Wiley Sharp

Wiley Sharp is a Doctoral Student in Urban and Cultural Geography and Sexual Diversity Studies. Their dissertation, The underbelly of the colonial metropole: Queer and trans pasts and presents in Toronto’s Bloor Viaduct examines the Bloor Viaduct as a complicated place. The double-decked truss-arched bridge stretches 960 meters across the Don Valley, facilitating flows of people and goods that make Toronto’s urban life possible. The viaduct is also one of the most used suicide sites in the world: more than 400 people have ended their lives there before the construction of a suicide barrier in 2003. Yet, the underbelly of the viaduct is also a site of queer and trans survival in the raves that take place beneath its ironwrought arches. The viaduct, then, is a place of many lives and deaths, a nexus of the settler-colonial power that brought it into being. What are we to make of the vivacious queer and trans lives that take root amid the viaduct’s deathscapes? This project combines archival research into the colonial-modern history of the viaduct, the migrant laborers who constructed it, and the rather queer suicides that haunted its first hundred years, with interviews with the queer and trans people who appropriate the infrastructure of the viaduct for other ends. In doing so, it explores how queer and trans people make their lives in the colonial-modern metropole of Toronto, and how they grapple with the hauntings of its violent pasts and presents.