, 2008; Puar, 2007) as well as on the literature of critical
disability studies (Clare, 2001; Erevelles, 2011; Garland-Thomson, 2002; Kim, 2017) in order to
extend existing community organizing frameworks (Minkler, 2012; Stall & Stoecker, 1998; Walter
& Hyde, 2012) by illustrating the significance of attending to the interconnected nature of commu-
nity belonging and the politics of inclusion.

The Research Project: Enacting politics through art: Encounters between

queer and trans of color organizers and the Canadian City
Data Collection
The findings from this article are drawn from the study Enacting politics through art: Encounters
between queer and trans of color organizers and the Canadian City. This project attempted to
10 Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 33(1)

understand the role of the arts in the relationship between urban government institutions and queer
and trans of color community organizations. The data were drawn from three sources. One source
was 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork among queer and trans of color community arts initiatives in
Toronto, Canada, between 2012 and 2014. Organizing initiatives were chosen on the basis that they
provided community arts programming and were run largely by and for queer and trans people of
color (QTPOC). I participated in and/or attended the events and programming of 13 of these
initiatives and came to work closely with three of them as a community organizer.1 In this article,
I focus specifically on one of these groups, Unapologetic Burlesque because of its explicit attention
to questions of accessibility and my direct role in its accessibility organizing efforts. The second
source of data was 63 semistructured interviews with queer and trans color community organizers
and program participants (n ¼ 55) and state arts administrators (n ¼ 8). Each person was interviewed
only once, and interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. The third source of data included
two community feedback sessions in which study participants were invited to give input on the
preliminary research findings. Those who attended these sessions (n ¼ 16) were previously inter-
viewed in the study. For both the ethnographic fieldwork and the community feedback sessions,
I wrote detailed field notes on a computer within 24 hr of the event at hand to document the
observation/participation process.

Data Analysis
I analyzed these data using a constructivist grounded theory approach. This approach required an
iterative process in which data analysis took place as data collection was occurring. I used a
preliminary process of open coding for the interview transcripts and field notes from the fieldwork
and community feedback sessions. I then analyzed the data using a constant comparison method
making use of focused and axial coding. Finally, I wrote memos throughout the analysis process to
make sense of the data analysis as it was occurring. The findings on accessibility within Unapolo-
getic that I detail below were one of the many results of the study which elaborated questions of safe
space (Chin, 2017a), the temporality of organizing efforts (Chin, 2017b), intracommunity conflict
(Chin, in press), and political economic strategies (Chin, in preparation) as a consequence of
QTPOC’s creative attempts to build community within the constraints imposed by state institutions.

Accessibility and Disability Justice Organizing

Disability justice movements have had an important influence on accessibility organizing within
Toronto-based queer and trans of color community organizations. Given the interconnectedness of
different mechanisms of oppression, it is not surprising that racial, gender, and sexual minorities are
engaging in disability justice work as a kind of intersectional approach to community organizing.
Following Kimberly Crenshaw’s (1989) seminal work and the scholarly and activist contributions of
feminists of color (Gutierrez & Lewis, 1994; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Smith, 1995), I mobilize
intersectionality as a means through which to understand the interconnected nature of different
modes of social difference. Intersectionality attends not only to the existence of overlapping social
identity categories but also to how the way in which these interconnections are structured and
experienced as lived realities can generate important theoretical and practical insights.2 In this
section, I outline the community and legal contexts in which disability is foregrounded and show
how these contexts are consequential for how accessibility organizing comes to be structured. In so
doing, I also illustrate the underlying theoretical foundation of these efforts and how their conceptual
framing of disability plays an important role in how accessibility efforts are organized.
The fact that QTPOC are engaging in disability justice work has important implications for the
study of the interconnected nature of the politics of difference. By examining the interconnectedness
Chin 11

of the mechanisms of social difference based on disability, race, gender, and sexuality, we can more
clearly understand the significance of queer and trans of color organizers seeking to make their
initiatives more accessible to people with disabilities. For many critical disability scholars, it is the
notion of disability that serves as the basis upon which other subordinate populations are subject to
mechanisms of exclusion. Siebers (2008) maintains that disability frequently anchors the status of
marginalized identities:

disability functions according to a symbolic mode different from other representations of minority
difference. It is as if disability operates symbolically as an othering other. It represents a diacritical
marker of difference that secures inferior, marginal, or minority status . . . the pathologization of other
identities by disability is referential: it summons the historical and representational structures by which
disability, sickness and injury come to signify inferior human status. (p. 6)

