Parades of Pride or Shame?: Documenting LGBTQ Visibility in Central and Eastern Europe EDITORIAL
2012
The authors of the papers in this special issue have chosen to focus on meanings of LGBT prides and marches in Central and Eastern Europe and to reflect on these often highly charged performances which have become significant in the contemporary imaginings of non-heterosexual lives. In all of the chosen locations–Serbia, Hungary, and Lithuania–these public events are sites where sexual identities are acted out, re-configured and re-evaluated in performances which involve the organisers, participants, counter-demonstrators, the media, police, local and national politicians as well as international activists present at the events. The marches act as a lens which brings into sharp focus the interplay between sexual and national identities, where organisers and participants position themselves strategically to challenge the boundaries of who is considered as worthy of belonging to the national community. This is not to say that the marches are uncritically embraced by the activists as a strategy and so the papers also address issues of intra-movement tensions and ways in which these play out in the context of prides and marches. The papers add to the growing body of work on sexualities in Central and Eastern Europe (for a comprehensive overview, see Kulpa and Mizielinska 2011), offering a counter-balance to the abundance of academic and research work for which the main reference point is the Western, particularly AngloAmerican context. While the authors are certainly aware of that context, they engage with it quite critically, and bring in an additional dimension where not only the West/Eastern Europe dynamic is explored but also the tensions embedded within the “new Europe”/”old Europe” (represented by the European Union) are analysed in detail. Overall, the articles reflect the controversies that the events have attracted over the past decade, where in a number of Central and Eastern European countries the marches have been banned or attacked, generating heated debate about the right of sexual minorities to public protest. It is not surprising then, that the issue of violence and its implications for the marches is a recurrent thread throughout the papers. For instance, both the articles by Johnson, focusing on Belgrade Pride and the paper by Davydova, focusing on Baltic
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