Bookreview: Queer in Europe (2011) - Lisa Downing & Robert Gillett

SEXTURES: E-journal for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, 2014

A review of: Queer in Europe, edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011, 232 pages.

Berliner Blätter, 2023

Starting from a fishbowl discussion, which has taken place at the conference, this paper discusses what can be gained from thinking across genderqueer theories and anthropological Europeanization research. It argues that thinking queerly includes a skepticism toward identitarian and normative understandings of Europe, as well as an ethnographic attention being paid to that which emerges in the gaps and cracks of Europeanization. The ways in which institutions working in the name of Europe generate heterogeneous experiences resulting in unequal and differentially distributed, multiple Europes are also key. »Queering Europe« oscillates between an emphasis on the central role of the sexual and the gendered in imaginations of Europe and destabilizing notions of Europe in a more general sense; as such, it is closely related to post-/decolonial approaches. This analytical move has three dimensions to it: First, queering Europe aims at deconstructing hegemonic imaginaries of the continent. Second, it makes visible the pluralistic and fragmented nature of Europe(s) and the ambivalent and sometimes unforeseen consequences that processes of Europeanization are accompanied by. Third, queering Europe can be envisioned as a way of imagining and thinking about Europe through a »critical utopianism« (Mbembe 2019) that puts solidarity center stage. Ethnography informed by decolonial critiques as well as by proposals for queering methodologies constitutes our chosen epistemological tool regarding investigating queering Europe as a mode of knowledge production and political vision.

2013

This article considers how the influence of the early Christian church in Europe led to the legal framework in which LGBT people could be persecuted. It then considers the response of European nations to the Nazi genocide of World War II, and how this led to the development of two parallel jurisdictions in Europe, one economic, one based in Human Rights. The article then considers how the features of these two jurisdictions have contributed to the development of a legal framework in which LGBT rights can now be increasingly recognised within the law, and asks whether this has led to a process of normative and ethical law in which LGBT rights are natural and given

LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space On the Rainbow Way to Europe

In this chapter, we present the chronology and dynamic of LGBT activism in Montenegro, suggesting that it has been firmly intertwined with the “Europeanisation” of the country. Making "homosexuality" appear inseparable from "Europe" , is potentially problematic: it positions non-heterosexual practices and people as not quite legitimate parts of the Montenegrin polity. We argue that the real challenge for improving the position of LGBT people is to destabilise this conceptual link and to make homosexuality a legitimately Montenegrin political issue. As long as public officials and state institutions engage with LGBT concerns because the EU requests it of them and because it is presumably a European "thing to do" — rather than because of people who live in Montenegro and experience various forms of oppression on the basis of their sexuality and gender— non-heterosexual sexual practices will not be perceived as constitutive of the political and social life of Montenegro.

The Chilean Handbook Of Human Rights 2013, 2013

The article addresses from a historical point of view which has been the treatment of queer lives in Europe. Particularly, the paper has for purpose to understand if there was anywhere in Europe where same sex lovers could expect equality and respect, and if yes, why did it not exist everywhere. Then, it seeks to determine if discrimination due to sexual orientation and gender identity really did exist and what was it. Finally, it addresses what is now happening within Europe to create social, legal and political change in this matter.

Oxford Handbook, 2020

Europe matters to contemporary LGBTQ politics. This chapter maps out various political articulations connecting Europe and LGBT rights today, arguing that Europe has played a central role in much of the LGBTQ movement's history but that this relationship is complex and multifaceted depending on the vast space of what "Europe" means to many different actors. In other words, Europe has been imagined and unimagined as LGBTQfriendly by various actors and for various purposes. In making this argument the chapter presents "Europe" from four different angles, exploring the association between the continent and "LGBT rights" in each: Europe as an institutional entity, Europe as an activist project, Europe as exclusionary, and Europe as a threat. It takes a position on how the relationship is defined in each section, highlighting both the opportunity and risk that entails for LGBT rights and people on the continent. In doing so, the chapter highlights the ways European states and institutions have gradually endorsed some activist goals, embedding LGBT rights into the version of Europe understood as an institutional entity. Problematically, however, it shows that this project also generates different forms of exclusion. Moreover, while many actors articulate an idea of Europe as associated with

2014

Cook and EvansÕ anthology offers a rich analytic assemblage of urban queer culture in Europe from 1945 to the present time. Although its temporal focus requires further conceptual substantiation, the work is generally effective in analysing queerÕs complex socio-spatial dimensions. This is particularly done in the domains of politics, mobility, migration, tourism, democracy, religion, language, sex, health, prejudice and justice that have been structurally intersecting urban queer culture over the last seven decades or so. Across genders and academic stages of career, the contributors approach these matters of urban queer culture from anthropological, historical, gender, philosophical, sociological, linguistic and legal epistemologies.

InterAlia, 2009

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2015

Our joint intervention explores Queer People of Colour (QpoC) positionalities as a valuable lens through which to rethink the racial and colonial imaginaries of subjects and space in Europe. It brings together race, gender, class, colonialism and sexuality, inseparably, in a shared analytic. We address multiple erasures: of genders, sexualities and race from discussions of space; of QPoC in Europe from discussions of European subjects, race and space; and from US-centric QPoC studies. Europeans are generally presumed to be homogeneously white, while racialized subjects are generally presumed to be uniformly straight and cis. Rarely is space understood as a formation that is co-constituted through sexualities with other relations of power. Our intervention radically rethinks urban environments in their relation to race, subjects and agencies. It also puts QPoC in Europe on the map. We recognize that the categories 'queer' and 'of colour' are contingent, contested and unfinished. They tend to reinforce US-centricity and to erase differences within and across gender and sexually non-conforming, racialized and colonized collectivities across the Global North and the South. The term 'people of colour' often travels to Europe in ways that keep Europe white and the US hegemonic, and dismiss local antiracist and antiimperialist struggles as inauthentic and derivative. Similarly, 'queer' often circulates in ways that universalize white colonial genders and sexualities, while erasing all others, including the working-class dykes of colour in the U.S. described by Gloria Anzaldu´a (1991, 2007), for whom queer was an important alternative to homonormative identifiers (Bacchetta, 2002; Bacchetta, Falquet and Alarcon, 2012). The assimilation of 'queer' (and often 'queer of colour') into white-dominated academic formations in Europe has done nothing to contest how racialized people are inscribed as deficient, inferior and disentitled to life chances on account of their failed masculinities, femininities and heterosexualities (El-Tayeb, 2003; Haritaworn, 2005). Instead, it unproblematically coincides with the increased criminalization, pathologization, displacement, and/or spatial confinement of racialized populations. This project hopes to show that despite these indisputable problems, both 'queer' and 'people of colour' can and should be mobilized to describe the radical interventions of QPoC into a European landscape from which they remain violently excluded. We acknowledge that identities and allegiances are multilayered and shifting, but at this point in history, the