ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the difficulties faced by organisers and members of the QTPOC groups in building community. Participants were concerned with how paranoid reading shapes some current formations of QTPOC and wider queer activism and how this may be detrimental to community building. Participants were concerned about an over-emphasis on safety and punitive strategies, such as ‘calling out’ and removing individuals from communities who exhibit problematic or abusive behaviours. Organisers were critical of how paranoid reading and a focus on individual vulnerability and injury seemed to structure some aspects of the groups, frustrating the groups’ more transformative potential. Returning to Munoz I propose that by focusing on the sociality of ‘feeling brown’ and of feeling queerly raced together we can resist the foreclosure of a reparative and hopeful politics, building on erotic experiences of connection and joy.
