Building Bridges on Queer Soil : Queer Kinship and the continuous Queering of Tkarón:to’s W*acking Community

As street dance continues to maintain global popularity and visibility in mainstream media, dancers are increasingly discussing worries about inauthentic and unsupportive dance-communities. This research explores pockets of the Punking / Whacking / Waacking / W*acking community on the lands of colonially known Toronto. These efforts are made in order to consider how a community can be queered and in turn uplift its agents, while also considering how to carefully enter in dialogue with history to embrace originating and empowering principals of a subcultural dance-form in its evolutions. The mixed-methods of autoethnography and phenomenology chronicle personal experiences of a multiracial queer researcher, while including voices of local community members through interview accounts given by established and newer dancers and culture stewards. An interrogation of what trials and successes lie within the maintenance of safer spaces with decentralised organisation of indoor- and outdoor sessions, drop in classes and dance programs in studio and public contexts depicts how presently community is nourished, maintained, and in reciprocity promotes abject ways of passing on knowledge, skills, self-care, and resistance.