Gay Rights Research Articles

The Psychic Life of Homonationalism

ABSTRACT In the current atmosphere of Hindu nationalist majoritarianism in India, LGBTQ activisms are increasingly being restructured through their allegiance with, or resistance to, a progressively violent imagination of a Hindu India. Within a larger climate of shrinking public freedoms, LGBTQ activisms have made some gains toward inclusive citizenship, and this has led to a false and dangerous correlation that claims Hindu nationalism is queer-friendly. As such, some LGBTQ activists promote “homonationalist” visions of a Hindu nationalist India. These narratives of “homonationalism” mete out violence against many other LGBTQ activists and communities that cannot or will not be interpellated into the Hindu nation. Reflecting on fieldwork with LGBTQ communities, in this article I demonstrate how the psychic life of homonationalism in India is rooted in postcolonial anxieties of defining an “authentic” national subjectivity. Building on theories on the politics of belonging and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I draw parallels between nationalist attachments to Hindu identity and homonationalist attachments to gay identity. In doing so, I argue that an anxious attachment to LGBTQ identity is at the root of homonationalist aspirations of belonging to a (Hindu) nation.

A New Dawn for Gay Rights in Botswana: A Commentary on the Decision of the High Court and Court of Appeal in the Motshidiemang Cases

AbstractIn 2003, the Botswanan Court of Appeal decided in Kanane v The State that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was not proscribed by the Botswanan Constitution because no evidence had been adduced showing that the society of Botswana was ready for gay individuals. After sixteen years, things changed: in 2019, in Letsweletse Motshidiemang and LEGABIBO (as amicus) v The Attorney General, the High Court held that the law criminalizing anal intercourse violated the fundamental rights of gay people. In 2021, the Court of Appeal upheld the High Court decision. This commentary briefly examines these three decisions. It argues that Kanane gave too much weight to public opinion to the detriment of constitutional interpretation. Through a robust approach to generous interpretation of fundamental rights, the Motshidiemang decisions partly remedied the flaw in Kanane. However, judicial clarification is still required on some aspects of the decision.

Under the Shadow of Culture and Politics: Understanding LGBTQ Social Media Activists’ Perceptions, Concerns, and Strategies

This study aimed to explore the perceptions, concerns, and strategies of LGBTQ social media activists in Turkey. Through semi-structured interviews with 20 LGBTQ social media activists, we investigated how they navigate cultural and political challenges and utilize social media for activism purposes. Our findings revealed that LGBTQ activists in Turkey strive to balance the risks and benefits of being online activists. They aim to avoid punishment from society and the government while simultaneously asserting their existence and amplifying their voices through social media. In addition, the study highlights the concerns of activists regarding both state and lateral surveillance.

Flailing at Feminized Labor: SOFFAs, 1990s Trans Care Networks, Stone Butch Blues, and the Devaluation of Social Reproduction

Around 1998, the term “significant other” or “significant others, friends, family, and allies” started to circulate in English-language trans communities to describe cis people's labor in supporting trans people through transition. One newsletter, Your SOFFA Voice, published letters, essays, and poetry by and for SOFFAs. Your SOFFA Voice could be understood as what Cait McKinney calls information activism, attempts at creating political collectivity through DIY communication and publication methods. While the poems, stories, and manifestos of Your SOFFA Voice were undoubtedly expressions of genuine experience, they also read as expressions of “bad” liberal feminism, preoccupied with the domestic and intimate and obscuring political questions other than personal identity. Historicizing the intimate, domestic themes of this 1990s archive in relation to earlier trans/butch/femme representations of 1960s bar culture and working-class solidarities—particularly in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues—helps contextualize them in relation to multiple historical events: the expansion of feminized administrative and clerical labor markets on one hand; and on the other hand, the withdrawal of the welfare state and the absorption of the radical political imagination into homonormative lesbian and gay rights organizing, and the institutionalization of 1960s-70s feminist, queer, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous campus protest into liberal diversity and inclusion initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s. This analysis helps us ask questions about trans care now: how and why intimate partnerships are made to bear such utopian desires for community building and care while also constituting a crucible for much of the mess, tension, and dysfunction of trans care, and whether understanding trans people as autonomous and self-determining is a viable alternative.

