LGBT Activist Movements in Post-Communist Europe: Localized Strategies of Visibility, Rights, and Europeanness

Abstract

In recent years there has been a surge of academic interest in LGBT activist movements in post-Communist European countries, understood herein to refer to those countries of central, eastern, and southeastern Europe that were dominated by Communist political regimes prior to sweeping political changes in the late 1980s and 1990s. Given the varied and creative ways in which minority groups adjust, adapt, and seek to operate and achieve inclusion within rapidly changing political, social, and cultural environments, often developing alongside resurgences in hostile discourses vocalized through rhetorics of nationalism and traditionalism, it is little surprise that this ripe and enlightening field has elicited such interest. This has also emerged from an increasing recognition in academic research that nationalist and ethnic discourses are not the only, or even main, sources of conflict, contestation, fealty, and identification in the post-Communist region and that a range of attachments, identifications, experiences, and discourses are transforming and reshaping identity and belonging (Abazovic and Zarkov 2014).