The devaluation of disability as a category of human existence is especially relevant for QTPOC
because the subordination of racial, gender, and sexual difference is founded on its relationship to
disability (Chen, 2012; Meekosha, 2006; Omansky Gordon & Rosenblum, 2001). David Snyder and
Sharon Mitchell contend, “if we consider racism to be tethered to biology, then drawing parallels
between racism and ableism seem necessary particularly given that disability is inevitably seen as
degraded biology” (2003, p. 859). Robert McRuer makes an analogous connection between queer-
ness and disability and argues that “the system of compulsory able-bodiedness, which in a sense
produces disability, is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that
produces queerness: that, in fact, compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-
bodiness and vice-versa” (2006, p. 2). If the terms on which people with disabilities are subject to
human disqualification are also the terms on which racial, gender, and sexual minorities are con-
stituted as “other,” the fact that QTPOC organizers are working on issues of disability justice can
also be seen as a way in which they are working against their own subordination.3
An example of a queer and trans of color community initiative working on addressing issues of
disability is Unapologetic Burlesque, a queer, antiracist, consensual community performance ini-
tiative. Unapologetic was cofounded by kumari giles and Shaunga Tagore partly out of their dis-
satisfaction with their experiences in Toronto’s mainstream burlesque scene. Among many things,
they were frustrated with performers of color continually being sidelined to minor roles, the limited
opportunities to perform non-cisheterosexual storylines and the difficulty of various groups such as
people with disabilities to participate either as audience members or performers. As a result, they
created Unapologetic as a way of democratizing the means of cultural production and as a return to
the politically subversive roots of this genre, which initially operated to counteract normative modes
of gendered sexuality. They conceptualized burlesque not necessarily as a sexualized practice
involving the removal of clothing but as a means of storytelling for various marginalized groups
(Unapologetic Burlesque, n.d.-a).4
For Unapologetic, the motivation to address issues of disability in their organizing work came
from the commitment to meeting the articulated needs of community members. I became intimately
aware of the disability dimensions of Unapologetic’s accessibility work because I took on the role of
Unapologetic’s accessibility coordinator at kumari and Shaunga’s request.5 In meeting with them to
discuss their request, I learned that this push for accessibility had come from community members
who had attended Unapologetic’s second event. They had shared with kumari and Shaunga that the
content of some of the performances were emotionally intense and that they were left with difficult
feelings that they struggled to address on their own. kumari explained that Unapologetic took this
feedback very seriously. They wanted to make their events accessible to people with mental health
issues but needed others to work with them given their limited personnel. I responded that I would be
happy to help but that I was hesitant to do so because I had no prior experience with accessibility
12 Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 33(1)

work. kumari and Shaunga restated their desire to work with me and suggested that I get in contact
with and learn from those who were already doing this kind of organizing and provided me with a list
of contacts as a starting point.
In the process of meeting with accessibility organizers, I came to learn that Unapologetic’s work
on accessibility was part of a larger trend within queer and trans of color organizations. Masti Khor,
an artist, community organizer and performer with Unapologetic explained:

I think that access is becoming a huge deal in QTPOC communities because of disability justice and the
work that Stacey Milbern, Mia Mingus and Leah [Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha] do and have been
doing for a long time now . . . . It’s been influential in our communities in the past few years and as more
crips of colour come out as being disabled . . . it’s less and less okay to not have ASL . . . [we won’t have
a] politicized QTPOC event . . . at places that aren’t wheelchair accessible. But 2 years ago it was okay to
do that. It’s awesome we’re growing politically and that’s exactly where we should be going. I’m really
proud of us and part of that access is around emotional pieces too; issues of mental health and taking care
of each other.

As a way to demonstrate the kind of accessibility work that goes into an Unapologetic event,
I include below the accessibility information section that was posted to the Facebook page for the
event held in December, 2013.

Trigger warnings6: Coming soon!