“That’s what we think of as activism”: Solidarity through care in queer Desi diaspora

This article examines a framing of solidarity as both activism and community care work in diasporic South Asian (sometimes referred to as “Desi”) communities in the US and the UK. From the vantage point of the researcher as a pansexual Indian-American activist herself, this article draws conclusions based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted with lesbian, gay, queer, and trans activists during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black-led uprisings against police and state violence in the US and the UK. These conversations and this article particularly examine the participation of Desi activists and their peers in these movements, and their explorations of different modes of solidarity, from joint struggle to allyship to coconspiratorship and community transformation. They ultimately argue that queerness in Desi diaspora fosters solidarity through care that nurtures relationships across and between the diverse groups that make up LGBTQ + communities and the Desi diaspora, as well as between Desi, Black, and other racialized and diasporic communities. By examining lesbian, gay, trans, and broadly queer South Asian activists’ relationships to each other and to other racialized groups in struggle, this article conceptualizes a framing of solidarity and Black and Brown liberation together that transcends difference, transphobia and TERFism, and anti-Blackness through centering kinship and care. Through the intimacies borne out of months and years on the frontlines of struggle together, this article argues that deepening an understanding of activism, kinship, and care together in Desi diasporic organizing is key to building a solidarity that imagines and moves toward new and liberated worlds.

Political Identity In The Perspective Of The Christian Faith: Welcome To The Future

Identity politics is a political tactic in which people or groups organize themselves based on certain traits such as religion, culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, or even hobbies. This can happen due to discrimination or injustice in society that makes the person or group feel the need to form a similar group for support and protection. In the context of society, identity politics can appear in various forms such as feminist movements, anti-racism movements, or LGBT movements. However, we must also beware of the dangers of identity politics that can divide society and create conflicts between different groups. The basis of Christian belief also teaches us to live in peace and harmony with fellow human beings. We are taught to forgive and give others a second chance. In the context of identity politics, these values and principles can help us build inclusive and peaceful societies where every individual feels valued and accepted.

Returning to the gaybourhood: Expectations of resilience and recovery of Chueca (Madrid) after the COVID-19 pandemic

Chueca, in Madrid, is Spain’s most well-known gaybourhood, a significant space for both local and national LGBTQ individuals and activist movements, as well as for the Spanish and European LGBTQ tourist circuits. The COVID- 19 pandemic hit hard in a neighbourhood already heavily disputed among arguments of touristification and tourist accommodation, as tourist-oriented businesses began closing and other, more resident-oriented ones transformed themselves to survive the year 2020. Drawing from ethnographic research undertaken from 2019 to early 2021, this article analyses different experiences and expectations of recovery among local professionals, mostly business- owners from Chueca itself. The opposition between a return to business-as-usual and a revolution towards a more humane or sustainable tourism, on the one hand, and an already conflicted debate over the nature of the neighbourhood, on the other one, interacts with the wider situation of urban tourist destinations in Western Europe and with the practices of discourses unveiled in Chueca. The article argues for the pandemic’s role as a catalyst for pre-existing conflicts, as local and global processes intertwine.

Pride Contested

This article explores Pride politics in post-Maidan Ukraine from queer feminist and decolonial perspectives. It aims to understand how the location of Ukraine on the fringes of two imperial formations, namely the global West and Russian imperialism, shapes Pride and its consequences for LGBT communities and broader society. The authors introduce the concept of buffer periphery as an analytic lens that focuses critically on both imperial formations simultaneously, while tracing naturalized colonial discourses. The first part of the article analyzes the material-symbolic framing of Kyiv Pride marches in the context of the NGO-ization of LGBT activism, police reform, the war in Donbas, and the corresponding militarization of Ukrainian society and the region at large. The analysis is focused on how West-centered geopolitics of liberation and the Euro-oriented aspirations of the Ukrainian government work together to animate Pride politics and instrumentalize them. The second part closely examines the case of the Queer Anarcho-Feminist Block at the 2017 Kyiv Pride, considering it an attempt decolonial resistance to neoliberalization and militarization of Pride and LGBT politics in Ukraine. The article suggests that the resulting outcome of Kyiv Pride marches with respect to broader LGBT communities in Ukraine is rather ambiguous. While acknowledging its influence on public opinion and media discourse as well as its personal significance for many community members, the authors offer a critical perspective on Kyiv Pride as a vehicle and an effect of the colonial geopolitics of liberation. It remains unclear to what extent Kyiv Pride challenged homophobia and transphobia, let alone capitalist and racist regimes of power, or if it perhaps just converted the idea of LGBT liberation into a homocapitalist project of producing loyal sexual citizens.

