Global Queer Politics

This book is the first study of multilateral LGBT human rights diplomacy viewed from the perspective of its practitioners: diplomats, LGBT activists, human rights experts and multilateral specialists. It demonstrates how diplomats and advocates work to promote LGBT rights on the world stage, often using Western constructs of sexual and gender identity. In turn, these efforts have triggered conflict and polarization: opposing states often deploy cultural, religious and moral discourses to minimize LGBT rights as a “legitimate” human right. The author, a seasoned Canadian foreign service officer, human rights negotiator and former community activist and researcher, uses insider perspectives to critically assess both bilateral and multilateral diplomatic engagement on LGBT human rights issues. Janoff’s research involved participation in UN meetings in Geneva and New York and 29 interviews with diplomats, human rights advocates and experts, and representatives from the UN and other inter-governmental organizations. Although LGBT issues have been mainstreamed into many areas of bilateral and multilateral human rights policy, his research found a considerable gap: a coordinated diplomatic and civil society approach is needed to more effectively address ongoing human rights violations against LGBT people around the world.

How did far-right, hateful and anti-democratic ideologies become so successful in many societies in Europe? This volume analyses the paradoxical roles sexual politics have played in this process and reveals that the incoherence and untruthfulness in right-wing populist, ultraconservative and far-right rhetorics of fear are not necessarily signs of weakness. Instead, the authors show how the far right can profit from its own incoherence by generating fear and creating discourses of crisis for which they are ready to offer simple solutions. In studies on Poland, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Austria, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Portugal, France, Sweden and Russia, the ways far-right ideologies travel and take root are analysed from a multi-disciplinary perspective, including feminist and LGBTQI reactions. Understanding how hateful and antidemocratic ideologies enter the very centre of European societies is a necessary premise for developing successful counterstrategies.

This book offers a much-needed analysis of the difficulties associated with providing state protection from violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Europe. Focusing on Poland as a national case study, encompassed in the broader European context, the book provides a holistic analysis of internal and external factors influencing state-level policy outcomes. By focusing on hate crime advocacy and carefully dissecting it from the rest of the LGBT rights “package,” the book fills a gap in queer scholarship, which has overlooked this aspect of mobilisation. The book also examines the emerging international standards and provides a comparative analysis of national laws, policies and practices on anti-LGBT hate crime across Europe. Highlighting variance in outcomes in different areas of LGBT rights, this book considers the role of lesser-known actors and mechanisms who are key in enacting critical policy changes. State Responses to Anti-LGBT Violence provides a critical reflection on the complicated relationships between queer communities and the state.

This book focuses on an underestimated alternative to the mainstream liberal rights-based approach: cultural activism. This political strategy deploys art and other creative techniques to support the quest for social justice. This work explores this approach's dynamics, strategies, and potential, presenting a qualitative case study of three cultural activists in Colombia and Mexico -Lia García, Felipe Osornio, and Manuel Parra-, including in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation of their artistic/activist work.

Through their intervention in the realm of ordinary affects, these cultural producers create new affective climates for the experience of sexual and gender difference and develop new repertoires of affective response concerning identities usually seen as abject or worthy of social punishment. Strategies of cultural activism aim to subvert dominant representations and performances of marginalized subjectivities, to critique and subvert gender norms, to give visibility to non-hegemonic identities, to resist different forms of oppression and marginalization, and to prompt collective healing of wounds left by violence and discrimination.

The open access book sheds light on the diverse forms of anti-gender mobilization in the post-Yugoslav space by exploring its historical trajectories, cultural variances, and different religious frames. It offers a meticulous comparative analysis of seven post-socialist countries that shared a common history, which collapsed through wars and through their different paths to “Europeanisation.” Gender scholars and activists have never ceased to build and rebuild ties across the new borders, fighting for freedom of speech, human rights and against their local nationalisms. Today, however, it is precisely the ultraconservative forces that speak the same language of rights but with diametrically opposing illiberal goals. The fiercest opponents in all other respects, the post-Yugoslav ultraconservatives agree that the major threat lies in the specter of “gender.” This volume tells a story about gender as a post-Yugoslav “symbolic glue.” It advances knowledge in the area of anti-gender mobilizations and offers helpful insights for academics, researchers, and policymakers alike.