The first two rows of seating at this event will be reserved for folks with chemical sensitivities/injury,
folks who have wheelchairs or mobility devices, who need to sit, read the screen, or have access to ASL
interpreters, and people of colour.
Two ASL interpreters will be present at the Monday, December 16th show. For both shows, all text
(performer bios, song lyrics, etc.) will be projected onto the screen that will be set up on the stage.
We will have active listeners present on both nights in case something happens at the event that brings
up things for audience members and/or performers that they may want to talk with someone about. If at
any time you feel as though you need to leave the space, we welcome you to take best care of yourself
and we offer these tips to support you: [website address].
So that folks with chemical injury can attend and perform at this event, please come fragrance free.
Good information about how to do this is here [website address]. At minimum, please refrain from
wearing cologne, perfume and essential oils and products containing them.
The venue is wheelchair accessible.
Unfortunately, we are not able to provide onsite childcare for this Unapologetic Burlesque Show. We
are going to try to make this happen for the next show!
Finally, we are always learning about how to make our spaces more accessible. This is an ongoing
process and we will continue to update the event page with information around accessibility. Please
contact Matthew [author] at [email address] with any questions, concerns or issues that you may have
about accessibility at this event.

While the role of accessibility coordinator had sensitized me to the increasing emphasis on disability
justice within queer and trans of color community organizing initiatives, it was not until I attended
the BlacknessYes! meeting in May that I became aware of the legal significance of attempts to
ensure accessibility for people with disabilities. BlacknessYes! describes itself as a community-
based committee that celebrates the creativity, histories and resistance of African diasporic, Black
Chin 13

and Caribbean queer, and trans people in Toronto.7 In this meeting, we were discussing plans for
Blockorama, a stage of programming organized each year that takes place during Toronto Pride.
More specifically, we were talking about the logistics of securing two ASL interpreters8 for the
event. In the exchange that I detail below: two of the organizers of BlacknessYes! Nik Redman and
Syrus Ware discuss this issue in detail when Nik recounts his conversation with Amy, a staff
member at Pride Toronto.
Nik: I asked her if there was any movement on our second [ASL] interpreter
and she said “No” and I said, “How come?”
Syrus: She should have gotten one by now.
Nik: I said that you should have booked people months in advance, you have
the dates. She said that she’s going to ask a few people for us.
Matthew (author): Why do we need ASL for? Is it for the whole . . . ?
Nik: [interrupts] No it’s just from 4-10 [pm]. Mostly when there is talking and
performances, I guess even the dance performers. When we give them
[the ASL interpreters] the lyrics in advance they can interpret them.
Matthew: So we don’t book our own ASL?
Nik: It’s supposed to come from Pride [Toronto] and their budget as a big
organization and it has to basically [pause]. They have all these laws that
they have to adhere to and I haven’t really put that to her.
Syrus: It is a law because all we need is one person to make a request in advance
[for ASL] and because of the AODA guidelines [Accessibility for Ontar-
ians with Disability Act], if someone is requesting for customer service
access, you have to provide it unless you can provide evidence of undue
hardship, which is the wording of the law, which it [Pride Toronto] is not
because it is one of the major [festivals].

In this exchange, Nik and Syrus express their frustration with Pride Toronto’s progress on
securing ASL interpreters for Blockorama and point to the AODA as a way of illustrating the legal
ramifications of accessibility efforts around disability. Because BlacknessYes! works in partnership
with Pride Toronto to host Blockorama, the legal stipulations that they face around accessibility are
quite different from the situations of other queer and trans of color community organizing groups
who, given their informal status and more tenuous links to formal institutions, are not legally
obligated in the same way. Nevertheless, I bring up BlacknessYes! and the AODA guidelines, as
an entry point to discuss the specificity of disability legislation in the province of Ontario to unpack
the way in which accessibility work is conceptualized and practiced.
While earlier legislation such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario
Human Rights Code drew attention to the disadvantaged position of people with disabilities,
disability activists, and community organizations have more recently identified the need for
greater efforts to remove barriers to full participation for people with disabilities within Canadian
society (Beer, 2010). The AODA came about as a result of their work to improve the living
conditions of people with disabilities. It passed into law through the Ontario legislature in 2005
and it states:

Recognizing the history of discrimination against persons with disabilities in Ontario, the purpose of this
Act is to benefit all Ontarians by
(a) developing, implementing, and enforcing accessibility standards in order to achieve accessibil-
ity for Ontarians with disabilities with respect to goods, services, facilities, accommodation,
employment, buildings, structures, and premises on or before January 1, 2025 and
14 Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 33(1)

(b) providing for the involvement of persons with disabilities of the Government of Ontario and of
representatives of industries and of various sectors of the economy in the development of the
accessibility standard (Government of Ontario, 2005).

