Caging and Uncaging Pride: Di(s)visibility and the Borders of Budapest Pride

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2008, following right-wing attacks in 2007, Budapest’s Pride march was ‘caged’ by a cordon of police barricades which remained until repudiated by march organisers in 2017. Both caging and uncaging resulted in fundamental transformations of the march, its spectacle of identity, politics, and belonging, and the meanings of Hungarian sexual politics. Grounded in ethnographic research from 1999 to the present, this paper explores the implications of these transformations for Budapest Pride’s layered visibilities and invisibilities, and their borders of desire, being, politics, and belonging. Weaving together queer concepts of ‘disidentification’, anthropological thinking on ‘friction’, and postsocialist analysis of queer ‘in/visibility’, I argue that that Budapest Pride’s shifting caged and uncaged state renders it a critical site of ‘di(s)visibility’: contingent frictions, simultaneously productive and destructive, between queer and other visibilities and invisibilities, whose ambiguous, ambivalent relations both crystallise and dissolve multiple borders of identity, politics, and belonging.