September 11th Revisited: The Troubled History of Victim Compensation

This article explores some of the less obvious and even surprising repercussions of September 11th. To do so, it draws on an online archive of more than 12,000 emails sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in response to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Just eleven days after September 11th, Congress created the fund for the express purpose of preventing victims’ families from suing the airlines. After the act passed, the DOJ solicited public comments and posted them to its website, and from the start, the tone was combative. This essay focuses on two especially acrimonious issues: first, gay rights and the recognition of same-sex partnerships and, second, economic inequality and populist anti-elitism. Taken together, the emails showcase how September 11th precipitated fundamental and divisive debates on who deserved the nation's largesse.

Homoerotic Photography and the White Gay Imaginary in Apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT In this article, I consider a selection of photographs of a man of color from a luxury book of male nudes, Images (1982), aimed at white gay men and published in South Africa by Alternative Books (AB) in the late apartheid period. Given the exclusive association of assimilable homosexuality with whiteness in the national gay press and other homoerotic commodities available in South Africa at the same historical juncture, I propose that these photographs, which interrupted longstanding, racist homoerotic iconographies, elicited experiences of ambivalence (and thus critical reflection) amongst their historical audiences. To this end, I analyze the editorial and commercial content of the newspapers Link/Skakel and Exit for the period that AB was active (1981–1991), anticipating an overlap of readership between these papers and the publisher’s titles. More precisely, I discuss the prevalence of the figure of the “good homosexual” and representations of classical (that is, white) male beauty in these papers to plot how apartheid logic was broadly reproduced (and same-sex desire disciplined according to such dictates) in mainstream South African gay movements, institutions, and print cultures during this time, but, notably, not in Images.

Identity Crisis: A Case Study on LGBTQ

The objective of this paper is to define LGBTQ and why it matters. Identify structures of inequality that shape our experience of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, ability, etc. Describe how people struggle for social justice within historical contexts of inequality. several examples of LGBTQ activism, particularly in relation to other struggles for civil rights. Recognize that “progress” faces resistance and does not follow a linear path

Labor Precarity of Chinese Feminist and LGBT NGO Activism—a Social Reproduction Perspective

Abstract: This article examines an under-explored topic of labor precarity of Chinese feminist and LGBT NGO activism from the perspective of social reproduction. Contextualizing the intimate connection between the Chinese party-state outsourcing social service delivery to global civil society and the burgeoning of feminist and LGBT NGOs since the 1990s, it argues that the party-state relies on the social reproductive functions of these NGO while containing their political influence; at the same time, the transnational non-profit funding complex utilized these NGOs for political intervention in China. Arguing against a binary framework of civil society versus state and resistance versus oppression, this article centers the lived experiences of feminist and LGBT activist workers and highlights the contradiction and interplay of agency and conformity of these workers in the state- and market- orchestrated processes of moralization, illegalization, and professionalization, whereby they reshape, revise, or reinforce norms associated with gender, sexuality, and neoliberal standards of productivity and efficiency. Building on Marxist feminist theorization of labor, this article valorizes NGO labor as socially valued work and calls for attention to the issue of labor precarity of NGO activist workers under the backdrop of increasing state violence and market cooptation in many parts of the world, especially in the global South.

What Does Art History Have to Say About a Lebanese Sasquatch? The Body of Decolonial Struggle in Amanda Boulos's Art

Abstract This paper focuses on several works by the Palestinian-Canadian painter Amanda Boulos that communicate the shared desire of both Palestinians in the diaspora and Indigenous peoples of Canada to move beyond the normative identities of settler colonialism. Through co-ordinated social historical, formalist and iconographical readings of Boulos's work, I propose a shift in the discourse on global contemporary art, from postcolonial figures of the oriental, the subaltern and the hybrid to strategies of representation such as transformation, ambiguity and queering – a shift intended to foster alliances amongst members of BIPOC communities, against the divisive politics of settler colonialism in Palestine, Canada and elsewhere. To this end, the artworks are set in two interrelated contexts: one art historical and one more strictly political. Boulos's work is read in relation to that of contemporary artists dealing with postcolonial conflict zones, and Modern and contemporary Palestinian artists both in Palestine and its diaspora. Relevant political contexts for her work include Palestinian LGBTQ activism after the Second Intifada and the 2014 Israeli War on Gaza called Operation Protective Edge.