Disability scholars have linked policies like AODA to a social model of disability. In this model,
disability is conceptualized in terms of a dichotomy between individual and private impairment on
the one hand and a structural public disability on the other (Shakespeare, 2013). As opposed to a
medical model in which disability is seen as an individual deficit, the social model conceives of
disability as the relationship between people with impairment and a disabling society. Faye
Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp state

this paradigm insists that disability is not simply lodged in the body, but created by the social and
material conditions that “dis-able” the full participation of a variety of minds and bodies. Disability is
thus recognized as the result of negative interactions between a person with an impairment and his or her
social environment. (2013, p. 54)

Instead of focusing on individual intervention as in the medical model, the policy implications of the
social model emphasize the importance of removing the barriers that have been imposed on people
with disabilities. The AODA, and indeed the notion of accessibility itself, fits squarely within the
realm of the social model as the goal is the transformation of the social conditions that are respon-
sible for the challenges faced by people with disabilities.9

Accessibility as Community Outreach

Investigating how queer and trans of color organizers work to secure disability justice through an
examination of the conceptual and juridical underpinning of these efforts does not constitute an
exhaustive analysis of how accessibility operates within community organizations. In addition to
looking at how accessibility work is mobilized, it is also important to examine how this work is
received, understood, and negotiated within community contexts. In this section, I highlight the
different responses that audience members offered to the accessibility efforts implemented at one of
Unapologetic’s events in order to illustrate that community organizers must be attuned to the
consequences of how these efforts are put in place. Building on the critiques offered by audience
members that Unapologetic’s accessibility work was potentially alienating for newcomers, I turn to
the literature on community organizing which points to the importance of adopting both an inward
and outward orientation to building community ties to illustrate that accessibility work may involve
efforts to reach beyond existing community structures.
On December 16, 2013, Unapologetic Burlesque hosted the “Superqueer Holiday Potluck
Dinner” at the Gladstone, a boutique hotel in the west end of downtown Toronto. The show asked
participants to reconsider/re-envision/re-imagine holiday celebrations, which are often difficult
events for queer and trans people in navigating family belonging. That night, one of the show’s
accessibility volunteers urgently approached me and the kumari during the intermission to tell us
that several audience members indicated that someone wearing heavily scented products was
sitting in the front two rows which were reserved for people with chemical sensitivities. I quickly
looked over to the front of the room and saw that indeed several audience members were squirm-
ing uncomfortably, holding their noses, and breathing through their mouths: it was clear that the
chemicals in the scented products were causing them to become ill. In brainstorming how to deal
with the situation, kumari volunteered to make an announcement reminding audience members of
the need to come to the event fragrance free and to ask those wearing scented products to move to
the back of room so as to prevent harm to those with chemical sensitivities. After kumari made this
Chin 15

announcement, audience members shuffled themselves around the room and, given the calmer
energy of the show and lack of further reports from accessibility volunteers, the issue appeared to
be resolved.
Audience member responses to these and other instances of Unapologetic’s accessibility work
were mixed. On the one hand, as I walked throughout the venue after the show thanking audience
members for coming, I received several compliments on the show’s accessibility. A prominent
disability justice activist glowingly shared that Unapologetic’s accessibility work was “right up
there with Sins Invalid” a community performance project well known for its disability justice work
(Sins Invalid, n.d.). On the other hand, I spoke to Scott a few days later who shared some of his
reservations about Unapologetic’s approach to accessibility. Working at the gender and sexuality
office of a local college, Scott invited members from the college’s queer of color student group to the
event thinking that it would be a good opportunity to introduce them to a community event outside of
a university setting. Having debriefed with the students after the show, he shared with me some of
their reactions as people who had never before participated in a queer and trans of color community
art event. Overall, he gave the feedback that the event was set up in such a way that was confusing
and somewhat off putting to the students who attended.
For instance, Scott introduced one of his students, Harry, to his friend Kay who had agreed to
volunteer as an active listener for Unapologetic at the show. Harry asked Kay why she was wearing a
ribbon around her arm and she explained that it was meant to identify her as an active listener and
briefly explained to him what her role entailed. As noted earlier, active listeners were recruited as
part of Unapologetic’s accessibility efforts to ensure that those who experienced emotional distress
(or became affectively triggered) as a consequence of the show might have someone to talk to. Harry
was not clear why such a role was needed and laughed when he heard the explanation. Scott
explained to me that not everyone was familiar with the concept of “active listener.” Having invested
so much time and effort into the accessibility work for the show, I responded somewhat defensively
that we described the role of active listeners on the Facebook event page and in the actual space of
the venue itself we had put up signs at the entrance and within the performance space explaining
what “active listeners” were. Scott did not disagree with me but explained that people have to
understand themselves in particular ways in order for these categories to make sense: if you do not
perceive yourself as someone who is capable of being emotionally triggered, the notion of an active
listener will not be relevant to you. As newcomers to Unapologetic these students were unfamiliar
with events that were set up in this way and it is unlikely that they would have felt the need to speak
to an active listener (at least in the way that was intended). This conversation with Scott led me to
understand accessibility organizing in a much broader way; it not only entailed addressing issues of
disability, but also other dimensions that might exclude participation such as being a newcomer to a
social scene characterized by complex cultural dynamics.
Scott’s point very much aligns with existing concerns about attending to community newcomers
within organizing efforts. Patrick, the facilitator of the Drag Musical, a community performance
initiative for queer and trans youths of color explained that community organizing cannot focus on
people who are already in the “scene” and that accessibility necessarily included reaching out to
others. He states,

