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Published in Reviews and Critical Commentary: http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/post-marriage-lgbt-politics-in-spain/ ; Council of European Studies

This dissertation examines the impact of litigation on a social movement's dominant substantive goals and message. While scholars have devoted substantial attention to the study of social movement litigation, research in this area typically focuses on how social movements affect substantive law, or more broadly, how a movement's legal tactics bring about social change. By contrast, my focus in this dissertation is on how litigation affects the social movement itself. In particular, how does litigation as a tactic shape a social movement's collective agenda? How does it affect which perspective among possible competing visions comes to define the movement?I investigate these dynamics through a case study of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement from 1985 to 2008. The study involves three phases of original empirical research, each of which investigates a potential mechanism that may privilege litigation over other tactics in its ability to set the LGBT movement's primary substantive agenda. First, I use a content analysis of newspaper coverage of LGBT politics to determine which movement tactics have received the most media visibility. Second, I perform a statistical analysis of LGBT organizations to determine which movement tactics have been most associated with organizational survival and stability. Third, I perform a qualitative analysis of a subset of those LGBT organizations to examine variation in the strategy-formation processes used by primarily litigation-, lobbying-, or protest-based movement groups.The media content analysis revealed that litigation received more news coverage than any other LGBT movement tactic, suggesting that litigation had greater visibility than other tactics. In addition, the statistical analysis revealed that the movement organizations that used litigation had greater survival rates than other types of LGBT movement organizations, suggesting that litigation has been a particularly stable feature of LGBT politics. The qualitative analysis of LGBT organizations revealed further insights into how litigation may influence the agendas of non-legal movement actors. Whereas litigating LGBT movement groups proactively pursued preplanned organizational priorities, protest groups formed their agendas reactively, focusing on the issues covered by the mainstream media. This phenomenon appears to have diverted protest groups away from their original priorities and toward the issues that the media found newsworthy. Given my findings that litigation coverage dominated news headlines, the processes identified here may enable litigation to dominate protest activism as well. Taken together, these findings suggest that the media visibility and stability of social movement litigation may contribute to the prominence of litigation and cause legal goals to dominate the movement's overall substantive agenda. I describe this process as the "legalization" of a social movement's agenda.This dissertation makes a novel contribution to existing scholarship by exposing systemic processes that may privilege movement litigation relative to protest, elevating the issues being litigated to top movement priorities. Significant implications follow for theories of law and social change. Focusing on litigation narrows a movement's agenda because courts offer a forum for only those grievances that can be translated into legal claims. This may be particularly problematic for movements that base their legal claims in antidiscrimination law, which has become settled around quite limited understandings of equality as formal access to equal opportunity and discrimination as an intentional, individual harm. This interpretation not only denies remedies for the structural factors most responsible for perpetuating inequality, it also places the focus on preventing individual wrongdoing rather than producing substantive outcomes. Thus, when antidiscrimination litigation comes to define an equality movement's priorities, the movement may find itself privileging issues with little hope of creating substantive social transformation.

Este artículo1 explora la producción de políticas reparativas en el movimiento de lesbianas, gays, bisexuales y trans en el Perú. Otorgando un protagonismo muchas veces negado al lugar de los afectos, se sostiene que las políticas reparativas son necesarias para la supervivencia de activistas y activismos LGBT. Además, se postula que las políticas reparativas habilitan posibilidades y alianzas inimaginables por las normas hegemónicas, radicalizando así el compromiso colectivo del movimiento LGBT por justicia social. ; This article explores the production of reparative politics in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement in Peru. Paying close attention to the often ignored site of affections, it argues the necessity of reparative politics for the survival of both LGBT activists and activisms. Furthermore, it argues that reparative politics hold open the possibility for creating alliances previously unimaginable by hegemonic norms, thus radicalizing the LGBT movement's collective commitment to social justice.

