LGBTI organizations navigating imperial contexts: the Kaleidoscope Trust, the Commonwealth and the need for a decolonizing, intersectional politics

Abstract

This article presents the first sustained social analysis of the Kaleidoscope Trust, the UK's leading social movement organization on LGBTI issues internationally, and its engagement with the Commonwealth -particularly through forming The Commonwealth Equality Network, comprising national NGOs. A contribution is made to sociological and critical analysis of transnational LGBTI movements, through argument for a new analytical framework combining the sociology of human rights with a decolonizing, intersectional approach -beyond the division between optimistic theories extending Western LGBTI progressive politics, or pessimistic postcolonial queer analyses. To investigate organizations' strategies leading to the Malta 2015 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the research utilizes sources of data including event observation and website sources, initiating analysis of online environments. The analysis deploys social movement theory to examine how and why Kaleidoscope selected the Commonwealth as a political opportunity structure to engage through strategies of framing and articulation of human rights. Invention of The Commonwealth Equality Network, shaped online and offline by imperial relations between core and periphery, is analysed via transnational public sphere and critical theories and argued to indicate a significant restructuring of global queer politics. It is contended that a consistently decolonizing and intersectional articulation of human rights is needed.

Quiet politics: Queer organizing in corporate Singapore

“…My empirical study showcased that when social and political strictures make conventional forms of mobilization such as protests, petitions, or legislative lobbying impractical, queer subjects may envision and gravitate toward alternative forms of contentious politics -that is, quiet politics. Quiet politics echoes with the recent critical conversations to 'decolonize' the epistemological limits of both Western-centric queer theory and area studies (e.g., Asian studies) to provide insights into the multiple possibilities of queer activism and social change (Kao, 2021;Lee, 2017; see also Moussawi, 2018;Waites, 2017).…”

Abordagens De(s)coloniais Na Gestão E Nas Organizações

“…diferentes tradições e culturas políticas com vistas à libertação e pondo em diálogo uma pluralidade de agentesgovernos, organizações religiosas, sindicatos, partidos políticos e outros (Álvarez, 2022). Contudo, é importante manter um olhar sempre crítico às alianças transnacionais, uma vez que elas podem manter hierarquias coloniais, marginalizando ações, movimentos e intelectuais do Sul (Waites, 2017).…”

Decolonizing the boomerang effect in global queer politics: A new critical framework for sociological analysis of human rights contestation

“…The argument here emerges at the juncture of several distinct literatures. First there is the interdisciplinary literature of feminist and queer sexual politics in gender and sexuality studies, which increasingly since the 1990s has focused on debating and claiming human rights (Corrêa et al, 2008; Miller and Vance, 2004), and more specifically LGBTI rights and queer transnational activism, including in relation to legacies of colonial regulation (Wilkinson and Langlois, 2014; Waites, 2009, 2017). Second, there is the literature of anti-colonial politics, postcolonial studies and decolonial theory and politics, where Said’s (1978) analysis of Orientalism has suggested how colonial histories are imbued in culture and discourses, and Quijano’s (2007) decolonial studies have mapped the expansion of Eurocentrism; yet many mainstream politics and sociology scholars have lacked engagement with such perspectives.…”

“…On the one hand we have the uncritical perspectives of those primarily gay and lesbian scholars who adopt individual human rights as a simple normative truth with fixed content, and imagine global LGBT or LGBTI politics as the ‘progressive’ legal and moral extension or ‘evolution’ of these ideals from European origins via the West to the rest of the world – while lacking an adequate social analysis of when and how this is possible (Wintemute, 2005). Different and more sophisticated versions of human rights approaches come from theorists elsewhere labelled the ‘LGBT progressives’, such as Weeks; these have a sociologically informed worldview in significant respects but affirm human rights normatively while needing more sociological analysis of how such rights are constituted and selectively utilized, particularly by Western governments (Weeks, 2007: 107–134, 199–224; Waites, 2017: 646–48).…”