Part 4: The Politics of (In)Visibility, The Idea of Europe and LBGT Rights, and Future Research Plans
BRENNA MUNRO: And, so, you’ve been talking about this question of backlash. In other words, the sort of impacts that visibility can have. And I’m thinking here of Ashley Currier’s work on how activists will often use strategic visibility or invisibility.
PHILLIP M. AYOUB: Yes, yes. Ashley Currier’s work is wonderful and I draw on it as well. It’s very much involved in this kind of complex understanding of politics of visibility, which can have all sorts of outcomes. And I absolutely agree with this notion of “strategic visibility,” which includes invisibility that all groups, especially vulnerable groups, must have the option of invisibility, as in many cases it’s necessary even as a survival strategy. And we see that in many different contexts.
In terms of backlash, to connect back to before as well, issues related to gender and sexuality have a long history, not just now in response to some of these anti-LGBT global campaigns, but gender and sexuality have a long history because of their fluidity of challenging the coherence of national identity. So they have been really ripe for attack by certain segments of society and also to some degree certain states that really feel like that it makes it very easy to paint them as external, foreign, imposed. And especially in Ashley Currier’s work looking at some of these issues in Africa, that also shows a different regional component we have there. Because while Europe—despite the complexities around that—has at an international level through the EU and through the Council of Europe, has some kind of systems of knowledge that support certain aspects of LGBT rights. That doesn’t exist exist [to that degree of institutionalization] in all regions.
In terms of how these norms are framed, whether – well, in Europe, they can be framed as a European value and then thus the state can feel semi as an in-group because they are also Europeans. You can be Spanish and European or Estonian and European. That’s not always available, and especially if we think about the comparison to Africa where there’s potent counter-frames, such as connecting LGBT rights to colonialism or to Western-imposed norms, of course, those are very resonant. It’s a little ironic, especially considering that homophobia was also imported, which scholars like Bosia and Weiss have argued, as well, homophobia was imported in part through colonialism around the world. So now the fact that it’s LGBT rights that seem imposed, that’s really problematic.
It’s also something that has to help us think about the localness, again, of how not all identities, especially ones that are defined in the West, have currency everywhere else. Some of the categories that we talk about, like LGBT and Q, we have to leave agency to people on the ground in different contexts on how to define it and to talk about their experiences.
BRENNA MUNRO: This question has two parts in a way. The first part would be that you talk in your work about how gay rights in a way has been kind of woven into the idea of Europe from the very beginning of that project. And, so, my first question would be: How then do we read the politics of sexuality in the current sort of resistance to and anger against the EU from both the left and the right? And the second question would be: How do you see what’s happening at the moment in terms of the EU, how that will impact LGBT rights?
PHILLIP M. AYOUB: Yeah, so that’s a great question. And I have to attribute my answer also to my co-author, David Paternotte, who I’ve worked a lot on that particular question with and also many other scholars like Kelly Kollman, who’s present in many of my other answers to questions, and many other scholars that were part of this edited volume. It was called LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe, A Rainbow Europe?
And we were looking at this construction of the idea of Europe as linked to LGBT rights, but we treated it problematically and so did the authors that, yes, on the one hand, you do have this production of this association between Europe and LGBT rights; one, because of the long history of movements in the continent; and also, two, because activists have used supranational structures in Europe to put LGBT rights on the agenda. And then you see this interesting relationship, an interactive relationship where you see European institutions responding a certain way, and then you see activists on the ground also using this rhetoric of connecting LGBT rights to Europe in many contexts—not in all of them, like not in the UK as much, but in many other countries, especially around the time of EU accession, those kind of narratives were reproduced.
And that creates a narrative that’s interesting because it’s an imagination, of course. It’s true that Europe is phenomenally ahead of the game in many respects as an IO compared to other IOs, but this—the struggle for LGBT people—has a long way to go, and also the experience of LGBT people on the ground is problematic in all EU countries. But this imagination, at the same time, has a lot of currency in that it has become an association that both proponents and opponents of LGBT rights use. We see that, for example, if you listen to rhetoric from Moscow in terms of “Gayropa,” that kind of term that’s been created to talk about the European Union as being this gay entity. So, it’s used even in these geopolitics where in Kiev, the Maidan protesters were called gay protesters by those more sympathetic with Russia than the EU, and of course, that wasn’t true. But it’s this entire reproduction of this idea that improving ties with the EU would mean joining this decadent and Western and sinful organization where sexuality gets woven into it. At the same time, proponents of LGBT rights also use it, which you see when Conchita Wurst, the Austrian singer and Eurovision winner, is in Brussels performing and saying that LGBT rights are part of the European project and this idea of tolerance. You also see that reproduced in that way.
