The State of Being LGBT in the Age of Reaction

This chapter provides an overview of LGBT politics in the Middle East and North Africa region, with a specific focus on Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey. It argues that LGBT movements in these countries must be understood within the context of how the state is engaged in a broader range of authoritarian and/or state-centered regulations of social movements after the period of the Arab Spring. It also illustrates how the current regulation of LGBT rights has historical roots in the understanding of sexual identities during the colonial era. The chapter argues, therefore, that the understanding of LGBT rights as part of a “progress” or “democratization” narrative is simplistic and does not account for the historical and structural conditions that created the contexts and possibilities for contemporary LGBT organizing.

Gender Identity and Transgender Rights in Global Perspective

This chapter provides an overview of how gender identity and transgender rights have been defined in an LGBT rights framework, what international and regional organizations and social actors have defined as fundamental trans rights, and, finally, the limitations of applying a homogenizing “trans rights” framework to a vastly disparate array of gender liminal subjectivities and practices. First, the chapter defines the scope and reach of a “trans rights” framework as housed within “LGBT” legal and organizational practices. Next, it outlines the key issues that international and regional trans rights activists, advocates, and academics have outlined as central to addressing their own communities’ needs. Importantly, while the popularity of collapsing sexual and gender minorities into an “LGBT” framework would suggest a coherence of shared identities and practices across cultural and regional experience, this framework may, instead, function to elide profound differences in the formation and application of primarily North Atlantic and Anglophone understandings of “rights” and “needs.” Rather, as discussed in internationally and regionally focused reports, activist needs assessments, and academic work, trans and gender liminal rights have been, regionally, best addressed and met by organizations and groups that are not housed within an “LGBT” framework or organization. Finally, the chapter discusses how approaching “trans rights” through a lens of gender self-determination, rather than as a category of mutually understood and identifiable subjectivities and experiences across different communities of practice, may function to bolster shared rights claims while also, simultaneously, delimiting or delegitimizing overly formulaic understandings of gender experience and expression.

Debating Imperial Violence and the Production of Sexualities

This chapter reviews scholarly controversies about responses to state violence targeting people for their sexual orientation or sex identities (SOSI) in a global perspective. It describes the emergence of legal strategies in the United States and Europe in the 1970s to 1990s to counter SOSI discrimination, as well as the responses to the use of these strategies in postcolonial African countries and nation-states created in the aftermath of the Ottoman, British, and French Empires, as well as in revolutionary Iran. The chapter analyzes the scholarship on anti-SOSI backlashes tied to critiques of US and European imperialism and militarism. Campaigns for SOSI inclusion in the heteronormative, reproductive nation-state are distinguished from queer agendas attacking the nation-state. The chapter concludes by raising questions about whether authors who attack liberal or queer anti-nationalist politics in Muslim or postcolonial contexts are tacitly or overtly supporting nationalist agendas and failing to provide remedies to restrain violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation or sexed identities.

Academia versus Activism

This chapter was inspired by reading a number of contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics and asks three interconnected questions: How can one best understand the range of experiences of and the attitudes toward people whose sexual orientation or gender expression is regarded as diverging from socially prescribed norms? Is the language of sexual rights the most appropriate in defending sexual and gender diversity when there appears to be growing global polarization around issues of sexuality? And how do we reconcile the growing gap between academic and activist understandings of sexual diversity and rights?

Introduction

This introduction outlines the types of phenomena and forms of analysis covered in the contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics. Pivoting from the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, it addresses current LGBT politics, from the adoption of marriage equality in Taiwan to innovative restrictive laws in Russia, from retrenchment over the rights of gender minorities in the United States to the moves toward decriminalization in Tunisia. The analysis provokes the reader to think of global sexual diversity politics as complex patterns of change without regard to notions of progress or social evolution in positive terms. In discussing the handbook, the introduction explores issues involved in developing a work with real global reach, including issues of equality and inclusion, the challenges of working on these topics, as well as the selection of a cover image. Finally, the introduction outlines the organization of the handbook in analytical terms.