Situational contexts vary substantially across the country. This variation provides conditionswhere a subset of the American public may be exposed to situations that others arenot. How do contexts affect the politics of minority groups? In this dissertation, I examinehow the politics of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people are situated by differing contextsacross the United States. I examine how LGB presence aects and conditions the approvalof the mass public. I examine the mechanism this influence bears on representative behavior in Congress. I finally examine how varying contexts uniquely affects some LGBs over others. In total, I find that varying contexts situate the political positions of LGB peopledifferently. This results in unique conditions where LGB people are politically ininfluentialand cohesive.

This thesis analyzes the journey of Ladlad, a political party in the Philippines specifically representing the country's LGBT citizens, within the context of a broader historical-anthropological perspective on same-sex sexualities and gender diversity in the Philippine Archipelago, the historical colonial implantation and contemporary persistence of heterosexism and homophobia in the country, and the current struggle for gender and sexual equality being articulated through both local Philippine and globalized discourses and traditions. For several years, Ladlad has sought to win seats in the Philippine Congress in order to fight for the equal rights, equal protection under the law, and state-sponsored support for the advancement and wellbeing of all LGBT Filipinos. By seeking to advance LGBT rights specifically as an LGBT political party within the Philippines' unique party-list system, Ladlad represents novel realities and future possibilities for both Filipino and global LGBT movements, electoral politics, and human rights advocacy.

What motivates individuals to participate in contentious, political forms of collective action? In this article, I consider the possibility that the promise of social esteem from an ingroup can act as a powerful selective incentive for individuals to participate in contentious politics. I conducted a field experiment-the first to my knowledge to take place in the context of a political march, rally, or social-identity event-to isolate this esteem mechanism from others. Using measures of intent to attend, actual attendance, and reported attendance at a gay and lesbian pride event in New Jersey, I find evidence that the promise of social esteem boosts all three measures of participation. The article offers new theoretical and practical implications for the study of participation in nonvoting forms of collective action. Adapted from the source document.

This book explores the alleged uniqueness of the European experience, and investigates its ties to a long history of LGBT and queer movements in the region. These movements, the book argues, were inspired by specific ideas about Europe, which they sought to realize on the ground through activism

Europe has long been regarded as a unique place for the promotion and furthering of LGBT rights. This important and compelling study investigates the alleged uniqueness and its ties to a relatively long history of LGBT and queer movements in the region. Contributors argue that LGBT movements were inspired by specific ideas about European democratic values and a responsibility towards human rights, and that they sought to realize these on the ground through activism, often crossing borders to foster a wider movement. In making this argument, they discuss the 'idea of Europe' as it relates to LGBT rights, the history of European LGBT movements, the role of European institutions in adopting LGBT policies, and the construction of European 'others' in this process.

