Queer Activism Research Articles

Queer citizenship in 1990s Britain

ABSTRACT This article argues that the 1990s was a distinctive period in the British queer experience. A perceived rise in violent homophobic attacks marks the decade out, as does the activist culture which emerged to counter it. The article argues that ideas of citizenship became an important vehicle for queer activists, especially when challenging legal inequalities such as the age of sexual consent for gay men. Queer citizenship campaigns highlighted the state of legislated inequality for queer Britons which was seen to be worsening during the 1990s. This article examines two main examples of such campaigns, grassroots direct-action movements and legal test cases, arguing that queer citizenship was an increasingly useful concept for queer activists and campaigners.

Between Queer Joy and Injury

This article expands the notion of queer domesticity from the vantage point of the global South. Drawing on autoethnography, ephemeral archives, and secondary sources, the authors examine Nanur Basha, the residence of a Bangladeshi queer activist and community mentor, which in 2016 was the site of two murders committed by a local chapter of Al-Qaeda. By empirically interrogating the events leading up to the unmaking of Nanur Basha, the authors argue that global South queer domesticities — constituted by quotidian practices of queer worlding and expanding from apartments to rooftops to streets to political discourses — aspire to greater political freedom by deploying imaginative and counterhegemonic practices. As queer domesticities open up interstitial sanctuaries in nationalist discourses and within the urban fabric, they are also unmade by competing postcolonial nationalisms. Contesting Nanur Basha's reduction to a site of victimhood under Islamic terrorism and homophobia, this article illustrates how Nanur Basha indexes a subterranean modality of southern queer domesticity that negotiates secrecy, safety, celebration, and survival under heterosexist nationalist surveillance and violence. Such queer domesticities underpin an affective sanctuary at the borderlands between queer joy and injury. The article contributes to emerging conversations in transnational queer studies by situating queer worldmaking practices within landscapes of authoritarianism and queerphobia.

‘The glowing fireflies’: Invisible activism under China’s queer necropolitics

In China, the escalating repression of gender and sexual diversity has given rise to ‘queer necropolitics’. ‘Queer necropolitics’ – a concept we build on – refers to the hegemonic ability to determine who is allowed to suffer, survive, or thrive. We examine China’s sustained re-enforcement of traditional gender norms, which has rendered queer communities non-existent from official recognition. In this context, we aim to understand how China’s state queer necropolitics has shaped queer organising in the country. From 2021 to 2022, we conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with a diverse cohort of self-identified LGBTIQ+ members and activists across 12 provinces in China. We find that the interplay of legal invisibility and politicised, moralised visibility has placed queer communities under hegemonic governance techniques of suppression. The paper argues that China’s queer necropolitics has established invisible activism. The juxtaposition of invisibility with activism denotes the quiet, implicit, and everyday embodied acts of communal care among queer communities as a form of resistance. Building on the metaphor of ‘glowing fireflies’ shared by a research participant, invisible activism presents a more sustainable approach than conventional rights-based activism. The paper expands our understanding of politically antagonistic practices, acknowledging the diversity and complexity embedded within queer activism.

Shades of presence in post-2011 Tunisia: evolving political positions in feminist and queer activism

ABSTRACT This article rethinks the concept of presence in feminist theory through the empirical study of Tunisian feminist and queer movements after the 2010–11 revolution. Over the past decade, these movements have displayed various forms of mobilisation, revealing different shades of presence/absence. Some strategies focused on gaining visibility within institutions and physical public spaces, while others showed new forms of disembodied, digitally mediated presence/absence. With the recent rise of cyber-authoritarianism, a re-calibration of positions of presence/absence have enriched our understanding of presence. Building on interviews and social media content analysis from 2017 to 2023, the article challenges the widespread notion that physical presence equates to empowerment and absence to disempowerment. It argues that presence and absence are political positions within a spectrum of contention, influenced by political opportunities, and calls for the recognition of multiple, disembodied and hybrid forms of presence/absence.

Development of an mHealth App by Experts for Queer Individuals' Sexual-Reproductive Health Care Services and Needs: Nominal Group Technique Study.

