2023 PRIDE TORONTO BIPOC AMBASSADORS RENOUNCE "EMPTY" AWARD
TORONTO, June 16, 2023 /CNW/ - "There's really no such thing as the "voiceless" - there's the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
In February 2023 - Les Femmes Fatales: Women & Femmes of Colour Burlesque Troupe was contacted by Pride Toronto to be their Pride 2023 Bipoc Honoured Ambassador.
With this honour came promises of Title Recognition, Promotion of the troupe across various Pride Toronto promotional materials, content creation, display on Pride Toronto's website, media interviews, a featured spot at the beginning of the Pride parade and a public announcement in the media of the troupe's title as Pride 2023 Bipoc Honoured Ambassador.
These promises largely went unfulfilled. Despite countless efforts to get PRIDE to make good and honour the troupe appropriately, Les Femmes Fatales have been ignored by PRIDE TORONTO, shut out from performing on their stages this year, repeatedly snubbed and left out of 2023 the Pride Programming. Instead of being honoured, they're being overlooked by Pride, and with it their 13 year history as Canada's first burlesque troupe for women and femmes of colour as is their legacy as a community leader and artistic entity composed entirely of queer folx.
Les Femmes Fatales have been left with no other choice but to renounce the award as the Pride Toronto 2023 BIPOC Honoured Ambassadors effective immediately. Performative allyship is deadly. Tokenizing a group of performers of colour with roots and contributions to Toronto's performing Arts Community and Toronto's Queer community that run as deep as Les Femmes Fatales is not only disrespectful, it's abhorrent. Professing support and solidarity with a marginalized group in a way that either isn't helpful or that actively harms or takes advantage of that group is exactly the type of behaviour that PRIDE TORONTO was called out on in 2016 by BLACK LIVES MATTER TORONTO. Yet, Here PRIDE TORONTO is again, 7 years later, in very much the same boat.
If you're not uplifting marginalized voices you are silencing them. Les Femmes Fatales will NOT remain silent.
Les Femmes Fatales are Canada's first and longest running burlesque troupe for Queer Women and Femmes of Colour & their allies, founded in 2010 by Toronto-based performer & playwright Dainty Smith.
Comprised of 16 multidisciplinary artists ,the artistry of Les Femmes Fatales is a celebration of self-love, resistance, resilience and rebellion.
SOURCE Les Femmes Fatales
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