LGBT/Q film festivals are an integral part of the social practice of queer film culture. They are places where social, political and economic discourses intersect and where LGBT/Q identities, representation through film, definitions of queer cinema, community and global queer politics are negotiated. The festivals themselves are constantly responding to the changing surroundings and demands from stakeholders such as their audience base, the communities they want to serve, and economic and political stakeholders. The versatile, ever evolving form of the festival speaks to its performative formation. Therefore, the concepts of performativity, the performative and performance lend themselves to the analysis of the mechanisms and processes at play there. This study, situated at the intersection of film and media studies, sociology and queer theory, builds its arguments on the interdisciplinary field of film festival studies, and sets out to argue for the value of applying the concepts of the performative, performativity and performance to the study of film festivals in general, and LGBT/Q film festivals in particular. As the discussion of the concepts in chapter 1 show, the performative as developed by Austin in language philosophy and its further transposition to performativity in the theorizations of philosophy and literature by Derrida, for gender/queer theory by Butler, and performance for ethnography by Turner, and in theater/performance studies by Fischer-Lichte and McKenzie provides a versatile analytical arsenal for the analysis of film festivals. At the same time it is highly compatible with other existing concepts and theorizations such as event, public sphere, and networks and flows that have already been canonically applied to festival studies. In chapter 2, I mobilize the historical dimension of the performative to discuss the formation of LGBT/Q film festivals and their circuit. There, I sketch out the historical development of the LGBT/Q film festival while paying attention also to the larger social, political, geographic, and economic contexts. The discursive historiography is accompanied by an empirical one, where I analyze the growth pattern and global spread of the LGBT/Q film festival circuit. Along with the global perspective, a discussion of US-American (Frameline, NewFest, MIX NYC), German (Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg, Verzaubert, Berlinale Teddy Award) and Austrian (identities) case studies provides further depth in understanding the evolution of the festivals and the circuit. Having drawn a broad picture of the circuit in chapter 3, I zoom in to look at a number of specific incidents of disruption and boycotts as case studies to unravel the different layers in which LGBT/Q film festivals as instances of queer film culture are performed (or failed). In this chapter I mobilize mainly perspectives of performativity and performance from ethnography and performance studies. These are put in synch with concepts such as public spheres, audience address, and event culture in three steps: selection, exhibition, and reception. Under the heading of selection, I discuss the performance of queer cinema as it becomes visible in the practices of selection of films and their programming at LGBT/Q film festivals. There I discuss various processes involved in programming, ranging from pre-selection, to screening committees, to programming strategies. Two historical incidents from the history of Frameline, the "Lesbian Riot" and the "Genderator" incident, serve as examples of how programming directly interrelates with identity negotiations. In the section on exhibition, I turn to the performative architecture of an LGBT/Q film festival by shedding light on the event itself, which follows specific scripts and rituals. In the last section on reception, I look at the corresponding side of these processes and look at the audience. Here, I discuss the formation of a counterpublic sphere, audience address, and the specific reception context of a festival. Two further festival boycotts are presented to analyze how LGBT/Q film festivals operate as queer counterpublic spheres that activists utilize for political intervention. The last section discusses the communal experience of collective viewing and the impact on the formation of a festival community. With this take on audiences, community and reception contexts, the chapter returns to the question of how LGBT/Q film festivals are an integral part of the practices of queer film culture, which was raised in the introduction. In the concluding outlook to the study I propose three further research trajectories. While the study mostly relied on conceptions of performativity and performance in the sense developed in ethnography, gender/queer theory and performance studies, another aspect of performance can be productively brought to bear on the subject of (LGBT/Q) film festivals: performance in the economic sense of efficiency and achievement.

AbstractIn this article we apply insights from 'new mobilities' approaches to understand the shifting sexual and gendered landscapes of major cities in the global North. The empirical context is the purported 'demise' of traditional gay villages in Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia, and the emergence of 'LGBT neighbourhoods' elsewhere in the inner city. We reinterpret the historical geography of twentieth century LGBT lives and the associated 'rise and fall' of gay enclaves through the lens of the 'politics of mobility'. In this reading, it is apparent that multifaceted movements — migration, physical and social mobility, and motility — underpin the formation of gay enclaves and recent transformations in sexual and gendered landscapes. After the second world war, LGBT communities in the global North were embedded in specific historical geographies of mobility and we trace these in the Canadian and Australian contexts. The 'great gay migration' from the 1960s to the 1980s has been joined by new LGBT constellations of mobility in the 2000s, and these have imprinted upon the sexual and gendered landscapes of Toronto and Sydney.

A critical discursive analysis of the It Gets Better Project with special attention to the racial politics of the contributors and messages communicated to the target audience of LGBT online youth.

AbstractDuring the negotiations around the International Criminal Court's (ICC) Statute (ICCS) there was a fierce debate about the use and definition of the term 'gender' in its Article 7(3), with a sizeable number of states opposing the use of the term as a synonym for sexual orientation, which could have included lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons (LGBT). This paper is going to argue that the drafting compromise was ultimately an exercise in moral failure for the sake of the political feasibility, cementing one of the most glaring instances of discrimination, and that it is high time to correct that error, especially in the context of the rising tide of state‐sponsored homophobia that can be noticed in certain countries whose politics have drifted to the (far) right. It will examine whether the existing international criminal law does allow for the characterisation of domestic criminalisation as a crime against humanity, with or without the invocation of the term gender, and how to take the debate forward.