Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research among Orthodox Jews in Israel to show how the struggles of LGBT people and their families over homosexuality are shaped by—and complicate—the association of homonationalism with the secular liberal West and homophobia with a religious conservative rest.

Paper long abstract:

Israel features prominently in scholarly and activist discourse on homonationalism and pinkwashing. When high-ranking politicians and lobby groups use LGBT rights to present Israel as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, they not only downplay the state’s violent policies against Palestinians. They also mask the internal struggles over LGBT rights and how they relate to the binary image of the liberal West vs. ‘the rest’. This paper focuses on the still small but growing Jewish Orthodox LGBT community to address this concern. I suggest that the everyday struggles of religious LGBT people and their families over homosexuality are shaped by, but also complicate, the association of homonationalism with the secular liberal West and homophobia with a religious conservative rest.

With the Orthodox rabbinate frequently hitting the headlines for homophobic statements, political struggles over LGBT rights in Israel are commonly perceived as running along a religious/secular divide. This dichotomy has long rendered a religious gay identity virtually inexistent and impossible. In the last five years, however, LGBT people from Zionist Orthodox homes—often located in the Occupied Territories—have increasingly come into the open. I show how in painful daily life encounters, LGBT people, their families, and sympathetic rabbis carve out space for LGBT identities within Orthodox Judaism while carefully rejecting a liberal ideology of sexual freedom and individual choice. Discussing these encounters, I explore whether these encounters constitute a particular religious form of homonationalism and how they challenge our understanding of the homonationalism/homophobia dichotomy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes an interpretation of the contemporary politics of representation about homosexuality and same-gender sexual relations in Senegal. It sheds lights on the local political stakes around the issue, arguing that the analysis could benefit from considering not only Western homonationalism, but also its gender equality agenda.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution proposes an interpretation of the contemporary politics of representation around homosexuality and same-gender sexual relations in Senegal, arguing that: these should be articulated in the analysis with the politics of representation of gender equality, as they can be jointly perceived as both a Western imperialist tool and a local moral intolerable; the focus on the global scale needs to go along with the understanding of the local political stakes.

Since at least a decade, under neoliberalism and extraversion, changing in gendered roles and sexual practices are occurring in the society and local moral authorities are thus developing a broader reinvention of Islam against this “exogenous” “corruption” of values.

Under this social pressure, government adopted heteronationalism as its official standing point and participated in fashioning LGBT’s rights as a forced and neocolonial acculturation that must be hindered. At the very same time, government is increasingly engaged in the incorporation of the more “naturalized” part of the global “gender agenda”. If homoerotic practices continue to be criminalized in the penal code, State is enforcing laws fighting sexual violence and promoting gender equality policies. Aimed at keeping a broad political consent, government thus decided to explicitly dissociate heteromormativity from the concept of gender: talking about gender-based violence does not mean preventing homophobia.

I will interrogate this strategic discourse, which disconnects sexuality from gender, thanks to a fieldwork I’m carrying out since 2019 in the Dakar region with professionals working in services and institutions tackling gender-based violence.

Paper short abstract:

Portuguese colonial legacies seem to have impacted on popular opinion and state attitudes towards homosexuality in e.g. Angola and Mozambique. Discursive dynamics are rather more complex in these settings compared to the notion of a homophobic backlash against an alleged western-imposed LGBT agenda.

Paper long abstract:

Three discernible conceptual strands appear in African homophobia discourses as well as elsewhere: traditionalist, biologistic, and religious. In African contexts, they clearly relate to the colonial experience. In much of the writing on homophobia, it has become almost a trope to claim that homophobia, not homosexual desire, is the colonial import. Much of the debate centers on British ex-colonial contexts. This may be significant, because at this point, we observe that popular views on the issue of homosexuality differ along various lines. In this contribution, I claim that one of these lines relates to the longue durée history of conceptual entanglements that derive from the various colonial settings, e.g. British versus Portuguese. Sources are necessarily scant, but an historical approach still holds interesting insight for currently different experiences in former Portuguese colonies compared to rather many other African countries. These ideas are mirrored in popular discourses e.g. in East Africa, relating to the different colonial experience in Mozambique and the current intra-African migration. The binary distinction between Western homonationalism as opposed to an alleged state-sponsored homophobia in African contexts is thereby rendered rather more complex in certain places with Portuguese colonial legacies. To outline some of these, and provide a tentative of current dynamics is the main goal of this contribution.

