Changing Places, Changing Frames? Queer Protest Under Adverse Conditions

Recent research has highlighted the urban-rural cleavage as a renewed central line of societal and political conflict. Often this is linked to the disproportional electoral gains of far-right parties in rural areas. This growing strength of the far right goes along with an increasing number of attacks on queer protests and individuals in recent years. At the same time the queer movement has expanded its protest activities, most prominently through pride parades. Especially in recent years, in Germany these have spread from major urban centers to smaller towns and rural areas, where political hostility is more pronounced and they have oftentimes been targeted and violently attacked by far-right groups. The diffusion of queer protest into adverse local settings leads me to pose the following research question: how does the movement adapt in its claims, and how is it interpreted by the media, under heightened political opposition? This paper addresses this question by taking a local comparative perspective on how queer protests are mediated in local news coverage. Drawing on framing theory and political opportunity approaches, the paper analyses (1) how queer protest diffuses along the urban-rural divide and over time, and (2) how claim-making and the public perception of the movement has changed systematically. Empirically, the study examines pride parades and similar events in Germany between 2016 and 2025. It combines a frame analysis of a newly compiled large-scale corpus of local and regional newspapers with a protest event analysis. The movements adaption and media framing are analyzed using a combined computational approach that integrates topic modeling and salience measures to identify dominant frames, key actors, and their relative presence in local news coverage. Keywords: queer protest; urban-rural cleavage; framing; far-right dominance; computational social sciences; local collective actions frames