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What novel political spaces emerge at the intersections of global HIV/AIDS interventions and LGBT rights movements? As discrimination and stigma become the targets of global health initiatives, how do communities affected by HIV/AIDS position themselves towards notions of rights? And what is the social and political afterlife of rights-based initiatives after they are defunded or cease to exist? These are the central research questions posed in the dissertation. To address them, I conducted six months of preliminary fieldwork and fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2012-2015 among gay and transgender communities in the upper Amazonian state of San Martín in Peru. Through data collection techniques that included participant observation and interviews, I examined the social and political effects of a rights-based HIV/AIDS intervention for gay and transgender communities in the region. Among these communities, I found the peche concept to be particularly meaningful. The peche referred to the small gifts that gay and transgender people exchanged for the company, affection, and sex with heterosexual men. While sometimes construed as either a risky sexual practice in HIV/AIDS-related research or considered disempowering by LGBT activists, I found that the peche had historical depth and social extension. I problematize these narratives by developing the concept of peche politics to analyze the political practices that emerged in San Martín among the communities I studied. I situate these practices, such as addressing discrimination and homophobia through formal grievances or recounting and transmitting stories of the internal armed conflict, at the confluence of local myths about sexuality, national histories of violence and human rights, and global health initiatives. In my conclusion, I rethink the local, national, and global scales of this research and propose a hemispheric imaginary to open new analytical possibilities, especially in the moments when global structures of HIV/AIDS initiatives and LGBT rights recede.

Under what conditions do states protect minority rights in a context of domestic resistance? Recent decades have seen rapid divergence on LGBT rights worldwide, with Africa presented as "norms antipreneur" in the face of international pressure. Yet, in 1996, South Africa was the first country in the world to provide constitutional protection on grounds of sexual orientation. This article develops an original theory on LGBT rights protection using a conflict-to-rights framework. Employing process tracing, elite interviews and archival sources, I show how a situation of insurgency allows LGBT activists to build networks and increase egalitarian attitudes to attain in-group status. Continued violence also works to block public participation in policy-making while dividing opposition forces, allowing a tiny group of activists to effectively lobby for change.

This paper explores an anomaly in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights policy, laws allowing transsexual individuals to amend their birth certificates. Unlike most other LGBT rights policies, these statutes are often found in Southern and other conservative states. In fact, these laws are found in half of the Southern states. The array of states with these laws does not conform to the traditional pattern of morality politics laws that is commonly associated with LGBT rights. Using a Cox non-proportional hazards model, we find that the adoption of these laws was influenced by vertical diffusion of the Centers for Disease Control's model vital records recommendations. States with more professionalized bureaucracies, like Virginia and Georgia, were more likely to implement these recommended best practices. However, as transgender rights became more closely associated with the gay rights advocacy movement, this issue likely resembles morality policy. The result being that liberal and conservative elites respond to these policies in predictable manners. Notably, the political opportunity structure in Southern states has not allowed the passage of this type of statute since the incorporation of transgender rights into the LGBT social movement during the mid-1990s.

This article explores civil society organizations' (CSOs) views on the contemporary situation of LGBT+people in Bangladesh. It is a lacuna requiring attention because of the country's poor and deteriorating equality and human rights record. Here we analyse the level of attention to prevailing human rights violations and apply critical frame analysis to the corpus of CSOs' submissions to the United Nations third cycle Universal Periodic Review (UPR), 2013–2018. These reveal how a series of key pathologies—including, violence, intimidation and discrimination—affect the lives of LGBT+people. The wider significance of this study lies in highlighting that, while not a replacement for justiciable rights, the discursive processes offered by the UPR are of key significance in seeking to advance LGBT+rights in countries like Bangladesh where oppression combines with extremism and political elites' refusal to embrace equality in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation.

This article analyses from an anthropological perspective the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, the first state-supported Parade in Serbia, as a part of the building of a democratic and European Serbian nation. In their discursive framing of the Parade and making claims on the state to take it under its auspices, the organising NGOs bound the event to the EU integration process of Serbia. This policy link helped them forge a political alliance with the state, but was also instrumentalised by the government to avoid an ideological conflict with the opponents of the Parade. Owing to the perception of the alliance as "elitist" and to the militarised and depoliticised nature of the state's involvement, the event materially actualised and reified rather than transcended the enduring conflict of liberal and collectivist citizenship visions in Serbia. The article argues that the overall discourse of the government on Europeanisation is informed by the same top-down and instrumental logic. However, members of civil society develop political subjectivities which demand active citizen participation and critically engage with the discourse to restore its democratising potential. Similarly, the emerging "populist" politics of LGBT rights, illustrated by the pop singer Jelena Karleuša's participation in the domestic debate, are better placed to face the legacies of socialist and ethnonationalist nation-building than the human rights and Europeanisation approaches.

This article analyses from an anthropological perspective the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, the first state-supported Parade in Serbia, as a part of the building of a democratic and European Serbian nation. In their discursive framing of the Parade and making claims on the state to take it under its auspices, the organising NGOs bound the event to the EU integration process of Serbia. This policy link helped them forge a political alliance with the state, but was also instrumentalised by the government to avoid an ideological conflict with the opponents of the Parade. Owing to the perception of the alliance as "elitist" and to the militarised and depoliticised nature of the state's involvement, the event materially actualised and reified rather than transcended the enduring conflict of liberal and collectivist citizenship visions in Serbia. The article argues that the overall discourse of the government on Europeanisation is informed by the same top-down and instrumental logic. However, members of civil society develop political subjectivities which demand active citizen participation and critically engage with the discourse to restore its democratising potential. Similarly, the emerging "populist" politics of LGBT rights, illustrated by the pop singer Jelena Karleusa's participation in the domestic debate, are better placed to face the legacies of socialist and ethnonationalist nation-building than the human rights and Europeanisation approaches. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright the American Council of Learned Societies.]

"The Intersection of LGBT Rights and Religious Beliefs in the United States" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractMost scholarship on corporate political activity assumes that market forces wholly motivate firms' political strategies. However, this conventional wisdom overlooks the role of employee groups in encouraging corporate activism. To evaluate whether employee groups are associated with firm social activism, we gathered all public statements in support of LGBT rights made by the five hundred largest publicly-traded US corporations from 2011 to 2017. In an exploratory observational analysis, we found robust evidence that in highly-educated workforces LGBT employee groups persuade management to take public stances in support of LGBT rights. Our findings suggest that internal pressure promotes activism on LGBT issues, and market, political, or social forces are insufficient to fully explain firm social activism. Although each does play an important role, since employee groups will use political, social, and especially market-based arguments to convince their managers to engage in activism.