Paper short abstract:

This paper pursues a case study of the global dialectics of homophobia and homonationalism in Trinidad and Tobago to show that understanding Global Southern homophobias as responses to Western neoimperialism is helpful, but incomplete and must be empirically complexified in order to be valuable.

Paper long abstract:

This paper pursues a case study of the global dialectics of homophobia and homonationalism in Trinidad and Tobago to show that understanding so-called Global Southern homophobias as responses to Western neoimperialism may be helpful, but also always incomplete. On the one hand, patterns and politics of homophobia in postcolonial TT may be seen as a sort of state-sponsored oppositional response to Western cultural imperialism, in particular the development of heteronationalist imperatives in TT's postcolonial legal code and political discourse that simultaneously increased the scope of heterosexuality while intensifying the criminalization of homosexuality. However, early postcolonial heteronationalist developments represent more an attempt to emulate Global Northern nationalisms than a reaction to them. Yet over time, with dissolution of the postcolonial nationalist project in the era of neoliberal globalization, Trinbagonian heteronationalism's "homophobia" was upregulated in response to Western imperialism, but this unfolded beyond the immediate jurisdiction of the state within transnationally-entangled religious communities—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian—adopting "conservative" positions that enabled them to establish superficial solidarity. These religious fundamentalisms are flanked from the "left" by secular anti-neocolonialists who see homosexuality as an imported "Western" imposition. Meanwhile, the state is increasingly fractured between a Judiciary that condemns homophobic law as unconstitutional and a "homophobic" Parliament. Moreover, intergenerational change and activist efforts have fostered new forms of homonormativity that aspire for respectability in sex-gender norms that come at the cost of new queer discipline and intensified transphobia, thereby complicating any simplistic characterization of TT as "homophobic."

Paper short abstract:

This paper is a work in progress that explores the ways Swedish and Russian national identities are structured in relation homosexuality and what effects this construction has for the way the national identities, on the macro level, are positioned vis-à-vis each other

Paper long abstract:

This paper starts by looking at the discourses on sexual nationalisms in the Russian and Swedish contexts. Previous research shows that the relation between the notions of sexuality and nation can be described as "state homophobia" in Russia, "homo-friendliness" or "homonationalism" in Sweden, and the Swedish disposition directed toward Russia can be termed "leveraged pedagogy". The paper attempts to provide a more nuanced account of Russian and Swedish well-established and discursively hegemonic positions beyond the simple "homophobiv" / "homo-friendly" binary. The paper is a start in exploring the questions such as (1) How are the Swedish and Russian national identities constructed in relation to (homo)sexuality? (2) What effects does this construction have for the way the national identities, on the macro level, are positioned vis-à-vis each other? (3) How is sexuality used to discursively articulate, construct and negotiate the borders between Russia(nness) and Sweden/Swedishness?

Paper short abstract:

The paper draws on the recently coined concept of 'heteroactivism' to examine the ways in which homophobic claims are framed and employed within scholarly campaigns in Ukraine, making the issues of motherhood and 'complete' traditional family central to the well-being of Ukrainian citizens.

Paper long abstract:

While right-wing homophobic aggression resulted in the emergence of what I define as Ukrainian homo-patriotism (open readiness of Ukrainian LGBTI people, predominantly cis-gender gay men to reproduce the national project and participate in military actions (Shevtsova 2018), new actors and form of resistance appeared within Ukrainian anti-gender movement in response to that, the present paper engages with those, namely, focusing on female spokespersons of Ukrainian radical right-wing and conservative anti-feminist groups. Using their public self-presentation: interviews, performances at the protests, posts in social media and on official sites of the groups, this article explores how issues of sexuality, gender, and women's rights is being instrumentalized and integrated into resistance against "Western ideologies" and which political purposes this instrumentalization serves. The paper will draw on the recently coined concept of 'heteroactivism' (Browne and Nash, 2017) to examine ideological and activist work of those resisting to promotion of LGBT rights and gender equality. In particular, I will focus on ways in which heteroactivist claims were framed and employed within scholarly and grassroots campaigns in Ukraine, making the issues of motherhood, 'complete' traditional family, and Christianity central to the well-being of Ukrainian citizens (in particular, minors).