Why We Speak Up: The Effect of Preconceived Cause of Sexual Orientation on Heterosexual Engagement in the Homosexual Movement for Social Equality

Despite the increasing societal acceptance of homosexual individuals, the perception of homosexuality by heterosexual individuals is polluted by personal bias. My study observed the interaction between 422 heterosexuals and the homosexual community. First, my subjects self reported their beliefs on the determinant of sexual orientation (genetic or lifestyle). Next, they took the Activism Orientation (AO) and Sexual Prejudice (SP) Scales as a baseline measure of their relationship with members homosexual community. Subjects were randomly assigned to listen to an interview of two fictional homosexual individuals that spoke of life experience which either supported or contradicted the subjects’ self reported beliefs. Additionally, subjects were assigned to a high or low empathy condition toward the interviewee. After listening to the interview, subjects were given the choice to allocate $0 - $8,000 in support of a pro - LGBT charity. Subjects then retook the AO and SP scales to measure for significant changes in perception of homsexuals after the fictional scenario. Results indicated a significant decrease in the AO of subjects that viewed interviews that contradicted their beliefs. Additionally, subjects assigned to the low empathy condition donated significantly larger amounts. The present study has two main implications: Heterosexual individuals’ generalize their advocacy toward the LGBT community based on the actions of a singular homosexual. Furthermore, many activists naturally approach issues regarding social justice from a place of empathy, it is more sustainable to approach social justice movements from a logical perspective to allow for more meaningful and long term participation in a social justice movement.

Globalization and the Emerging Sexual Trends in Africa

Globalisation has significantly affected African societies' social, economic, and cultural aspects. One area that has seen significant changes is sexuality, with emerging trends such as lesbianism, gay rights, premarital sex, and transgender rights gaining prominence. Despite significant resistance from some African societies, these trends are becoming more prevalent and widespread. This paper examines the impact of globalisation on emerging sexual trends in Africa, with a focus on homosexuality, premarital sex, and transgender identity. It also discusses the underlying factors contributing to their emergence and why they may be difficult to stop. Using Cultural Marxist theory, the paper explores how globalisation and Western cultural norms are influencing the sexual values and behaviours of people in Africa, and creating new forms of power dynamics and inequalities. Furthermore, the paper explores the challenges and opportunities these trends present to African societies and the need for effective management strategies to address them. The paper argues that while these trends may be difficult to stop, African societies can adopt strategies to manage them, including the creation of legal frameworks that protect the rights of sexual minorities, comprehensive sex education, and the promotion of cultural diversity and tolerance. Overall, this paper contributes to ongoing debate on the impact of globalisation on African societies and the need for a more nuanced understanding of the complex processes that shape social change in the region.

The interaction of human rights and religion in Africa’s sexuality politics

Abstract This article examines varieties of human rights appropriation in the context of sexuality politics in Africa. Noting how contested the landscape of human rights has been in Africa, it demonstrates how the human rights of lesbians, gays, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex persons or sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQI+) are excluded from protection as a result of what are described as three interconnected predispositions. These predispositions are postcolonial, cultural, and religious tendencies within many African countries which adopt “othering” narratives that justify, and even sacralize, discrimination or violence based on gender identity and sexual orientation. The article analyzes the rights-based arguments—the appropriation of human rights language—used by anti-gay advocates in Africa, which emphasize rights to religion, culture, and family and exclude or deny the rights of LGBTQI+ people. This presentation of a human rights corpus and discourse which excludes LGBTQI+ rights, and which circulates both within and outside Africa, relies on alliances with the US Christian Right, and with the Vatican and Islamic leaders, to oppose sexual rights, and is often deployed by African politicians to retain political power. The article concludes by exploring the concept of ubuntu as a potential alternative to or as an accompaniment to human rights language, as a way of vernacularizing and Africanizing LGBTQI+ rights.

How Does Party Position Change Happen? The Case of LGBT Rights in the U.S.

A partisan divide over LGBT rights has emerged in the U.S. Yet unlike other issues on which the parties have traded places or polarized, most of the change on gay rights has occurred within one party, the Democrats. How did this unusual change occur? LGBT rights was originally a fringe cause, rejected by most politicians in both parties. As gay rights activists slowly became more prominent in the Democratic Party, many politicians adapted, abandoning earlier positions informed by their personal backgrounds and state or district constituencies. Meanwhile, incorporating the religious right led most Republicans to maintain the anti-LGBT rights stand that was once common to both parties, even as public opinion shifted. The result was a partisan divide in this issue area that had consequences for policy. The role of adaptation by incumbents in producing it—contrary to some prominent models—is evident in both Congressional co-sponsorship and roll-call data. The growing party divide is also evident in platforms. These findings contribute to a broader understanding of how party position change occurs.