for me, community is about expanding it too. It’s not just QTPOC [queer and trans people of color]. I’m
part of a larger community that wants to grow . . . when you are community organizing and building a
movement, it’s not just about the people who agree with you, it’s about how to get everyone in.

In trying to work with this principle in the Drag Musical, Patrick explained to me that in the outreach
and selection process for the program, the team purposefully reached out to people who were not
already within the queer and trans of color community arts scene and decided that most of the
16 Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 33(1)

participants would be selected for the program on the basis that they had not already been involved
with these and similar initiatives. Having seen Patrick at various community events throughout the
city making announcements and raising awareness about the Drag Musical and sitting in on some of
the selection interviews with various youths, I can attest to these organizational commitments to
community growth.
By positing accessibility as a part of a broader process of community building, the Drag Musical
situates accessibility within one of the cornerstones of social work practice: community organizing.
In their definition of community organizing, Walter and Hyde (2012) state,

if we perceive community not as an existing unit that needs to be organized differently but as a dynamic
and emergent whole embodying varying degrees of community-ness that is continually being built or
created, then the building of community will be one of the central concerns and activities of community
practice. Community is created or built, or not, with each of our actions; with our consciousness
concerning ourselves, others, and the issues; and with our relationships. (2012, p. 84)

Walter and Hyde illustrate that community practice does not entail working with preexisting
collectives but rather working to construct these collectives through relationship building.
In framing accessibility as a kind of community building the Drag Musical is focused not just on
any kind of relationship building but on building relationships of a particular type. Pierre Bourdieu’s
work on social capital has been influential among community scholars and is particularly helpful in
analyzing the relational nature of community practice. Bourdieu defines social capital as “the
aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network
of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition” (1985, p.
248).10 Walter and Hyde forward three kinds of social capital and describe how they contribute
to community building in different ways: “bonding- strengthening existing relationships; bridging––
building new relationships; and linking––fostering linkages between community members and
community organizations” (2012, p. 81). Within this framework, the Drag Musical engages in both
bridging and linking forms of social capital by reaching out to those who have not previously been
involved in queer and trans of color community activities. For this initiative, accessibility is a form
of community building in which community organizers work to foster bridging and linking forms of
social capital by establishing relationships with community “outsiders.”

Accessibility as Counterpublic Making

The accessibility organizing work of Unapologetic takes place within a broader community context
where other queer and trans of color initiatives (like the Drag Musical) are also working through
questions of participation and representation. Though these initiatives may be focused on the
inclusion of different groups (people with disabilities or community “outsiders”), they nevertheless
structure their programming to encourage the participation of their intended population(s). In this
section, I shift attention away from the question of whether or not accessibility initiatives meet
intended outcomes to examine the broader consequences of accessibility work more generally. I
argue that accessibility organizing is a public-making process in which community workers inter-
pellate or anticipatorily imagine the participants they seek to engage. Thus, my interest is not on
investigating the success of accessibility initiatives in drawing in already-existing communities, but
rather on looking at how these initiatives discursively construct the communities they seek to
include. In situating accessibility organizing as a process of public making (Cody, 2011; Warner,
2002), it is important to note that queer and trans of color community initiatives such as Unapolo-
getic and the Drag Musical are not just interested in making any public. With their focus on drawing
together ethno-racial, gender, and sexual minorities (among others), their work is more closely
Chin 17

