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EASTERN EUROPEAN LGBT HISTORY AND POLITICS

Piro Rexhepi

From Orientalism to Homonationalism: Queer Politics, Islamophobia and European

Enlargement in the Balkans This lecture addresses the convergence of European Union expansion and queer politics in the production of Islamophobia in Muslim majority countries in the Balkans. It looks at how EU enlargement assemblages of civil society, conditionality mechanisms and media reporting establish a representational praxis of queer communities in Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania under threat by Muslim extremists. The discursive framing of Muslims as homophobic rests on the emergence of a new Islamophobic discourse in the Balkans that identifies Muslim extremists in the registry of foreign, fundamentalist intruders into the otherwise peaceful and secular local Balkan Islam. I argue that the LGBT rights projects that become part of the European expansion processes not only aim to create acceptable queer subjects along Euro-American homo and heteronormative norms but to also divide ‘good’ secular Muslims against the deviant religious extremist and un-European Muslims. The engagement of LGBT political formations in the processes of Europeanization then serves as a tool to both discipline and exposes those Muslims in the Balkans who reject Eurocentric sexual liberatory frames as foreign Muslim extremists. In this context, European financed ‘coming out’ projects gain a new meaning in the Balkans, one where the promotion of visibility for certain queer subjects works simultaneously to expose Muslim extremists. Queer acceptance in Islamophobic times, then, becomes the ultimate test of who can and cannot become European citizen. Piro Rexhepi is a scholar of East European Studies currently teaching at the Center for Global Affairs, New York University. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Strathclyde, UK (2013). His research is located in the Queer and Feminist Theories in International Relations with special interest in Islam and Southeastern Europe. He is fluent in Albanian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian. He is a founding member of the Balkan Queer Initiative and a member of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, a group of volunteers committed to the Islamic traditions of equality and brotherhood/sisterhood in Islam.

Thursday, 26 November 2015, 15:00-17:00

REC C [Nieuwe Achtergracht 166], Room 3.01

The lecture is organised in the framework of Dr Bojan Bilić’s research project: [Post-]Yugoslav LGBT Activism: Between Nationalism and Europeanisation