Residing on the stolen lands of Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country (Canberra), DEiFY celebrates and centres the resilience, rapture and rage of Q***r, Transgender and Intersex Bla(c)k, Indigenous and People of Colour. To the q***r global majority, this narrative is far too familiar: for centuries, the dominion of the Western colonial project has led to traumatic persecution, alienation from our culture
s, and the suppression of our complex histories. This colonial project remains in contemporary Western q***r* spaces where our identities continue to be expunged. But our spirits have proven to be too powerful to be vanquished, too incandescent to be extinguished. DEiFY harnesses this power to subvert and reject the white heteronormativity of this settler-state. We exist to honour the resistance and transcendence of our ancestors against colonial and hetero-patriarchal violence. To achieve our common goal of anti-racist q***r spaces, settler members of our collective recognise how they benefit from the exploitation as settlers on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri land. Despite some shared identities, we acknowledge that the experience of being Q***r, Transgender, and Intersex non-First Nations People of Colour is distinct from the First Nations community. We are therefore committed to continually elevate the immense strength and struggle of q***r Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Similarly, we recognise that our anti-racist, feminist and q***r resistance originates from the labour and knowledge of Indigenous, Bla(c)k and Global South activism. While we deify our heavenly bodies to conjure a space of nourishment and relief, while we dream of a radical present and future, we root our feet on the ground to remind us of our humanity, our daily oppressions, our material conditions. The paradise we manifest is as embodied as it is divine, as real as it is ethereal. DEiFY is a home for our community.
