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Masking and Mobilizing Anti-LGBTIQ+ Agendas
Abstract
Over the course of the past two decades, the role of U.S. Christian Right groups in setting the stage for the creation of anti-LGBTIQ+ legislation in African countries has become increasingly recognised. This awareness was largely prompted in 2009 when investigative researchers uncovered connections between American anti-LGBTIQ+ Christian Right actors and the Ugandan lawmakers who proposed the original Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Despite their immediate efforts to distance themselves from having been involved in the process of developing the legislation, U.S. Christian Right groups have continued to strengthen and adapt their anti-LGBTIQ+ campaigning across the region. This chapter discusses how U.S. pro-family actors mask their homophobic and transphobic prejudice and present their existential attacks on LGBTIQ+ people as ‘common sense’ through alternative language and framing strategies.
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Gender intersects as a major fault-line in increasingly polarized, contemporary global politics. Many democratic states in the global North and South have adopted pro-gender norms in their foreign policies, while other states and populist regimes have resisted the promotion of gender equality and women's rights. This article analyses how political leaders harness gender dynamics to further their power, status and authority to act in foreign policy. While scholarship on foreign policy analysis has emphasized the role of individuals, political leaders and their followers, and of two-level games balancing domestic and international pressures, we advance a novel theoretical concept: ‘gendered multilevel games’. This new concept highlights the gendered dynamics of the problem of agency and structure in foreign policy, which are generated from the interactions between the domestic, international and transnational levels, and reach within and across states. To illustrate the utility of this concept, we analyse foreign policy leadership and the variation in gendered multilevel games in four vignettes: (1) hyper-masculinity and revisionist leadership; (2) normative leadership and gendered nation-branding; (3) compassionate leadership and gendered transnational symbolism; and (4) contested leadership on pro- and anti-gender norms in foreign policy. Importantly, these empirical illustrations show how adept political leaders navigate pro- and anti-gender norms to achieve core and often divergent foreign policy goals.
The concept of critical diversity literacy (CDL) has been a work in progress for more than a decade. 1 It represents an attempt to distil into a single framework the analytic proficiencies I believe a qualification in diversity studies should provide. The particular framing is the outcome of a confluence of factors: the specific higher education context in post-apartheid South Africa where students enter a society characterized by an impetus towards transformation, integration and greater equity; the deepening of my own work on whiteness towards recognizing the family resemblances in how privilege and oppression operate along other axes of difference; and a serendipitous encounter with France Winddance Twine’s concept of racial literacy, 2 which I recast, developed and extended along new lines for a different purpose.
This article examines the recent wave of grassroots mobilizations opposing gender equality, LGBT rights, and sex education, which vilify the term “gender” in public debates and policy documents. The antigender movement emerged simultaneously in various locations after 2010. We argue that this is not just another wave of antifeminist backlash or a new tactic of the Vatican in its ongoing efforts to undermine gender equality but represents a new ideological and political configuration that emerged in response to the global economic crisis of 2008 and the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy. The backlash of the eighties and nineties combined neoconservatism with market fundamentalism (which is to some extent still the case with neoconservative Christian fundamentalists in the United States and elsewhere), while the new movement—though in many ways a continuation of earlier trends—tends to combine gender conservatism with a critique of neoliberalism and globalization. Liberal elites are presented as “colonizers”; “genderism” is demonized as an ideology imposed by the world’s rich on the poor. Thanks to the anticolonial frame, antigenderism has remarkable ideological coherence and great mobilizing power: right-wing populists have captured the imagination and hearts of large portions of local populations more effectively than progressive movements have managed to do. The article examines the basic tenets of antigenderism, shedding light on how this ideology contributes to the contemporary transnational resurgence of illiberal populism. We argue that today’s global Right, while selectively borrowing from liberal-Left and feminist discourses, is in fact constructing a new universalism, an illiberal one. While the examples discussed are mostly from Poland, the pattern is transnational, and our conclusions may have serious implications for feminist theory and activism.