aligned with the construction of what Nancy Fraser would term “subaltern counterpublics” (1990, p.
67). Within a context where social difference on the basis on race, gender, class, sexuality, and
ability among others are hierarchically arranged, the fact that queer and trans of color organizers are
creating subaltern counterpublics challenges dominant modes of social inclusion.
As Scott indicated earlier, the fact that Unapologetic engages in accessibility practices like
having “active listeners” at community events is not only potentially off putting to event newcomers,
but it also assumes that audience members will understand the role of active listener and engage with
active listeners in a particular way. The process that Scott describes––the way in which accessibility
efforts work on flesh and blood people as well as discursively construct the audiences they seek to
enroll––is the very means through which publics are constructed. In his identification of a public as a
space of discourse, Warner (2002) argues that a text can be described as public if it addresses people
who cannot be known in advance and who are identified primarily through their discursive partic-
ipation. Much like the hit or miss nature of the success of accessibility efforts in fostering the
involvement of target populations, Warner cautions that becoming part of a public is not a straight-
forward process,

the magic by which discourse conjures a public into being, however, remains imperfect because of how
much it must presuppose . . . . It appears to be open to indefinite strangers, but in fact selects participants
by criteria of shared social space (though not necessarily territorial space), habitus, topical concerns,
intergeneric references, and circulating intelligible forms. (2002, p. 75)

For Warner, the very act of constituting a public is a selective process in which not everyone takes
part.
In his articulation of the relationship between ideology and subjectivity, Althusser’s (1971)
proposes the concept of interpellation, which I identify as the process through which public making
occurs. Althusser argues that ideology

functions in a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘trans-
forms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I
have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most
commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘hey you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical
scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere
one-hundred and eighty degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has
recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’
(and not someone else). (1971, p. 129)

Situating Unapologetic’s accessibility work within a model of interpellation, audience members

may “turn around” when hailed by efforts intended to promote the participation of particular groups.
Yet turning around, Althusser’s metaphor of coming into subjectivity, is dependent on the ability to
recognize the means through which this hailing occurs. As Scott discussed earlier, if an audience
member is not familiar with accessibility efforts (trigger warnings, active listeners, accessibility
ushers, ASL interpreters, reserved seating for particular groups, etc.), they will not see them as
relevant to their participation. In Althusser’s terms, these efforts fail to interpellate some audience
members as they do not turn around when hailed.
The tension between how accessibility efforts anticipatorily imagine their intended participants
and the ways in which flesh and blood individuals engage with these overtures allow us to take
seriously Francis Cody’s argument that “the political subject of publicity is deeply entangled in the
very technological, linguistic and conceptual means of its own self production” (2011, p. 47). Cody’s
elaboration of a “political subject of publicity” highlights one of the challenges of using Althusser’s
18 Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 33(1)

model of interpellation as a way of understanding the accessibility efforts of queer and trans of color
community organizers. While Althusser envisions the process of hailing as the means through which
an individual becomes a subject, QTPOC accessibility organizing efforts are not concerned with
individual subjectivity per se but rather with the creation of a particular kind of public (subject). In
this case, I follow Warner’s (2002) discursive concept of publicity, which is (partly) defined through
the hailing of unknown others. Thus, while QTPOC accessibility organizing practices create a
particular kind of public, the logics of these practices rest on an understanding that it is not possible
to know beforehand hand exactly who these participants might be.
In trying to get a sense of what is happening within this public-making process, it is important to
consider those who are in the business of creating these publics, their (un)intended audiences and the
relationships between them. Thus, QTPOC accessibility organizing does not address unqualified
unknown others, but rather unknown others who are nevertheless discursive participants. For
instance, Unapologetic Burlesque describes itself as an antiracist, queer, consensual performance
series and while it does not attempt to restrict participation in its events, it nevertheless does
anticipatorily imagine some social parameters that characterize its participants. As indicated on its
website, Unapologetic Burlesque (n.d.-a) states,

performers, audience members and people who make all of this possible include, but are not limited to
folks who identify as; queer, youth, people of colour, Indigenous, fat, chronically ill, disabled or with a
varying set of abilities/disabilities, and folks from a wide range of class, work and educational back-
grounds. We are continuously engaging in dialogue with community members and individual/group
reflection processes of who gets access to stage or learning spaces, who gets left out and why, and what
structures can be built in order to increase accessibility and representation.

