Introduction: Thinking Queer Activism Transnationally

A New Transnational Queer Activist Agenda

Our special issue includes academic essays, interviews in both video and textual formats, and video art works to illustrate the rich, exciting intellectual collaborations between scholars and activists that have inspired this project from its inception. We start the issue with “Queer Transnational Activism? A Conversation on Organizing, Solidarity, and Difference,” in which Karma R. Chávez and Hana Masri bring together a series of on-line exchanges with activists Daniel B. Chávez, Ryan Conrad, Dani D’Emilia, Fatima Jaffer, Ghadir Shafie and Di Wang. These activists and artivists’ conversation provides a perfect frame for this issue, because they discuss what “transnationalism” means to them; how “queer” signifies differently as it circulates internationally; what “activism” looks like within and among radically different contexts; and how one might practice “respectful solidarity” (Jaffer) and “queer internationalism” (Conrad). Ghadir Shafie, co-director of Aswat-Palestinian Gay Women, discusses how for activists from outside Palestine and Israel who wanted to help queer Palestinians, sexuality might have been the starting point for their engagement, but listening to queer Palestinians meant a realization that the struggle of all Palestinians in relation to the violence of the occupation was the most urgent issue. While the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement offers what Chávez and Masri call a “clear cut” form of global action called for by local activists, more often “politically pure actions can seem nearly impossible.” Daniel B. Chávez and Dani D’Emilia, “performance artists, scholars, activists, transfeminists and former core troupe members of ‘La Pocha Nostra’, who hail from US/Mexico and Italy/Brazil/Barcelona, respectively, are precisely interested in “working from multiple levels of impurity—racially, ethnically, nation-state,” and in encounters that force participants to engage with forms of difference while practicing what they call ternura radical or “radical tenderness.” Fatima Jaffer, Asian-Canadian by way of Kenya, who runs the organization Trikone Northwest among other activist and research projects, discusses what she calls “the queer shadows of empire,” spaces of complicated belonging from which multiple regimes of power can be challenged. For Di Wang, a feminist lesbian activist from China now living in the US, the “constant readjusting and relocating” of transnational life “speaks to” her experience of activism in China, where state repression makes any form of public action fleeting. As she puts it, “censorship is also like software and you are a virus. It always threatens to break you (and sometimes it does) and forces you to regenerate a new self, a new self that is undetectable by the censorship.” Finally, Ryan Conrad, artist, researcher, and co-founder of Against Equality, from the US and living in Canada, suggests that from the global North, “I feel it is my responsibility to both confront my imperialist governments from inside the belly of the beast, but to also collaborate on as even footing as possible with queers struggling under the boot of my government and their own along with the corporations that often supersede them.” His example of activism focusing on how the now-defeated Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement would have affected the patenting and prices of HIV medications globally offers an entirely different way again of thinking queer activism transnationally.¹

We next move to Ryan R. Thoreson’s important analysis of the difficult questions that arise when transnational LGBT advocacy, either willingly or by pressure, falls into step with a hegemonic Human Rights framework. In “LGBT human rights in the Age of Human Rights,” Thoreson offers an expertly condensed history both of the dominant human rights framework itself and the main critiques of it, on one hand, and a history of how transnational LGBT groups have strategically negotiated the limits of human rights discourses, on the other. Complicating Stephen Hopgood’s schematic distinction between “Human Rights”—meaning largely the Global North’s official understanding of the concept, focused on international law and supra-national actors—and “human rights”— how the majority of transnational activists see human rights frames as just one of the many ways in which to effect the change they seek for their particular queer communities—Thoreson poses important questions about what immediate and long-term effects of following such a framework might emerge for queer advocacy across the world. Acknowledging that the Human Rights framework can be very effective in attaining certain LGBT rights, Thoreson nonetheless identifies several potential dangers that may emerge from embracing the Human Rights framework’s “emphases on legality, universality, and indivisibility.” He argues for continuing to recognize the effectiveness of the “alternative tactical frameworks” that activists have deployed outside the Human Rights framework (such as the “sexual liberation, biology, epidemiology, civil rights, and religious and national traditions” currents), and he warns against embracing wholesale “assimilation and respectability politics” that exclude the rights of marginalized queers, such as those of transgender sex-workers, gender non-conforming individuals, intersex people, etc. Most importantly for this issue, Thoreson reminds us that LGBT activists have always recognized that “the efficacy of certain demands is incredibly context-dependent.”

