Border Regimes: Homophobia and LGBT Place Making in Six Ordinary Cities in Europe

Abstract

European nation states increasingly hail LGBT identities as part of modern values; LGBT recognitions have become a symbol of secular achievements. Discourses around gay rights and sexual diversity are increasingly pitted against presumably homophobic and intolerant ‘others’. An increased intolerant and repressive attitude towards migrants and racialised minorities is justified by their supposed threat to exactly these values. LGBT people are finding themselves positioned as ‘border patrollers’ who can count as part of the modern liberal nation. This paper analyses 92 interviews with LGBT participants who live in six small and medium sized ordinary cities in Europe. It discusses how their fear of homophobia is evaluated according to perceived sexual and gendered norms and attitudes at the neighbourhood level. Neighbourhoods are considered either LGBT friendly or unfriendly according to their socio-demographic characteristics that focus on social class and/or migration and that intersects with race, ethnicity and religion. Based on the findings, neighbourhoods are both a geographical and a cultural terrain that can be understood, organised and contested through a sexuality discourse in the production of border regimes that discipline and produce the confines of the normative, the ‘modern’ and the ‘backward’. Not only are LGBT people positioned as border patrollers but their fear of homophobia is also expressed through bordering. The neighbourhood can then be understood, organised and contested through a sexuality discourse in the production of border regimes.

Promoting Human Rights standards for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from the perspective of International law

“…He definitively abandons the biological determination of gender and suggests that all genders are trained and practiced and that drag practice is the ideal solution for demonstrating this process for the sake of understanding among actors with different gender identities and sexual orientations. According to Butler it is necessary to leave behind the binary subject/object division and attempts to emancipate it and feminist attempts to form a general female identity and she calls for such a subject to be formed through repetition and the practice of signification (Klett-Davies, 2022).…”