Suchergebnisse

The European Union (EU) praises itself for being a promoter of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the world. It supports LGBT organisations abroad with the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR). Yet, the EIDHR has come under scrutiny by scholars arguing that it is based on neoliberal rationalities and depoliticises civil society. The literature analyses the EU's documents but does not study funding in practice. Moreover, it has a narrow understanding of politicisation failing to include insights from feminist and queer literature. To problematize the EU's policy, we need to analyse it in the sites it intervenes in. It is unclear whether and how the EIDHR depoliticises LGBT organisations and issues. Studying the case of Turkey, I argue that the EU's support of LGBT organisations had ambiguous effects which are not necessarily the ones intended by the EU nor the ones expected by the governmentality literature. The EU's funding depoliticised the organisations in the sense that they looked less political and more transparent. Yet, this helped making LGBT rights' claims more legitimate within Turkey's political struggles. At the same time, EU funding created conflicts within the LGBT movement about the question of Western external funding and neoliberal co-optation.

Feminist scholars praise and criticize the UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security for its considerations of women and gender in conflicts. Poststructuralist feminists show how gender is constructed in the UN's security policies and how these constructions reproduce gendered dichotomies between women and men and representations of women as victims, part of civil society and neoliberal subjects. Although the UNSC Resolutions 1325 and 1820 are implemented by the EU, there is no literature on how the EU is taking up the UN's discourse. Scholars studying gender policies in and of the EU mainly analyze the (in)effectiveness of EU gender mainstreaming but rarely interrogate its discursive foundations. Using a governmentality perspective, I argue that on the one hand the EU produces a binary and stereotypical understanding of gender, and on the other hand constitutes women as neoliberal subjects responsible for their own well-being, ignoring broader structures of (gender) inequality and war and making gender equality solely an instrument to achieve more security and development.