Queer/ing Development?! Contesting the Subversive Potentials of LGBTIQ-inclusive Development Agendas from a Post/-decolonial Perspective

The human/sexual rights situation of LGBTIQs is gaining ground in the arena of international development cooperation and development politics – not only since the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway canceled their Official Development Assistance for Uganda after the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” was signed by President Museveni in February 2014. National development agencies as well as several development NGOs and international foundations are increasingly engaged in ‘officially’ supporting LGBTIQ-inclusive development strategies but have also started to fund LGBTIQ-organizations engaged with the promotion of LGBTIQ-rights in the Global South/East on a bilateral or small scale level. Moreover, these recent developments have also strongly been supported by LGBTI-organizations and networks from ‘donor countries’ themselves. My paper is concerned with the question, if and how LGBTIQ-inclusive development strategies and concepts embrace any subversive potential(s) in the arena of ‘development’. By drawing on some preliminary results from a sample of qualitative interviews with ‘queers in development’ and by bringing queer, post-/decolonial and race-critical approaches to sexuality and global/ized queerness into a productive dialogue with postdevelopment theories I am particularly asking whether racialized and civilizational implications constitutive for the functioning of the project ‘development’ are challenged when ‘queer’ agendas, organizations and activists enter the development apparatus. I will examine how new versions of a racialized and civilizing discourse are being produced in and through LGBTIQ-inclusive development agendas thereby re-establishing a queer/ed regime of sexual rights panopticism where the homophobic ‘rest’ can be watched (and ‘wronged’) as an anachronistic “spectacle” from a privileged point of invisibility (McClintock; Spivak). However, by interpreting development as a paradoxical process which is imbued with hegemonic as well with oppositional and subversive forms of knowledge, spaces of failure and “slippages“ (Bhabha) I also intend to transgress a simplistic accusation of LGBTIQ-development agendas as only being ‘neolocolonial’ or ‘homonationalist’ encounters.