Crosscurrents and Dialogue between the Romani Movement and the Women’s and LGBTIQ Movements

Multiple, often negative representations of Roma tend to originate in and be sustained by non-Romani actors including organisations, governments, the majority, as well as academia. Other social movements have shown that this situation is not new for non-dominant social groups who have had to challenge representations which impede the opportunities, rights and expectations such representations induce. Recently, dominant orthodoxies within the Romani movement and academia have been ruptured by a series of interventions which emphasise the importance of Roma agency and political voice. Specifically, these ‘revolutionary’ Romani, post-colonial feminist, intersectional, queer voices call into question the prevailing essentialist legacy within Romani Studies, as well as the ‘epistemological erasure/invisibility’ of Roma within Romani knowledge production that continues to conserve the West as Subject. This Paper will look at the recently emerged Romani+ LGBTIQ movement that has been looking at ways of ‘decolonising’ knowledge-production and the lessons learnt by the Romani movement, the LGBTIQ movement, as well as the women’s movement. It will also argue that employing critical, counter-normative queer, as well as intersectional concepts, which interrogate the deployment of dominant social orthodoxies, fixed identity categories and other discursively produced binaries as ‘regulatory fictions’, enables a re-conceptualisation of Romani identities. Such a revised approached more adequately attends to the pluralist, multidimensional identifications that members of the various heterogeneous groups and sub-groups of Roma make and is more attuned to the multifaceted, non-fixed, constantly negotiated nature of Romani identities and identifications.