Authors

Discussion

In the twenty-first century, European Union institutions have increasingly championed human rights as a fundamental European value. LGBT rights in particular have taken on the role of a litmus test for EU membership. By centering LGBT rights in both intra-Union and accession politics, the EU actively strengthens the imagined association between LGBT rights and Europe. This contentious linkage positions LGBT rights as something inherently European, leading actors from governments to social movements to use this association to align themselves with or in opposition to Europe and the values it claims to represent. The rhetoric of international human rights and frequent financial and collaborative alliances with European partners have led actors both for and against LGBT equality to presume a natural confluence of interests between LGBT movements and Europe, a confluence which is often equated by right-wing or populist actors as being inherently anti-national. The resultant discourse aims to divorce LGBT people and their struggles for equality from the national community and its interests by positioning LGBT issues as elite, foreign or in competition with the rights and privileges of majorities. This binary presumption of LGBT movement as European, and therefore anti-national, homogenizes the myriad ways that LGBT people belong and obscures the intensely personal and political processes of negotiation through which LGBT activists reimagine, reappropriate and subvert prevailing narratives.

Drawing insights from feminist, queer and postcolonial scholarship, this paper investigates the ways LGBT activists in Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia negotiate belonging within this socio-political context, as well as how belonging is and can be instrumentalised by activists as a tool of liberation. Recognizing that belonging is highly political, affective and grounded in notions of place, I am using a ‘queered’ relational comparative design which foregrounds participatory practices, an ethics of care and researcher-activism.