Within the framing of its accessibility work, Unapologetic is not interested in reaching just anybody
and everybody; rather it seeks to explicitly address unknown others whose life experiences are
characterized by subordination in some way.
While all accessibility as public-making efforts involve reaching out to unknown others, the
fact that these QTPOC organizations are concerned specifically with marginalized groups means
that they are not just involved in creating undifferentiated publics but rather what Nancy Fraser
(1990) calls “subaltern counterpublics.” She describes these publics as, “parallel discursive arenas
where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses which in turn
permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs”
(1990, p. 67). Warner (2002) highlights the significance of the creation of counterpublics in
relation to the workings of dominant public spheres and argues that in contrast to dominant publics
which take their lifeworlds for granted and misrecognize the scope of their address as universal,
counterpublics engage in scene making as a means of transformation and not merely replication of
the status quo. He contends that the claim to be oppositional is not what makes a public a counter
public, but rather

counterpublics are ‘counter’ to the extent that they try to supply different ways of imagining stranger
sociability and its reflexivity; as publics they remain oriented to stranger circulation in a way that is not
just strategic but also constitutive of membership. (2002, p. 88)

This process of constructing modes of stranger sociability is particularly significant for QTPOC
because they are often passed over, expelled from or granted only provisional membership within
dominant publics (Giwa & Greensmith, 2012; Ware, 2010; White, 2013). By creating their own
counterpublics through practices of accessibility, queer and trans of color organizers are thus building
their own modes of belonging in a broader context that devalues their lived existence and realities.
Chin 19

Conclusion
In this article, I examine how queer and trans of color community arts workers engage in accessi-
bility organizing. Through an ethnographic investigation of the theoretical foundations and practical
strategies of queer and trans of color accessibility organizing, I identify two different approaches to
accessibility: one oriented toward the involvement of community newcomers and the other pre-
occupied with ensuring the full participation of people with disabilities. Though these approaches
differ in the populations they seek to engage, they both entail a process in which community
organizations anticipatorily imagine those they seek to include. Following the work of Nancy Fraser
and Michael Warner, I identify this process of anticipatory imagination as a kind of counterpublic
making in which queer and trans of color community workers construct their own particular kind of
stranger sociability. Within a broader context where QTPOC are subject to in various forms of
violence, the construction of their own publics operates as a means through which they structure
their own belonging in otherwise hostile environments.
The suggestion that queer and trans of color accessibility practices as processes of counterpublic
making operate as a critique of dominant modes of social inclusion does not mean that these practices (or
the ideologies that animate them) are without fault. As indicated earlier, the way in which Unapologetic
implemented its accessibility practices around disability limited the participation of community new-
comers. It does not follow however, that these accessibility practices necessarily failed. This is because
queer and trans of color accessibility efforts are not outcome based. As Shaunga and kumari indicated in
their letter template requesting financial sponsorship from corporations for ASL interpretation, “[though
our goal is to] make queer and POC performance spaces accessible and enjoyable to all the communities
we care about and who deserve space, we still have a lot of work to do. This work is ongoing.”
Accessibility organizing as (counter) public making is a continual open-ended process.
This process-oriented approach to accessibility, combined with the fact that queer and trans of
color accessibility efforts exist within a hierarchical relationship with more dominant forms of social
inclusion, has important implications for social workers. In their attempts to construct their own
spaces of belonging, minority community groups operate against the exclusionary tendencies of
more powerful institutions. For instance, as illustrated earlier, Unapologetic Burlesque was formed
to counteract the racism and cis-heterosexism within Toronto’s mainstream burlesque scene. The
subordinate position of Unapologetic and other community groups in relation to dominant institu-
tions makes them potential sites for social work intervention. Rather than attempting to transform
existing human service organizations or establishing new programs to combat mechanisms of social
exclusion (or in addition to these efforts), social workers can support the work of minority com-
munity initiatives in their bid to establish new modes of belonging. By directing attention away from
social work agencies and prioritizing the existing efforts of disadvantaged communities, social
workers adopt an empowerment-oriented,strengths-based approach by taking a supportive (as
opposed to leadership) role in social change efforts and locating the driver of this change within
the communities most affected.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: This research on which this article is based was funded by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the
University of Michigan.
20 Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 33(1)