Queer individuals continue to be marginalized in South Africa; they experience various health care challenges (eg, stigma, discrimination, prejudice, harassment, and humiliation), mental health issues (eg, suicide and depression), and an increased spread of HIV or AIDS and sexually transmitted illnesses (STIs; chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis). Mobile health (mHealth) apps have the potential to resolve the health care deficits experienced by health care providers when managing queer individuals and by queer individuals when accessing sexual-reproductive health care services and needs, thus ensuring inclusivity and the promotion of health and well-being. Studies have proven that the nominal group technique (NGT) could be used to solve different social and health problems and develop innovative solutions. This technique ensures that different voices are represented during decision-making processes and leads to robust results. This study aims to identify important contents to include in the development of an mHealth app for addressing the sexual-reproductive health care services and needs of queer individuals. We invited a group of 13 experts from different fields, such as researchers, queer activists, sexual and reproductive health experts, private practicing health care providers, innovators, and private health care stakeholders, to take part in a face-to-face NGT. The NGT was conducted in the form of a workshop with 1 moderator, 2 research assistants, and 1 principal investigator. The workshop lasted approximately 2 hours 46 minutes and 55 seconds. We followed and applied 5 NGT steps in the workshop for experts to reach consensus. The main question that experts were expected to answer was as follows: Which content should be included in the mHealth app for addressing sexual-reproductive health care services and needs for queer individuals? This question was guided by user demographics and background, health education and information, privacy and security, accessibility and inclusivity, functionality and menu options, personalization and user engagement, service integration and partnerships, feedback and improvement, cultural sensitivity and ethical considerations, legal and regulatory compliance, and connectivity and data use. Overall, experts voted and ranked the following main icons: menu options (66 points), privacy and security (39 points), user engagement (27 points), information hub (26 points), user demographics (20 points), connectivity (16 points), service integration and partnerships (10 points), functionalities (10 points), and accessibility and inclusivity (7 points). Conducting an NGT with experts from different fields, possessing vast skill sets, knowledge, and expertise, enabled us to obtain targeted data on the development of an mHealth app to address sexual-reproductive health care services and needs for queer individuals. This approach emphasized the usefulness of a multidisciplinary perspective to inform the development of our mHealth app and demonstrated the future need for continuity in using this approach for other digital health care innovations and interventions.

Hysterical lesbians and respectable gays. Lesbian anonymity in mainstream LGBT+ and grassroots activisms

This article is informed by sixteen in-depth interviews with LGBT + activists in Romania, my archive and notes during my involvement in feminist and queer activist circles, as well as archival materials of an LGBT + NGO. It proposes the concept of lesbian anonymity as a means of investigating the way in which marginal positions within mainstream movements are anonymized and their contributions to the movement dispersed within the generic queer/gay activism. By looking at specific case studies from Romaniás transition period (1989 to mid 2000s), I analyze how matters of representation were tackled within the LGBT + mainstream movements in relation to grassroots activist circles. The article explores what happens when queer gatekeepers fail to engage with internal criticisms concerning the selective erasure of certain categories of voices such as queer women, trans people, racialized people, sex workers. I argue that lesbian anonymity offers another angle of analyzing the clashes between and within different LGBT + groups in post-socialist spaces. How does lesbian anonymity shape the queer movements and why is it important to keep representational issues in mind while working on non-normative sexualities, gender, and women´s reproductive rights? This contribution offers a necessary critique of the representational gaps within queer movements.

Governing queer activism: power and visibility in state funding of international LGBTI organizations

Governing queer activism: power and visibility in state funding of international LGBTI organizations

Mnemotechnics and Other Psychogeographies of Flying

This meditation on how the spaces of cities can carry and activate cultural and political memories was inspired by the memory of Zak Kostopoulos, a queer activist who was murdered in Athens in 2018.

Autoimmunities after COVID: An Interview with Cindy Patton

Cindy Patton is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. An early AIDS activist in Boston, she holds a PhD in Communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After inaugurating her academic career at Temple University (Rhetoric and Community) and Emory University (Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts), she accepted a Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture and Health at Simon Fraser (2003-15). In that capacity, she worked with more than two dozen groups to develop small community-driven projects related to HIV/AIDS, housing, social welfare, mental health, while achieving, culminating in the creation of the Community Health Online Digital Research Resource, a catalogued, open-access, full-text collection of the materials from those groups (www.chodarr.org). Her academic publications span the social study of medicine, especially AIDS; social movement theory; gender studies; and media studies. She is the coeditor of Queer Diasporas (2000) and a special issue of Cultural Studies on Pierre Bourdieu (2003). She is the author of such works as Globalizing AIDS (2002), Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film (1997), Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (1996), Inventing AIDS (1990), and LA Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film Classic (2014). Taken collectively, Patton’s scholarship and activism has laid the foundation for insights in the health humanities, particularly AIDS studies, that consider the inextricable connections between epidemiology and ideology. Patton’s theorizations of stigma and discrimination patterns, her deconstruction of “truth” discourses subtending science, her critical re-evaluations of axioms associated with risk, safe sex, community, and knowledge production have been crucial interventions in the understanding of health and illness as cultural and discursive scripts. Among Patton’s most enduring contributions has been her theorization of how “African AIDS” was invented and circulated—that is, the notion of geographically bifurcated HIV pandemics split by the essential linkage between Africa and blackness generally with pathogenesis. Equally influential has been her elaboration of the insurgent queer research practices that fused with antiracist struggle to combat this split. In the interview below, Travis Alexander and Nishant Shahani engage Patton in a discussion on a range of topics—from (dis)continuities between the HIV/AIDS and COVID pandemics to the role of queer activism in forging epidemiological counter-publics and the geopolitics of medical bureaucracy.