Several of the contributors to this special issue have rightly insisted on a historically informed look at LGBT transnational activism. In “‘Third-World Gays’ and Western Baggage in the Early Construction of an International Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement,” Rafael De la Dehesa looks at early debates about how to engage with “third world” countries within ILGA, the longest-running international gay rights organization, which began as a European/North American group with aspirations to globality. What is striking about these debates is how similar they are to contemporary conversations, with critiques of Global North-led activism in the Global South as a “refined type of imperialism.” The model proposed by the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group, in which they “twinned” with the Gay Freedom Movement, from Jamaica, exchanging literature and funding the Jamaicans’ attendance at conferences, presaged the emphasis on working with local activists when engaging in transnational work that is espoused by most contemporary international gay rights organizations. De la Dehesa focuses on two activists who wrote discussion papers for ILGA’s annual conferences in the early 1980s, Ian Buist, from Scotland, and João Antônio Mascarenhas, from Brazil. Mascarenhas’ contribution marks the growing presence of Latin American and Caribbean members in transnational activism, and his paper critiques Buist’s deployment of the “third world” as a homogenous entity. De la Dehesa traces, however, the similarities in the two men’s political thinking across the North/South divide. Their reformist, rather than liberationist, orientation, and their investment in developmental notions of modernity as the key to gay rights, are perhaps inflected by their similar class positions. De la Dehesa’s analysis of this fascinating exchange thus complicates easy invocations of partnering with “the local” in transnational work: within any given locale there will be a range of actors and positions, and choices about partnerships are inevitably political.

In a recent interview we filmed at the University of Miami with Phillip M. Ayoub, of Drexel University, he discusses his book, When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility,² and the diffusion of gay rights as a norm across Europe, even as the legal and social realities in different European countries are actually quite varied. His work shows how transnational activism has been fundamental to the gay rights movement across Europe beginning in the late 1800s, although these histories are often narrated in national terms. Giving examples from his field work in Poland and Germany, he reflects on how activists have been engaged in the use of supranational structures to create shared norms, but also what he calls “norm brokering,” or translating transnational models for different local contexts, and the forms of backlash and resistance engendered by all of these processes, such as Russia’s denigration of the EU as “Gayropa.”

Complicating still further the notion of the “local” that De la Dehesa addresses in his work, in “Acknowledging Mutual Influence: India and the West,” Ruth Vanita provocatively argues that attempts to find an authentically Indian vocabulary for same-sex sexualities and to create modes of activism that do not borrow from Western models are misguided, emphasizing both the linguistically and culturally diverse nature of India and the region’s long history of cultural hybridity. She advocates for an embrace of eclecticism, flexibility, and contingency, on one hand—asking whether an approach like “coming out” is effective in a specific place and time, rather than asking to whom it belongs as a practice—and a deeper historicity, on the other. She cites, for example, the travels of the poetic form of the ghazal, so often used homoerotically, from Persia to India to Europe, as an instance of how the flow of cultural forms from East to West offer important counter-histories to the idea that people in the Global South are merely the recipients of over-powering foreign cultures. This does not mean that cultural provenance does not matter; she unpacks the etymology of the word aprakritik by guru Baba Ramdev in his support of the reinstatement of the (colonial) anti-sodomy law in 2013, a word that does not appear in Hindi until the translation of the English word “unnatural.”

Jasmine Rault, meanwhile, examines what she sees as a culturally specific form in “‘Ridiculizing’ Power: Relajo and the Affects of Queer Activism in Mexico.” She tackles the ambivalent meanings and the productive use of a performative intervention, relajo, meant both to ridicule power and to create a community of resistance. Through a historically informed analysis of several queer performance interventions and activists’ strategies from key 1970s queer activists groups—Frente Homosexual de Acción Revolucionaria (FHAR), Lambda and Okabeth—to a contemporary group’s activist performance—Proyecto 21’s fashion show—and Jesusa Rodríguez’s hilarious improvised performance on La Malinche, Rault revalorizes relajo as a localized affect with important transnational projection. Relajo, in her reading, is an “invitation to feeling otherwise, to a leaderless and collective suspension of the value of heteropatriarchal capitalism embodied by the institution of Pride . . .”, thus constructing itself as a “dissident affect” that promotes a community-building incivility and decolonial techniques that challenge dominant transnational homonormative narratives.

In “Going Public: Transnational Pride Politics and Queer Grassroots Activism in China,”³ Elisabeth L. Engebretsen explores how queer/tongzhi grassroots activists in China strategically negotiate the global circulation of queer theory and gender identity politics, as well as the limits imposed by Chinese authorities on public demonstrations, through local ad-hoc actions and transnational connections. To explain how public dissent and protests can flourish in a country with almost no democratic civil society, Engebretsen proposes the term “strategic queer politics of contingency” to challenge “the orthodox view of the inherent link between visibility, empowerment and recognition.” The standard model of activism from the North “emphasize[s] values such as spectacle, confrontation and occupation of urban central space.” But these strategies patently do not work in non-democratic countries and could draw outright violence or, at the very least, “tacit violent retributions and rights deprivation including censorship, surveillance and intimidation tactics.” Studying the “ad-hoc, non-territorialized use of (parts of public) space” of Chinese queer grassroots activism in three key moments—the 1996 celebration of the Stonewall movement; the 2009 Shanghai Pride; and several 2013 public pride parades—Engebretsen demonstrates that Chinese queer activists are “politically highly literate and creative agents, at once accommodating their strategies to hegemonic power structures and articulating alternative ones.”