It is premature to gauge the full impact of the developed West’s effort to sell gay rights to the developing world, but the early returns are not auspicious …
Post-apartheid, South Africa has come a long way in making the inclusion of gender and sexuality equality explicit in its Constitution. To make schools more inclusive for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) identifying learners, the Department of Basic Education has developed what it claims are South Africa’s first guidelines regarding sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). Despite the emphasis on equality in South Africa’s post-apartheid policies, which set out to protect the rights of LGBTIQ+ individuals, there has been a backlash from conservative advocacy groups, many with links to the US Christian Right. This paper argues that contrary to the disinformation being propagated by anti-LGBTIQ + groups, it is queer and transgender individuals who experience extreme levels of violence and marginalisation in schools. The empirical research makes explicit the bullying and exclusion that transgender and gender-diverse youth experience in school; however, this evidence is neglected in conservative claims that SOGIESC (SOGIESC) guidelines and Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) endanger other learners. Notably, and in stark contrast to those advocating for measures to make schools safer for LGBTIQ + learners, far-right advocacy groups have no empirical basis to support their claims.
Examining the Russian state’s turn to ‘traditional values’ in the 2010s, this article aims to understand traditionalist state discourses in a global context where LGBT inclusion has been incorporated into notions of national exceptionalism. It argues that the Putin regime has articulated, provided ideological coherence to, and made visible a narrative according to which resistance to LGBT rights appears as a logical choice for states seeking to position themselves in opposition to the ‘liberal West.’ That narrative both counters the homonationalist idea of ‘gay-friendliness’ as a signifier of modernity and good statehood and incorporates some of its elements, notably externalization of homophobia onto racialized, Muslim Others.
While homophobia is commonly characterized as individual and personal prejudice, this collection of essays instead explores homophobia as a transnational political phenomenon. Contributors theorize homophobia as a distinct configuration of repressive state-sponsored policies and practices with their own causes, explanations, and effects on how sexualities are understood and experienced in a range of national contexts. The essays include a broad range of geographic cases, including Cameroon, Ecuador, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Singapore, and the United States. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
This article un/maps the recent impasse between pro- and antigay mobilization around Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA, 2009-14). Drawing on scholarly and social media sources, it summarizes the increasing influence of (US) transnational evangelism that has precipitated a state-religious complex of "anticipatory political homophobia" in Uganda. If transnational evangelism against same-sex sexuality in Uganda has generated a strong reaction from global LGBT human rights advocates, this paper critiques this Western homotransnationalist response by analyzing its limited terms of operation, focusing on the ways in which Uganda is hailed into the biopolitical project of a Western queer modernity. The author focuses on the co-presence between homotransnationalist mobilization and "homophobic anticipatory countermobilization" as (re)organizing/suturing a global ordering project that is deeply invested in biopolitics and necropolitics. This suggests that the global flashpointing of Uganda in the context of the AHA incites further questions concerning the transnationality of "gay human rights" discourse under neoliberalism.
The article examines a set of documentaries that serves to promulgate a depopulation crisis narrative and heteronormative "natural family" solution for the World Congress of Families, a transnational network of primarily conservative Christian organizations engaged in "pro-family" politics. These videos provide a portable delivery system of rationales for preserving sexual norms aimed at countering claims for the sexual and reproductive rights of women and sexual minorities. The films, revolving around a theme of "demographic winter," warn of the collapse of social-security systems and ultimately the end of so-called Western civilization. The documentaries locate the problem principally in women's individual marriage and childbearing decisions and blame environmentalist, feminist, and LGBT-rights movements for spreading misinformation that fuels what the films declare to be problematic choices. The article argues that these documentaries employ a politics of fear in an attempt to secure social norms based on a set of gender and racial hierarchies. They mobilize fear of economic, moral, racial, and sexual chaos positioned against a "familiar" model of home, motherhood, and safety. The analysis highlights how emotional and demographic elements combine to shape an argument for patriarchy that resonates with a variety of global anxieties and political goals.
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