Suchergebnisse

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over 'LGBT rights' and 'Europeanness' equally constitute the understandings of 'the international' with which Queer IR is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber's reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with 'queer intellectual curiosity', this paper demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008–14, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe/Russia relations, and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions – ranging from detachment to celebration – about 'LGBT' politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to LGBT rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around 'LGBT equality'.

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.

This volume combines empirically oriented and theoretically grounded reflections upon various forms of LGBT activist engagement to examine how the notion of intersectionality enters the political context of contemporary Serbia and Croatia. By uncovering experiences of multiple oppression and voicing fear and frustration that accompany exclusionary practices, the contributions to this book seek to reinvigorate the critical potential of intersectionality, in order to generate the basis for wider political alliances and solidarities in the post-Yugoslav space. The authors, both activists and academics, challenge the systematic absence of discussions of (post- )Yugoslav LGBT activist initiatives in recent social science scholarship, and show how emancipatory politics of resistance can reshape what is possible to imagine as identity and community in post-war and post-socialist societies. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of history and politics of Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav states, as well as to those working in the fields of political sociology, European studies, social movements, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, and queer theory and activism.

This dissertation examines the history and operations of niche LGBT media distribution companies in the past three decades. Since the rise of gay and lesbian film festivals in the 1970s, several distribution companies specifically devoted to LGBT media have made over a thousand titles available in theaters, on home video, or via digital streaming. By focusing on five companies (Ariztical Entertainment, Here Media, Strand Releasing, TLA Entertainment, and Wolfe Video), my research breaks new ground as a large-scale analysis of a sector of media largely unexplored by queer media studies. The texts produced by LGBT distributors are often perceived as conventional and uninteresting formally and politically. However, my project takes these "bad objects" seriously, recognizing their economic, cultural, and historical significance for a minority group and their larger impact on mainstream understandings of LGBT identity and politics. Partly an industrial history, this project deprioritizes textual and representational analysis of the niche media itself, attending instead to the industrial and discursive circumstances surrounding these media and treating distribution as a collection of meaning-making practices revealing insights impossible through textual analysis alone. Each chapter demonstrates how LGBT texts circulate and activate differently in different contexts, focusing on the contingency of a text's categorization as LGBT, the signification of business practices with liberal LGBT politics, and the complexity of evaluating LGBT media based on differing expectations about what LGBT media should do and what LGBT viewers need. This project provides an untold history of a minority group's cultural production, and in doing so raises larger questions about LGBT media's contemporary and future relationship to categorization, identity, politics, economics, value, and affect.

AbstractIn the EU accession literature, there is a tendency to downplay the role of discourse in facilitating norm diffusion, particularly when domestic resistance towards European norms is strong. The assumptions in this thinking are that critical deliberations and civil society activism simply lack the potency required to elicit norm conforming behaviour in accession states and that the only realistic hope for achieving this rests with the introduction of material incentives that make the costs of normative adaptation lower than its rewards. I focus on developments in the field of LGBT politics to challenge these assumptions and to specify the conditions under which discursive strategies are likely to stimulate the domestic uptake of contentious norms. I highlight shared identity as a crucial factor in the success of discursive influence, contending that under conditions of identity convergence, a cultural environment prevails in which norm promoters can more effectively ignite a process of deliberative reflection, shame norm-violators into conformance and cultivate resonance around controversial ideas. I develop these arguments through an analysis of LGBT and accession politics in Croatia and Serbia, contending that Croatia's strong identification with Europe accelerated LGBT recognition there while Serbia's relatively weaker identification with Europe slowed it down.

Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece, has seen a sudden attempt to establish LGBT politics during the last 5 years, due to movement mobilization and favourable local and European opportunity structures. The article suggests a multiscalar analysis of Thessaloniki Prides, which takes into account politics articulated by a series of actors located in distinct scales. These actors include institutional and religious authorities, as well as the local LGBT movement. The analysis demonstrates that Thessaloniki Prides are shaped by conflicting discursive blocks articulated through the national, urban/local, and transnational scale. Prides, as the most visible outcome of the local LGBT movement, become a collective action, which is shaped and continuously challenged by its embeddedness in these scales. This analysis brings new insights into the geo-temporal politics of LGBT politics, reminding that European periphery's sexual politics are located in a nexus of progressive cosmopolitanism and nationalist anti-modernity. In fact, the Thessaloniki case demonstrates that being part of the Western periphery places sexual politics between a globalist EU-ized discourse of modernity on the one hand and anti-secular views on heteronormative traditions on the other. Such a space is the setting where grassroots LGBTQ movements perform their politics.

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights' and 'Europeanness' equally constitute the understandings of 'the international' with which Queer International Relations is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber's reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with 'queer intellectual curiosity', this article demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008–2014, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe–Russia relations and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions — ranging from detachment to celebration — about 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender' politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality'.

1. Equalities, cities and ordinariness : introduction -- 2. Contextualising research and researching contexts : situating participatory projects -- 3. The promise of ordinary lives in a city paved with 'gay gold' -- 4. The gay scene : having it all? -- 5. Bi people and trans people under our umbrella? Contesting and recreating ordinariness -- 6. Ordinary activisms : possibilities beyond the dichotomies of radicalism/assimilation -- 7. Resistant ordinary activisms : safe in the 'gay city'? -- 8. Is pride political? Beyond (oppositional) politics in lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans festivals -- 9. Ordinary in brighton? Conclusion.