Pride and the politics of activism in South and South-East Asia: a transdisciplinary conversation

ABSTRACT The notion of pride in the context of queer activism and community organising has been questioned by South and South-East Asian scholars and practitioners regarding its Eurocentric genealogies, its emphasis on visibility, and its reliance on capitalist and consumerist practices. This article builds on an online public panel discussion hosted at Heidelberg University on 15 May 2023 on the theme of queer activism in South and South-East Asia in the lead-up to the event ‘Bangga di Bali’, the first large-scale LGBTQ+ pride parade in Indonesia initiated by grassroots communities Pelangi Nusantara and QLC Bali. The discussion below brought together activists, students, and scholars working in and across Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka to think through different challenges and potentialities in the context of contemporary queer activism. The discussion examines the notion of pride and other queer activist strategies for their challenges and potentialities. The speakers explore decolonial approaches to activism in the context of the queer Indonesian music and activist scene, Khwaja Sira activism in Pakistan, and queer Eelam Tamil counter-narratives in Sri Lanka and the Eelam Tamil diaspora. Topics that are discussed include intersectional differences within queer communities, the risks of visible political activism, and the regional and global dynamics of funding.

Conceptualising queer activist critiques of Pride in the Two-Thirds World: Queer activism and alternative Pride organising in South Africa, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Shanghai

This article explores queer critiques of LGBT Pride in the ‘Two-Thirds World’, drawing from ethnographic data, focussing on under-researched contexts and analysing common and divergent themes in queer critiques of Pride globally. Criticisms of corporate involvement and capitalist appropriation of Pride are replicated in the case studies; there is also a complex politics of necessity, precarity, and pragmatism. ‘Mainstream’ Prides reflect and can exacerbate racial and class divisions and be a well-rewarded career path for its organisers. The article analyses the radical politics of ‘alternative’ queer Prides and argues for the importance of continually tracing the ideological impacts of Pride, engaging with the dynamics of global capitalism, and highlighting the struggles of queer grassroots activists.

Monsieur Mosse

Raimo Jääskeläinen, better known as Monsieur Mosse (1932–1992), was a hairdresser, makeup artist, gossip columnist, convicted blackmailer, and Finland’s first out gay male celebrity. The topic of endless articles, befriending and falling out with beauty queens and fashion models, publishing a tell-all memoir elaborating on his taste for luxury, working for straight porn magazines and briefly editing one, Mosse was both the subject and object of popular media and, in his flamboyance, a key domestic celebrity figure of the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, his relationship with the gay rights movement was frictional at best in that his brand was considered “dishonorable” vis-à-vis liberatory politics. Building on media historical inquiry and taking cue from Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller’s (2022) popular argument for studying “bad gays” – historical figures not fitting aspirational and inspirational narratives of queer activism and agency – this article examines Mosse’s trajectory as a celebrity, focusing especially on his 1980s collaborations with the sex press. We argue that Mosse’s particular brand of shameless extravagance and candid gossiping knowingly operationalized “badness” as a vehicle of distinction and visibility in a largely homophobic national context.

How Queer Activism Is Changing the Labor Movement

How Queer Activism Is Changing the Labor Movement

On the ‘demonic grounds’ of South African higher education: centering Black women and queer activists’ experiences in decolonization movements

Amidst the global wave of decolonization movements, the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement in South Africa has echoed globally, connecting struggles against racism and colonial legacies such as Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. to Change the Date campaign in Australia. This study focuses on the experiences of Black women and queer activists within #RMF, examining their role in disrupting hegemonic patriarchy and addressing gender-based violence. Using McKittrick’s (2006) demonic grounds as an epistemic framework, we delve into how Black women and queer activists navigate and resist ‘violent grounds’ spaces of historical oppression and violence – within their geographical and institutional contexts in South Africa. Our findings reveal how such violence is an empirical manifestation of the ‘demonic’ and how resistance materializes through counter-movements and oppositional politics in contested spaces. This research illuminates the intricate dynamics of resistance within the #RMF movement and highlights its significance as a microcosm of broader struggles for social justice, emphasizing the transformative power of marginalized voices in the global discourse on decolonization.

