CGF Higher Seminar with Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen

“Cake is not an attack on democracy”: Building queer coalitions and moving beyond carceral Pride in post-22/7 Norway

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen (Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger) 

This paper draws on a case study from Oslo Pride 2016 when a queer activist threw a cake at the then Minister of LGBT+ rights, and member of right-wing populist party and government coalition member Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet), Solveig Horne. I discuss the disruptive event of the pieing itself, and examine media, activist and legal discourses from the ensuing criminal case where the activist was sentenced to 45 days in prison for ‘attack on democracy’, a legal paragraph that was re-drafted after the right-wing terrorist attack in Oslo/Utøya in 2011 but rarely applied.

In particular, I analyze blog and radio texts from the imprisoned activist and their collective, Cistem Failure, to argue how increasingly homonormative Pride festivals together with the protective support of law enforcement, have redefined the meaning of the ‘good queer citizen’ (Russell 2019, Puar 2007).

On this basis I demonstrate the changing relations between sexuality and the Norwegian equality and welfare state, and argue that it is imperative to build alternative coalitions and knowledges, and continue to expose the violent effects of dominant tendencies of depoliticizing queer lives at the expense of conditional carceral state protection.

Biography

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, and an Affiliated Researcher, Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Her research interestes include queer and feminist theories and methodologies to do with identities, inequalities, activism, kinship and knowledge. Engebretsen is the author of Queer women in urban China: An ethnography (Routledge 2014), co-editor of Queer/tongzhi China: New perspectives on research, activism and media cultures (NIAS Press 2015), and a special issue of Sexualities on “Anthropology’s queer sensibilities” (2018).

Current research projects include  Transforming Identities: Exploring Changes, Tensions and Visions in the Nordic Region through the prism of Identity Politics, and  A Nordic Queer Revolution? The Formation of Gay, Queer and Trans Activism in Scandinavia, 1948–2018. Engebretsen is the editor-in-chief (with Erika Alm) of lambda nordica.

This seminar will take place on Zoom. 
If you wish to attend please contact jennie.sarnmark@kau.se.

Please remember to register for the seminar before April 6th!