Global LGBT Politics at Scale

This chapter illuminates one dynamic of the global emergence and successes of LGBT politics in the early twenty-first century: how LGBT communities remember and narrate the emergence of LGBT politics and the historical antecedents they use to contextualize contemporary LGBT rights claims. In juxtaposing a nationally circulating narrative with a regional one, the chapter suggests that how narratives about the emergence of LGBT politics circulate is a function of scale. For example, both national and regional LGBT rights efforts take note of events in the city of Tarapoto, located in Peru’s Amazonian region. At the national level, the violence that occurred in Tarapoto during Peru’s internal armed conflict helped link LGBT rights claims to the country’s broader human rights movement. Yet in Tarapoto interlocutors emphasized a municipal anniversary parade as a starting point for recounting the successes of LGBT rights in the region. Whereas analyses at the national scale may indicate a less successful record of LGBT rights in Peru in comparison to other Latin American countries, shifting analysis to the regional scale reveals an alternative account.

Research on Diversity in Sexual Identities

If the elaboration of LGB identities is predicated on the development of binary sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual, or Western and non-Western, research at the dawn of the twenty-first century has turned decidedly to the fluidity of sexuality and the various ways that sexual behavior is situated in social relationships and as social identities. This chapter turns to the persistence of alternative sexualities outside of or beyond the construction LGB, interrogating the links between sexuality and gender, the various reactions to the global diffusion of homosexuality (and homophobia) as cultural forms predicated on Western binaries, and the possibilities inherent in a world of diversely constituted sexualities.

Global Sexual Diversity Politics and the Trouble with LGBT Rights

This chapter responds to the challenge state homophobia poses to LGBT rights in its invocation of a “gay menace.” It engages the limits of a rights-based discourse in achieving security for sexual and gender minorities under threat: first, as homophobia is marshalled as a tool of statecraft and then as LGBT rights and identities are bound geotemporally by the historically specific context to which they responded. These two efforts demonstrate the need for an approach sensitive to the practical conditions faced within specific political contexts. The chapter’s argument addresses the political incommensurability of LGBT rights in the context of authoritarian and illiberal states and the danger of associating sexual and gender liberation with autocracy. It considers the consequences of a “gay menace” and of “rights”-claiming in response as both are bounded in geotemporal terms, then dislocated from history, culture, and politics as they become modular. Finally, the chapter asks what a global sexual and gender minority politics might look like through claims around capabilities tied to global civil society that foster collective self-actualization instead of “human rights” or “security” tied to authoritarian or fickle states.

LGBT Politics in South Asia

LGBT politics in South Asia is rooted in both the history of colonialism and what the author of this chapter calls the “underground movement” of the LGBT South Asian communities themselves. Offering a critique of coming out, the chapter argues that South Asian states carry the burden of colonial violence to this day. Therefore, embracing Western coming out culture for these states is antithetical to the process of decolonization. This chapter moves from a state-centric understanding of LGBT politics to an everyday people–focused conceptualization and practices of LGBT politics and movements that cross geographical, cultural, religious, and political boundaries in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Employing a feminist autoethnographic approach, the chapter argues that public space performances of hijras on the streets, trains, buses, and homes in South Asia are the most authentic, indigenous, decolonial, and antipatriarchal drives in creating space for LGBT communities in the region. This movement troubles gendered and heteronormative public spaces while also claiming the rich history and diversity of gender and sexuality in South Asia.

LGBT Rights in the Former Soviet Union

This chapter examines how LGBT politics have evolved in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and other countries of the former Soviet Union since 1991. Using the concept of visibility as an analytical lens, it charts the changing experiences of LGBT people and public attitudes toward homosexuality and gender identity through three distinct phases: first from erasure to invisibility in the 1990s and early 2000s, then increasing in visibility in the 2000s with the emergence of the region’s second wave of LGBT activism, and finally the current state of hypervisibility as state-sponsored political homophobia has intensified. For each stage, the main features of the configuration of a post-Soviet “regime of visibility” are outlined, charting the parallel development of activism and resistance and their interactions. The chapter concludes by considering the geotemporalities of post-Soviet LGBT politics and the insights that this region offers for both practices and understandings of global LGBT activism.