The Condemnation of Hate and the Violence of the Status Quo

Abstract This article interrogates the tension between the way that the condemnation of hate performatively establishes and reinforces discursive and affective boundaries for public debates and the embrace of hate by anti-racist, abolitionist, feminist, and queer activists, that is, their claim that hatred is a valid response to the existential violence inflicted by borders or the police. The cases of activists embracing hate indicate that the boundaries set by the condemnation of hate are too limited to appropriately account for the violence of the status quo. The condemnation of hate, rather, appears to veil this violence, that is, as a way to curb the means to critique and overcome the status quo. The article offers a critical engagement with studies on hate that pathologize the hateful subject, juxtaposing these studies with cases of activists affirming their hatred for politicians, straight people, or San Francisco tech workers. It thereby broadens understandings of hate by proposing that hate as a response to harm can be part of anti-racist, abolitionist, feminist, and queer struggles and provide valuable epistemic effects grounded in theory rather than conspiracies. The article consequently challenges the condemnation of hate by contesting that hate is necessarily illegitimate.

Translation as a cultural tool for mediating conflict in queer and feminist grassroots democratic coalitions in Denmark, Germany and Sweden

In this article, I present the findings of a three-year qualitative research project studying feminist and queer activist groups that support refugees in Denmark, Germany and Sweden. My findings show how multilingual activists volunteered as linguistic interpreters to enable inclusive dialogue between refugees and host-country citizens in joint grassroots democratic coalition meetings. Based on interviews with different groups, I show that their linguistic-broker position gave these activists the leverage to challenge and bring to the attention of white-majority citizens the exclusionary dynamics of structural inequality and civic-status hierarchies that create tensions within supposedly open and inclusive joint meetings. By highlighting the critical, counter-hegemonic positionality of activist-translators in coalitions working on gender, the central contribution of my case study is to connect theories of translation and conflict mediation in transnational social movements with research that focuses on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in intersectional coalitions.

Where the personal is political

The Queer Asylum Stories project collected interviews with people who had successfully gained asylum based on their sexuality. The focus of this article is on life stories leading up to and triggering the decision to seek asylum, and the processes of formation of the interviewees’ queer subjectivity. The discussion draws on the three related constructs of interpellation, ideological becoming and habitus, and considers the role of queer activism, understood as a dimension of queer habitus as theorised in the foundational work of Didier Eribon. Finding that the term ‘activism’ is widely used but infrequently defined, the article suggests that activism in general, and queer activism in particular, need to be defined explicitly and explored in order to gain a deeper understanding of what is involved. It provides a working definition of queer activism to guide this process.

Climbing out from being thrown under the bus: queer faith futures in a transphobic political world

ABSTRACT Since the achievement of marriage equality, culture wars focused on religion have intensified and the political spotlight has turned more sharply towards transgender and other gender-diverse people. Grounded in the experience of Australia’s first out transgender priest, this article explores these developments by focusing on the marginalisation of transgender and queer people of faith in queer activism and mainstream Australian churches during and after the Australian marriage-equality plebiscite. The normative cisgender assumptions underpinning the ‘yes’ campaign reflected the continuing marginalisation of queer people of faith in much secular LGBTIQ + advocacy and organising as well as the lack of progress in addressing gender-diverse people’s chief concerns. A political framework that gives agency to the voices and priorities of transgender and other queer people of faith is urgently needed to challenge the processes of othering and exclusion that predominate in right-wing populist and gender-critical quarters.

LGBTQ+ activism in Azerbaijan: shifting queer (in)visibility regime through power–knowledge technologies

ABSTRACT The queer (in)visibility regime in Azerbaijan has been historically structured through centralizing powers and the coloniality of knowledge(s) in their Russian/Soviet and contemporary Western manifestations. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, this study shows how local queer activism arises through the appropriation of Western LGBTQ+ discourse and the use of the internet, with its novel spaces and digitally mediated discursive practices. In addition to its humanizing and normalizing effects, these organizations generate a new space for the realization of homosexual desire against the old Soviet subjectivity while preserving their didactic enlightener position towards Western/European pedagogy. Finally, this study argues that homosexuality has become a means of boundary-making practices both inside and outside the country, positioning on the borderline between symbolic Europe and national characteristics.

Becoming a queer and black woman in Marseille: scholarly, political and ordinary uses of intersectionality

This article examines ordinary uses of intersectionality in antiracist Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Bi and Queer (LGBTQ) activist networks in Marseille. Analysis of the first empirical data gleaned from the ethnographic exploration of these activist circles shows the dissemination of an intersectional interpretation grid. More precisely, by focusing on interviews of Awa and Ngozi, two self-identified black and queer women in their twenties, this article reveals how they have taken ownership of political and academic categories that give meaning to their personal trajectory shaped by processes of racialization and heterosexist dynamics. As these ideas travel, new connections are also made with individuals sharing similar experiences.