The Pitfalls of Resistance: LGBTQ Media, Eastern Europeanism and Brexit

Scholarly literature on the ‘anti-gender’ movement in Europe has so far focused much of its attention on Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. With issues of gender and sexuality largely overlooked by scholars of Brexit and the UK’s relationship with Europe, this paper takes the UK as a case study. The UK’s accession to the EEC coincided with significant challenges to gender and sexual norms. Both the EU and the European Court of Human Rights became key drivers of UK anti-discrimination law, particularly in relation to sexual orientation discrimination, sexual and family rights and legal gender recognition. What’s more, the passing of marriage equality in 2013 became entangled with then Conservative prime minister David Cameron’s pledge to call an EU referendum to satisfy party hardliners. This paper presents the final empirical chapter in a book project on Anglo-British national identity and media narratives about LGBTQ rights during EU membership. Drawing on trans- and queer-feminist theories of nationalism, the book argues that LGBTQ rights were intertwined in different ways with media narratives of national identity throughout the UK’s EU membership. Applying feminist narrative analysis to news coverage between 1973 and 2017, this paper presents findings from the liberal and pink press that traces the development of a particular pro-Europeanism amongst LGBTQ activists. Contrary to the idea of the British as ‘reluctant Europeans’, this paper demonstrates that there has been a discourse of European identity within liberal and queer media in the UK. This discourse has sometimes been underpinned by shared histories of the oppression under European totalitarianisms and supported transnational solidarity across the continent. Media stories also revealed a political identity as queer Europeans in which the EU was positioned as a liberal, values-based organisation that would equalise rights for LGBTQ folk across the continent through political integration and the enlargement process. Yet, characterisations of western European countries such as the Netherlands as the ‘pinnacle’ of progress and the European liberal ideal erase homophobic and racist legacies of European colonialism. Moreover, coverage during the 2010s of anti-LGBTQ politics in Russia, Poland and Hungary in particular was reflective of what Kalmar has referred to as ‘Eastern Europeanism’ in which Central and Eastern Europe is racialised and constructed as ‘backwards’. With the EU seen to be failing in enforcing its ‘liberal values’ in member states rolling back LGBTQ rights, this pro-European narrative ultimately failed to legitimise the EU by 2016. As such, the paper serves as a reminder and a call to action to shape feminist and queer resistance in ways that do not perpetuate the same gendered and racialised ways of thinking upon which our oppression rests. Moreover, it highlights the need to rethink pro-Europeanism in ways that move away from civilisational ideas of ‘liberal values’ and ‘European progressiveness’.