Suchergebnisse

Russia's anti-LGBT Mizulina Law, named after its author, Elena Mizulina, was signed into law on June 29, 2013 by President Vladimir Putin. The law, which has since been dubbed the 'gay propaganda law' is aimed at "protecting children from information promoting the denial of traditional family values" and bans "promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors," thus prohibiting children from accessing information about the LGBT community through the press, television, and internet. Those found to be disobeying this law can face fines of ₽5,000, and organizations can face up to ₽1,000,000 in penalties, or even a temporary suspension of their activities. Though these fines may seem quite large, even harsher repercussions can be faced if the law is defied through mass media, like the internet, and tourists can face deportation. While this hostility towards LGBT Russians is not uncommon, the law also affects the accessibility of educational and other social support services to LGBT youth. As a result, both children and adults have faced tremendous harm, and horrific treatment of LGBT Russians has notably increased. Most devastatingly, however, secret detention camps for homosexual men in Chechnya have been created, serving as another means through which the Russian government can perpetuate injustice. In its investigation of Russian and Chechnyan history, this Article demystifies the atmosphere that led to the passage of the gay propaganda law and its harsh implementation.

The teaching of critical race, feminist, and queer theory generally, and of LGBT rights specifically, has developed into a discrete, contested, and politicised area of teaching in English law schools and beyond. While there is some academic discussion on the personal and political significance of 'promoting LGBT rights' within law schools, less considered is how 'LGBT rights' are shaped by the emotions of legal academics and how these emotions circumscribe what we imagine LGBT rights can and/or should mean in law and critical legal study. To illustrate this dynamic, this paper uses critical race, feminist, and queer scholarship alongside work in the emerging field of Law and Emotion to articulate the 'emotional grammar' of teaching a Gender, Sexuality and Law unit at an English law school. Turning to autoethnography, I use my emotional experiences as a methodological tool to explore how emotions co-constitute the pedagogical, political, scholarly, and personal registers of LGBT rights as a descriptive, critical, and normative pursuit. In doing so, I use 'emotional grammar' as a novel way to map how emotions structure legal pedagogies invested in pursuing LGBT rights. Emotional grammar illustrates how emotions structure: (1) the articulation of LGBT rights as an object of study in law; (2) the pursuit of law to secure the rights of LGBT people; and (3) the shape of legal critique relating to LGBT rights.

AbstractNationalism has been one of the domestic constraints to progress on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, especially in the Balkans that are dealing with multiple postwar transition realities. Ethno-nationalist challenges, often influenced by religion, have been significant in Bosnia-Herzegovina given weak state identity and democracy, competing institutionalized ethno-national identities, and slow Europeanization. Through the lenses of gendered nationalism, the societal security dilemma, and political homophobia, this article analyzes how the politics and discourse of LGBT rights during the past decade in Bosnia reveal tensions between competing and multiple identities and narratives—European, multiethnic, ethno-nationalist, and religious—using the violent response to the 2008 Queer Sarajevo Festival as a key illustration. However, in the past decade, LGBT rights have progressed and antigay backlash to LGBT visibility (in addition to stronger external leverage and other factors) has resulted in stronger activism and change. The public discourse and response to the announcement of Bosnia's first Pride Parade represents another turning point in LGBT visibility that seems to reveal that ethno-nationalist challenges may be lessening as LGBT rights norms gain strength.