Navigating (post)coloniality, global human rights discourse and the neoliberal present: Intersectional perspectives on the complexities and precarity of LGBTIQ* lives and LGBTIQ* activism

Abstract

Since the Millennium, LGBTIQ* movements and LGBTIQ* activists are playing an increasingly visible role in international politics, as well as on a state, regional or communal level. A number of transnational LGBTIQ* organizations (e.g. ILGA) are actively participating in, or influencing, policy processes on an UN level, in different EU institutions or other supranational organizations (e.g. World Bank). Funding structures have likewise become internationalized, and especially LGBTIQ* organizations in the Global South are increasingly allocating funding from institutions in the Global North (e.g. via development programmes). However, despite these growing (international) visibility of LGBTIQ* issues and tremendous (socio-legal) changes in some countries, anti-gender mobilizations are globally on the rise. They become entangled with different ‘local’ politics or ideologies including (postcolonial) anti-imperialism, Christian conservatism, right wing nationalism, neoliberal autocratism, or (homo)populism. LGBTIQ* movements and activists must therefore navigate these complex political constellations and institutional constraints in different geopolitical contexts and settings. LGBTIQ* activists have thus also learned to engage strategically, or subversively, with a variety of political structures, legal bodies or state institutions, however, often at the price of (re)producing particular forms of exclusion and marginalization, for instance, based on class, education, race, citizenship, age, gender characteristics. This panel therefore aims to shed light on related challenges and ambivalences for LGBTIQ* activism and LGBTIQ* lives when engaging with, but also depending on, related political institutions, established (legal) frameworks and (transnational) funding structures: Which LGBTIQ* lives are addressed, which become marginalized?

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