Notes
1. While ethnography as a research method is uniquely suited to illustrating the quotidian dimensions of social
life, the immersive and deeply relational nature of this research endeavor often means that ethnographers
are forced to grapple with their personal relationship to the project and research participants. In this study, I
chose to do research with communities with which I previously had a close personal relationship. Many of
the queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) groups in this study agreed to participate in the project
because I identify as a queer person of color, was friends with the organizers beforehand and/or because I
had previously worked with these initiatives. During the project, I continuously negotiated the multiple
roles of community organizer, friend and researcher. This process of role negotiation can be complex and
fraught with ethical dilemmas (Kanuha, 2000).
2. In a similar vein, throughout this article, I use the term “queer and trans of color” to refer to the way in
which individuals have chosen to describe themselves as an identity category. I also mobilize the insights of
queer and trans of color analyses which highlight how hegemonic racial, sexual, and gendered regimes
come to structure the lives of those they subordinate in ways that produce specific kinds of knowledges and
experiences. While interrelated, these two senses of the term (epistemology vs. [self] ascribed identity
category) are not interchangeable.
3. In making such a statement however, it is important to refute two possible though contradictory entailments.
The first is that although disability scholars have tried to show how disability is often the foundation on which
other modes of social difference are devalued, the way in which mechanisms of devaluation are manifest vary
widely across these different modes. Thus, for instance, while racism and ableism may be related to processes
of disqualification on the basis of biological inferiority, racist and ableist practice may be enacted and
experienced in very different ways. Second, though racism and ableism are related but distinct modes of
devaluation, the existence of sick and disabled queer and trans folks of color (many of whom participated in
the study on which this article is based), make it impossible to understand the categories of disability, race,
gender, and sexuality as isolable dimensions of social difference in terms of lived experience.
4. For instance, their first event was held at the end of October 2012 and featured performances that worked
against the way in which “cultural appropriation, racism, and transmisogyny through costumes is allowed”
during Halloween (Unapologetic Burlesque, n.d.-b).
5. In her e-mail to me, Shaunga wrote: “We thought of you as someone really awesome to work with and
would love it if you were interested in taking on the outreach/accessibility coordinator position! Also
thinking because you had asked us if the show could somehow be incorporated into your research––so
doing this work might be a way for you to understand through experience how the work comes together that
would benefit your research. The main part of this role would be around overseeing the process of getting
ASL [American Sign Language] interpretation and active listeners at the show, and keeping track of
performer and community accessibility needs. We’ll definitely be around as backup for everything so you
wouldn’t be doing it without support.”
6. Part of my role as accessibility coordinator involved eliciting information from the performers and
passing this information onto the ASL interpreters so that they could be as prepared as possible to
interpret the show. The form that performers were required to submit as part of this process described
trigger warning in this way: “Trigger Warnings give folks at the show opportunities to prepare for
subject manner that may elicit heavy, difficult or complicated emotional responses, as well as allow
us space to be in control of how/if we engage with the material. Is there any heavy/difficult content in
your piece that requires a trigger warning? FYI, there will be active listeners at the show to support
folks backstage and in the audience. (Example: This piece deals with misogyny and contains specific
misogynist/violent language. Feel free to take a break from the space or speak to an active listener if
you need to.)”
7. The specific identification of BlacknessYes! with African diasporic, Black and Caribbean queer and trans
people makes it clear that the general term “queer and trans of color” does not attend to (a) the way in which
Chin 21

many queer and trans of color community initiatives in fact have very specific ethno-racial affiliations and more
importantly and (b) the way in which ethno-racial otherness is experienced differently across different ethno-
racial groups. Throughout this article I have been using the term “queer and trans of color” which is term that
was wide spread among the groups I was working with at the time of data collection. However, shortly after the
study was completed, community organizers began replacing “queer and trans people of color” (QTPOC) with
the term “Black Indigenous Queer and Trans People of Color” (BIQTPOC) as a way of highlighting the very
specific ways in which anti-Black racism and mechanisms of settler colonialism in Canada work to racialize
Black and Indigenous queer and trans people in ways not felt by other ethno-racial minorities.
8. It is typical to have two ASL interpreters at any event because the work of interpretation is quite arduous
especially for longer periods of time (more than 2 hr). The two interpreters will often take turns interpreting
roughly every 15–20 min.
9. While the social model has been useful to disability movements not only in its effectiveness as a means of
leveraging resources to transform disabling conditions but also as means of building a positive sense of
collective identity, disability scholars such as Siebers (2008) have also taken issue with the way that this
model downplays the very important role that impairment plays in the lives of disabled peoples.
10. While research around this phenomenon initially focused on the potential benefits accruing to actors who
obtain social capital through their participation in broader networks, more recently, political scientists such
as Robert Putnam (1993) have analyzed social capital in ways that have equated it with the level of
participatory behavior in community activities.

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Author Biography
Matthew Chin holds a joint PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan and is
currently an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Social Service at Fordham University. Using an
interdisciplinary approach that draws from social work, anthropology, critical ethnic studies and gender and
sexuality studies, his work unfolds along three lines of inquiry: analyzing race, sex and power in the Americas,
interrogating diversity in academia and studying the arts as a method of social change.