"What's Up With All these Walls?" : Racialized Lesbian/Queer Women Immigrants and Belonging in Toronto

Despite government and scholarly interest in how Canada's immigrants settle after arrival, there is limited scholarship on how queer female immigrants find spaces for belonging in a Toronto context in both immigration scholarship, and in theories of queer migration. Drawing on critical queer, critical post-colonial feminist, and critical whiteness approaches, the paper aims to demonstrate why a universal subject, and increasingly, a universal queer subject renders a racialized lesbian/queer woman immigrant living in Toronto marginalized, impossible and unintelligible in mainstream and queer spaces. For the study, three racialized lesbian/queer women immigrants living in Toronto were interviewed. A reflexive analysis of the experiences of the three participants suggests that spaces of belonging for a racialized lesbian/queer woman immigrant in Toronto and beyond are limited, contradictory, and conditional.