As an example of the limits of the human rights framework for LGBT transnational activism, Thoreson rhetorically asks in this issue’s essay whether “the human rights framework [can] fully articulate the dignitary harm of being unable to amend one’s gender on state-issued documentation.” Expanding on this particular limit to human rights approaches, in “Naming as the locus of trans*national struggle,” Lucas Platero explores how much more complex the vexed question of naming—being named by the state, naming oneself—becomes for transgender people in the context of migration in a historical moment in which, in the Global North, homonormativity coincides with hostility towards immigrants. Moving between regulatory systems with an identity in transition can produce dangerously conflicting documents. Platero looks specifically at migrants from Latin America in contemporary Spain, where within a changing legislative landscape on gender and sexuality there is still the necessity of obtaining the National Identity Document, a product of Franco’s regime, which insists on clearly gendered names—in contrast, for example, to Ecuador, where the current rules about changing one’s name are more flexible. At the same time, Platero emphasizes that naming practices are an everyday form of resistant world-making and a site of activism. He looks particularly at two creative activist projects, Name to Name (N2N), an on-going collection of video interviews with people about their experiences of name-changing (which we feature in this issue), and Migrantes Transgresorxs, a Madrilenian group of mostly Latin American “trans*national” people who catalyze conversations about intersectionality in the Spanish public sphere—providing a fascinating parallel to the Latin American activism in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s we discussed earlier in this introduction. An interview from N2N with a Mexican writer who goes, in Spain, by an ambiguously gendered indigenous name that was forbidden to them as a child entering school indicates, as Platero points out, how “local vernaculars” turn out to have continuing salience across borders, rather than dissolving in the production of a homogenous global queerness.

Following Yera Montero’s video Name to Name (N2N), we include an interview that Lindsey Green-Simms has conducted with writer Unoma Azuah expressly for this issue. Nigerian writer and activist Azuah talks about her current projects, which include the non-fiction anthology, Blessed Body: The Secret Lives of LGBT Nigerians,⁴ her forthcoming memoir, Embracing My Shadow, and her work with the Nigerian activist group Queer Alliance. Azuah comments on the importance of art, film-making, mentoring, and the transnational possibilities of the internet for writing and activism in the context of a Nigeria that is both more dangerous for queer people and yet also seeing an outpouring of creativity and struggle.

Focusing on two different temporal instances of queer activist challenges to US migration policies, Karma R. Chávez shows how queer migration activism that may seem narrowly targeted on a particular nation-state’s laws nevertheless challenges “bordering logics” and “national sovereignty” in her essay “Queer Migration Politics as Transnational Activism.” She analyzes how the immigration rights movement responded to former President Obama’s deferred action program and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), pointing out the contradiction at the heart of Obama’s and PEP’s slogan “felons, not families,” and how queer immigration activists, in turn, challenged the narrow definition of “family” used even by other immigration activists. They drew attention to “who would be left out” and who would be “targeted as deportable priorities” (such as trans* immigrants). Chávez concludes that “queer transnational resistance is not just the work of mobile cosmopolites, but can also be the labor of the most marginalized by state policy” and she points out that queer activist critiques in these instances challenged “powerful national fictions about family and belonging” and their reinforcement of both “literal and metaphorical borders.” Contrasting this relatively recent scenario in the US immigration struggle and its effects on LGBT populations, the second part of her essay takes the reader back to a crucial historical moment of AIDS activism at the 1990 and the 1992 International AIDS Conferences (IAC) in San Francisco and Amsterdam, respectively. Focusing, in particular, on the public actions of Spanish citizen and US resident AIDS activist, Tomás Fábregas, and his acts of “transnational publicity,” Chávez demonstrates how transnational LGBT activists can call attention to a particular country’s laws and challenge “bordering logics between supposed developed and underdeveloped countries” and, in this case, among different kinds of people living with HIV/AIDS.

