Queer Cold Wars? Troubling Geopolitical Visions of Gender and Sexuality

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, “LGBTQ+” has emerged as a key discursive marker signalling alliances and oppositions and underpin broader geopolitical claims in the international arena. From the US War on Terror, backed by the rhetoric that Jasbir Puar describes as “homonationalism” (Puar 2013) or the EU’s use of LGBTQ+ issues in enlargement processes (Slootmaeckers 2017) to Russia’s labelling of the “international LGBT movement” as “extremist” and claims to be waging a war for “traditional values” against Ukraine, a picture has emerged of a world divided into two camps—of states supporting LGBTQ+ rights and ones vehemently opposing them. This binary has been theorized through the opposition of “homonationalism” vs. “heteronationalism” (Renkin & Trofimov 2023). Additional binaries such as Christianity vs. Islam, West vs. “the rest,” and democracy vs. autocracy have often also underpinned such framings. In these narratives, the recognition of sexual and gender minorities constitutes a civilizational test, indicating to which geopolitical world a country belongs. The idea that gender and sexuality, and LGBTQ+ rights in particular, have emerged as a major faultline in international relations has been expressed in public discourse as a “gay divide” (the Economist 2014), “world war LGBT” (Rohrich 2015), or as a “new Cold War” (Zivo 2021). Researchers identify a geopoliticization of gender and sexuality (Brock and Edenborg 2020; Luciani 2023), where sexual politics become entangled in narratives of sovereignty, foreign influence, security, and a marker of a nation’s standing and role in the world. Such associations have become a recurrent phenomenon across the world in the twenty-first century, although their articulations and manifestations are complex, varied and shifting. This panel draws on the forthcoming edited volume Beyond Queer Cold Wars: Troubling Geopolitical Visions of Gender and Sexuality (Palgrave 2026, edited by Klepikova, Shevtsova and Edenborg) to explore how queer politics is shaped by and implicated in contemporary geopolitical tensions. While debates over global LGBTQ+ rights often reproduce binaries such as progressive versus regressive states, inclusive versus exclusionary regimes, West versus East, our contributions critically interrogate these divides by examining how LGBTQ+ rights and queer lives are mobilised in struggles over security, nationalism, and global governance. The chapters seek to deconstruct, interrogate or trouble binary visions of gender and sexuality, empirically and theoretically. The analyses do not however stop at showing the limitations of dichotomies, but all seek to move beyond them and point at alternative, more nuanced and complex - and ultimately more productive - ways of figuring the politics and geopolitics of gender and sexuality in their respective context. Case studies from Turkey, Brazil, Sweden, Taiwan and the EU reveal how the governance of sexuality and gender both unsettles and reinforces geopolitical imaginaries. Together, these contributions trouble simplistic Cold War–style binaries and open up space for nuanced understandings of sexuality, power, and geopolitics.

Title	Details
Troubling Turkey’s Anti-Gender Geopolitical Discourse: Tensions and Contestations within and beyond the Islamist Power Bloc Under Autocratization	View Paper Details
The Im-Possibility of Global Queer Politics: Identity, Consensus and the Geopolitics of LGBTQI+ equality	View Paper Details
(Homo)nationalism, homonormativity and coloniality: Unpacking the geopolitical imaginary of right-wing LGBTIQ+ activists in Brazil	View Paper Details
From queer victims to queer defenders? Troubling binary notions of threat and protection in contemporary contestations over LGBTQ+ rights in Sweden	View Paper Details
Harmonizing LGBTQ Progressive Ideology and Stylistic Continuity: The Expansion of Taiwan’s Soft Power through the Lesbian Drama "Fragrance of the First Flower"	View Paper Details