The ‘Golden age’ of LGBTIQ+ Equality? Minoritarian expertise at the EU Commission and the making of LGBTIQ+ policies, 2015-2025

This presentation is based on ongoing doctoral research focusing on the development of LGBTIQ+ policies at European Union (EU) level, especially the Commission and its LGBTIQ+ strategies or list of actions (2015, 2020 and 2025). It aims to combine an interest in the individual trajectories and positions of the actors producing these policies with an interest in the evolution of these instruments across the last decade. It draws on data collected through interviews and the analysis of policy documents and grey literature from an ongoing fieldwork. At the crossroads of the sociology of EU institutions and feminist policy analysis, this presentation describes the dynamics of the subfield of LGBTIQ+ policymaking within the EU and proposes to explore two aspects of it. On the one hand, it seeks to understand how being associated with a minoritarian expertise determines the specific position of the subfield within the EU Commission symbolic architecture and the individual experience of the civil servants who work on these files. On the other hand, it attempts to plot the coordinates of the major developments in the subfield since 2019. Inspired by the so-called “Strasbourg school” of European sociology, in the first section we propose to discuss two hypotheses. First, we want to show that the LGBTIQ+ subfield occupies a dominated position within the field of EU administration because the expertise it promotes is disqualified and dismissed as activism. Second, we demonstrate that civil servants working on these policies show a high level of personal commitment to their work and bring individual dispositions such as their sexual orientation into play in their professional activities. In the second section, we will seek to describe the trajectory of these policies over the last few years by putting them in conversation with the literature on EU equality policies (Ahrens, 2017; Jacquot, 2014). We propose to critically assess the idea that the period from 2019 to 2024 represented the “golden age” of EU LGBTIQ+ equality policies by placing it in continuity with earlier developments and show the deep contradictions that mark its advent and that coalesce around each of the strategies.