“It Is Not the Netherlands Here.” How Parents of LGB Migrants Experience Everyday Bordering Against Nonheterosexual Belonging in CEE

Abstract

This chapter explores everyday bordering against nonheterosexual belonging in the case of CEE parents of LGB migrants who emigrated to Belgium or the Netherlands—two countries reputed for their “LGB-friendliness”—from five countries characterized by a homonegative public opinion, exclusionary LGBT legal framework and recent anti-gender mobilizations. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with eight CEE parents—the “stayers” who are embedded in the transnational social field with their migrant children, but still firmly situated in their CEE home countries. In this analysis, the chapter focuses on how the “others”—representing the wider imagined community of their CEE societies—were continually inserted in the narratives of parents discussing the nonheterosexuality of their migrant children. In these narratives, the parents highlight the experiences and expectations of the personal cost of societal homonegativity—both for their children and themselves. The analysis shows how these experiences and expectations are embedded in a wider heteronationalist discourse that places nonheterosexual belonging outside CEE collectivities and is reinforced and amplified by the anti-gender actors and their nationalistic, right-wing allies in CEE, who use it to support and sustain the construct of the European West–East divide.