So, that seems to be something that people agree on for the most part, but it can be problematic in terms of who it excludes, and that’s another thing that we’ve worked on together when we’ve talked about this production, because once you have LGBT rights associated to something European, then does that “other” certain people, certain countries from what it means to be Europe? And we see that with saying, “Well, Turkey is not LGBT friendly enough to join the European Union,” or within the European Union you could say, “Well, Poland is too homophobic to be good at being European.” These are really problematic, then, with types of ways of creating new exclusion. And then also on a more personal level, if you look at groups of people who are, especially in this current climate of populism and nationalism in Europe where certain group are vilified like Islamophobia, of course, that certain migrants, Muslim migrants, and other migrants are “too homophobic” to be Europeans and thus they need to be vilified or they need to be excluded. These are things that are really troubling about the kind of perverse effects of that association.
And we obviously saw another interesting imagination around Brexit where there’s this group called Out and Proud which was advocating to leave the European Union on the basis that the United Kingdom was too advanced in its LGBT rights for Europe – that’s also a really interesting figment of imagination considering that in the UK Europe has been very involved in many aspects, including decriminalization, but many aspects of the UK’s LGBT rights standing have been achieved in cooperation with its European neighbors. So, the idea that now you have a nativist campaign that says, “Well, we can’t be in a union with homophobic x country like Poland” and at the same time using really nativist language towards Polish migrants in the United Kingdom, these are the kind of interesting associations we see. And a lot of them – we really refer to them as imagination. So that’s what’s important to keep in mind with these conceptions. But yes, for the most part, we’ve seen a development of this idea of linking the two, Europe and LGBT rights, as something that go together. And unfortunately, that can also be attacked for giving them the tinge of being Western and imposed, and it feeds into the rhetoric of the opposition that says these are not reflective of our local communities. So, this is something that activists are also having to now confront and to navigate around.
GEMA PÉREZ-SÁNCHEZ: So, could you tell us a little bit more about where your current research is going in terms of expanding your work – the work that you’ve already done in the book and your articles on transnational activism on LGBTQ topics?
PHILLIP M. AYOUB: Sure. It’s actually always interesting talking about the book because it feels like it’s been done for so many years but just always takes a while for them to appear. But yeah, I’ve had other interests and I’ve gone back to thinking about backlash, which I had written an article on, early on in the process of doing my research on the book. And I’m interested, though, in thinking about that transnationally as well. So with colleagues, [I am] looking at [these] kind of networks of transnational opposition to LGBT rights and how that works.
I’m also interested, and I’ve been for a long time—which came out in my interviews with the book but I haven’t gotten a chance to really write about it—is thinking more intersectionally about LGBT activism, looking at different patterns of power within transnational LGBT activism. So there’s a lot of rhetoric about intersectionality, which is great, but sometimes how that plays out on the ground is still quite lacking, or a lot of effort to sound inclusive without actually having representation and competencies of the most marginalized within LGBT communities. So, I’ve started doing some work on trying to understand some of those dynamics. Try to see, for example, in these political times where you have a lot of populist movements, a lot of nationalism, how does that affect these dimensions? In a way, you see the coming together sometimes in a more intersectional framework because it’s saying, “Well, we’re all under attack by a certain threat.” But at the same time, there are still huge obstacles to realizing that goodwill on the ground.
And then there’s also dynamics where some subsets of queer people become part of the nation and they can be then mobilized to support anti-migrant policies, for example, if migrants are painted as homophobic; or we see a lot of that, of course, with Trump here too. I mean, not to say that large amounts of LGBT people have supported that, but there’s still a contingent that can be co-opted by politics that vilify other groups.
So thinking about intersectionality – that’s the other – those are two of the other areas. And then a third area is a project that I’ve been working on with Kelly Kollman for a while that’s looking at diffusion, the heterogeneous diffusion patterns to partnership, same-sex union policies, across states and trying to complexify how we think of diffusion a little bit by highlighting that who sends the message really matters in terms of how states are willing to learn, whether they learn more from their neighbors or they learn more from a local cosmopolitan framework. And this is helping us understand some of the polarization, like what Altman and Symons called more polarization where we see different responses to LGBT rights, sometimes going in that direction, unexpected direction.
So anyways, those are some of the main things I’m working on right now.
GEMA PÉREZ-SÁNCHEZ: Well, thank you very much for speaking with us today.
PHILLIP M. AYOUB: Thank you for having me.
BRENNA MUNRO: And thanks.
PHILLIP M. AYOUB: Thank you, thank you, thanks.
