Queer in Cyprus? Normativity and Resistance in a Changing (Trans)national Landscape

The mainstreaming of transnational LGBTIQ agendas has not always or everywhere led to substantive LGBTIQ equality and inclusion. In some contexts, it has even contributed to the introduction and stabilization of forms of relational privilege among LGBTIQ individuals. How are the boundaries of LGBTIQ exclusion and inclusion (re)formed in contexts where mainstreamized transnational discourses and practices that pertain to LGBTIQ rights and politics merge, cross, and/or collide with resistant traditional and conservative ideas and practices about socially and politically acceptable sexualities and gender identities, including nonconforming ones? How does the increased attention to transnational LGBTIQ rights discourses and politics in such contexts impact local perceptions and manifestations of gender- and sexuality-nonconforming identities and politics? Answers to these questions are important for understanding the opportunities and limitations for queer and denormativized interpellations of gender- and sexuality-nonconforming identities and politics. This paper offers novel responses to these questions through the study of Cyprus, a country where the interplay between traditional/conservative and transnational notions and practices is particularly intense. Employing a qualitative research design and analyzing data from interviews with LGBTIQ participants conducted across the span of more than a decade, it examines the development of Greek-Cypriot LGBTIQ politics since the late 2000s. It notes the positive impact of the strategic employment of transnational LGBTIQ rights and politics discourses and practices during the first years of LGBTIQ activism and argues that they have enabled LGBTIQ agency and political mobilization. However, it also argues that, in more recent years, such discourses and practices have led to the normativization of local LGBTIQ politics and have become markers of LGBTIQ hierarchical differentiations based on positionality and privilege. Therefore, it calls for a shift towards a counter-normative approach to LGBTIQ activism and politics, so that alternative subjugated knowledges and new political possibilities may arise. In doing so, this analysis contributes to the scholarly discussion on whether and how LGBTIQ politics in contentious contexts reinforce and challenge homonormativity, transnormativity, privilege, and power, and whether they facilitate or inhibit queer emancipatory activism and politics.