Resistance and activism: LGBTQ rights movements and queer subject formation in a global perspective

This panel focuses on sexual and gendered resistances and claims for rights, self-definition and subject formation, both in the form of organised activism and lived experience in opposition to dominant norms. In order to emphasise the increasingly global significance of struggles for sexual and gendered rights, as well as for sexual and gendered identity formation, a  number of ongoing research projects at Lund University’s Gender Studies Department address this topic from a diversity of approaches. In this panel, five papers will cover various forms of resistance in as seemingly distinct and far apart contexts as South Africa, India, Turkey, and Sweden. Presenting their ongoing research on emergent forms of gendered and sexual resistance, panelists enters into a critical dialogue with established approaches to - and challenges of - human rights, legal frameworks, notions of space/place and the global/local. Specifically, speakers will highlight various ways to articulate gender and sexuality through a global perspective, with attention to their embeddedness in different situated locales. 1) Using techniques informed by media ethnography, Sunny Gurumayum explores beauty pageants in Manipur to trace flows of  popular culture and forms of gender and sexual resistance in the locally lived context of India’s Northeast. 2) esethu monakali attends to the supple invocation “Being trans” and tracks the vernaculars of embodiment and subjectivity informing how trans identities are constructed and claimed in public socialising spaces. 3) Highlighting emergent forms of resistance at digital spaces by LGBTI+ activism in pandemic times, Onur Kilic focuses on Pride activism and activist narratives in Turkey to  grasp the transformative potentials of networked activism for queer resistance cultures. 4) Selin Çagatay discusses the    various expressions of LGBTI+ activism in Turkey with regards to agendas and political strategies (including alliances) in different sub-national locales, from the metropole to the province. 5) Finally, through the example of legal practitioners’ engagement with LGBTQ asylum rights in Sweden, Marta Kolankiewicz och Maja Sager explores the question of juridification of social justice struggles, as a subject of debate and contestation among activists and critical scholars.

Mia Liinason1

1Professor, Professor, Genusvetenskapliga Institutionen, Lunds Universitet