In “Becoming Coalitional: The Perverse Encounter of Queer to the Left and the Jesus People USA,” Deborah Gould approaches the question of working with others across differences in the context of the deeply local: a coalition fighting for low-cost housing in gentrifying Chicago in the late 1990s, in which activists in a group called Queer to the Left, many of whom had been involved in Act Up and abortion clinic defense, found themselves working alongside Jesus People USA, left-leaning evangelicals who are staunchly anti-abortion and hold that homosexuals are sinners. She argues that the experience of sustained “being in the same room” was transformative on both sides, even if they did not achieve grand political goals or an institutionalized form of alliance. In the tradition of Cathy Cohen’s classic “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,”⁵ Gould offers a meditation on the potentiality of perverse alliances, or “convergence without unity.” This form of “world-building with unlike others, where the outcome was not foreordained” was mirrored in the vision of class-diverse neighborhoods towards which their project worked. This model of coalition, rooted in the experience of physical proximity, is thus perhaps a “perverse” one for transnational activism in an Internet age; nonetheless, Gould’s account of the possibilities generated by queer partnerships in search of another world, partnerships with an openness to being changed by each other, is a resonant one for work across national borders.

Brenna Munro interviewed Sokari Ekine, a Nigerian-British writer, journalist, photographer, and activist. She is the co-editor with Hakima Abbas of the ground-breaking 2013 Queer African Reader⁶ and the creator in 2004 of the blog Black Looks, which helped to create an Africa-centric black queer diasporic public sphere. Brenna asked her about those two projects, and the connections between art, the Internet, and activism. As Ekine says about the creative process, “I think what the art does is allow you to process the political in a way that is experiential, so then you come out at the other end with understanding, and not feeling so overwhelmed. I think that’s what art does in a political sense. I think that’s where its power lies.”

We close our special issue with a series of short videos of two different interviews with Graeme Reid, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch (HRW). We first interviewed him in the summer of 2015 and conducted a follow-up interview in May 2017. Reid was also the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Archives in South Africa and is the author, among other publications, of How to Be A Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-Town South Africa.⁷ We asked him about HRW’s methodology, and the impact, in terms of both risks and possibilities, that a large international organization working throughout the world can have. Reid argues for the advantages of a long-term approach that is embedded in advocacy for human rights in general, rather than working as a single-issue organization. He also discusses the complexities of working with local activists, the challenges of deploying publicity, and the impact of social media as both an activist tool and a form of surveillance by the state. In both interviews, he addresses a range of specific locations and issues, from the impact of Russia’s propaganda laws; to changing similar laws in Malaysia, Ireland, and the Netherlands on transgender people; to the push for a world-wide ban on “anal testing” for homosexual sex; to the need for more research on the experience of lesbians.

As a whole, the scholars and activists in this collection offer a promising picture of an invigorating transnational queer activist agenda. Their work encourages a multi-directional analysis of LGBT advocacy that embraces complex, multi-vocal, strategic, contingent, and affective activist practices. Like the ternura radical explored by La Pocha Nostra, or the relajo documented by Rault in México, we learn that local strategies of resignification, subaltern knowledge, humor, and critique are constantly deployed to counter neocolonial, homonational forces⁸ and the security archipelago, and we also learn that LGBT activists around the world consciously negotiate queer concepts and identities from the Global North in ad-hoc ways and blend them with local ones to survive oppressive regimes and to challenge “the bordering logics” (Chávez) that have carved out the world into “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries. None of our contributors fetishize false notions of autochthonous authenticity and much less of presentism, as most of them trace many global affective and intellectual exchanges that have almost never originated in the Global North and that often had important historical roots. The question of working with others across differences, of forging alliances—however contingent and fragile—permeates the contributions in this special issue on Thinking Queer Activism Transnationally: all of them suggest that, although politically pure actions may be nearly impossible—paraphrasing Chávez and Masri—transnational activist collaboration is a key element of success for an effective, multi-vocal, multi-directional, coalitional LGBTQ activist agenda.

1. See “The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Restricting Access to Affordable Medicines,” Public Citizen https://www.citizen.org/our-work/globalization-and-trade/restricting-access-affordable-medicines, accessed October 15, 2017. [↩]
2. Ayoub, ibid. [↩]
3. This is a revised reprint of Engebretsen’s essay, “Of Pride and Visibility: The Contingent Politics of Queer Grassroots Activism in China,” in Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and William F. Schroeder, eds., Copenhagen: (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies [NIAS] Press, 2015): 89-110. We thank NIAS Press for the permission to reprint Engebretsen’s work. [↩]
4. Unoma Azuah, ed., Blessed Body: The Secret Lives of LGBT Nigerians (Jackson, TN: Cooking Pot Publishing, 2016). [↩]
5. Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” GLQ 3. 4 (1997): 437-465. [↩]
6. Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas, eds., Queer African Reader (Nairobi and Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2013). [↩]
7. Graeme Reid, How to Be A Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-Town South Africa, (South Afirca: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013). [↩]
8. Jasbir K. Puar coined the term “homonational” in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). [↩]