The Research on the Representation of LGBTQ in Eastern and Western Films

In recent years, increased public awareness and understanding of the LGBTQ community have led some film and television productions to venture into LGBTQ themes. However, there is still some under-representation in these films. These films often come from the independent sector of film, and there is a lack of such films in the major Hollywood studios. Stereotypes about this group still exist despite the lack of diversity and representation of this group in media. Through visual analysis, discourse analysis and other analysis methods, the author examines the representation of LGBTQ people in both Eastern and Western films and uses these three films: Farewell My Concubine, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Call Me By Your Name as examples. Through this study, the author found that the expressions of this group in Eastern and Western films and TV series differed greatly, with the expressions in Eastern countries being more subtle and the expressions in Western countries being more intuitive and diverse. This code was relaxed in the 1960s-1970s, which also signalled the dawn of the feminist and homosexual movements.

Gay Nazis

Most histories on the development of homosexual identity in Germany focus on the 19th-century origins of the first homosexual rights movement, the thriving queer culture in large cities like Berlin during the 1920s, the extensive advocacy done by the liberal sexologist Magnus Hirschfield, and the ultimate eradication of all this progress by the Nazi regime. Consequently, these histories focus primarily on left-wing progressive homosexual advocacy groups like Hirschfield’s WhK (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee; German for Scientific-Humanitarian Committee). Comparatively, less attention is paid to a smaller, but nevertheless significant cohort of right-wing male homosexual activists — or masculinists — like Adolf Brand and Hans Blüher who rejected notions that same-sex desiring men constituted an effeminate “third sex”. In their view, homoeroticism was the ultimate expression of virility and male camaraderie, and they fused this idea with nationalist, racialist, and antisemitic views in order to formulate a right-wing position against repealing Paragraph 175, Germany's anti-sodomy law. World War One (WWI) was a crucial event which allowed homosexual veterans to affirm their desires more boldly without being labelled as weak and unmanly — their war experience allowed them to defend their reputation as macho and patriotic men. This paper investigates the historical, social, and psychological reasons why many early Nazis, especially those who joined the SA, were attracted to Brand and Blüher’s ideas. The SA’s relative tolerance for homosociality provided a safe space for many homosexuals in the movement. However, this was extremely problematic for the political side of the Nazi Party whose hegemonic heterosexual masculine image came under question after a series of SA scandals in the early 1930s, and ultimately took deadly actions to quash non-heteronormative elements of the movement.

The Power of Visibility: A Visual Semiotics Analysis of the 1990 Pride Celebration in South Africa

The main aim of this article is to explore the significance of celebrating Pride in South Africa, with specific reference to the 1990 inaugural gay Pride march. The first lesbian and gay Pride march was held on 13 October 1990 in Johannesburg. This was the first Pride march on the African continent and acted as both a gay Pride event and an anti-apartheid march. There were 800 people in attendance, with gay rights pioneers such as Beverley Ditsie, Justice Edwin Cameron, Donné Rundle, Hendrik Pretorius and Simon Nkoli addressing the large crowds. Two of the main aims of the Pride celebration were to publicly march in support of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in South African law, as well as to call for an end to apartheid. This 1990 Pride march thus served as a publicly visible rallying point. Over three decades of annual gay Pride marches have been observed in South Africa to encourage the just treatment of LGBTQ+ identities. Since the initial event in 1990, Pride marches have continued to grow in South Africa, with each of the nine provinces now hosting a march. Pride has also become a symbol of the LGBTQ+ community’s struggle for equality in South Africa and throughout the African continent. Even so, (Black) queer people in South Africa are still coded and marginalised in mainstream media discourses as disaffected bodies, and at worst, they are confined to the impermeable background of LGBTQ+ history. This article makes use of a qualitative visual semiotics analysis, using a non-probability purposive sample of five images from the first Pride celebration in South Africa, to explore the significance of celebrating gay Pride in our context. The findings indicate that even though things have improved significantly for the LGBTQ+ community in South Africa, this community still faces many societal issues that are a direct result of the legacy of oppression that has been perpetuated against the community throughout history.