50 Years of LGBTQ Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: Framing and Accessing LGBTQ+ Rights in Democracies

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Part of Mini-Conference

• 50 Years of LGBTQ Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference

Session Description

Activists, politicians, and organizations have advanced gender and sexual minority rights (LGBTQ+) in a variety of democratic regimes types in the past fifty years. Activists note that these legal and political changes are highly uneven within and across countries and groups. This panel delves into the actors, incentives, and unintended consequences that impact movements for gender and sexual minority rights and shape their divergent outcomes. The papers in this panel ask: What are the tactics that LGBTQ+ rights activists and organizations use and what are the intended and unintended consequences of those tactics in different democratic contexts? How does financial support affect rights? Who are rights for, who receives rights, and who is left out? How does the state incorporate heavily discriminated minorities and what are individuals’ incentives to be incorporated?

This comparative and multi-method panel brings together questions and data from democracies across the world. Kris Velasco disaggregates LGBTQ+ social movements around the world into distinct dimensions of personhood to explain contradictory LGBTQ+ policy environments. He finds that known transnational pathways for recognizing personhood vary significantly across each dimension, illuminating why contradictory policy environments exist and how strategies to advance one aspect of queer justice may hinder others. Sid Baral investigates why and how states implement rights and programs designed to incorporate previously excluded minorities and what incentives minorities have to participate. Working with trans communities in India, Baral finds that individuals value the redistributive benefits of the state’s attempts to make trans communities legible over other potential benefits. Calla Hummel and Sarah Berens examine how sending and receiving money and ideas across borders can change people’s beliefs about LGBTQ+ rights. Hummel and Berens use public opinion data, interviews, and survey experiments to demonstrate that monetary and social remittances can increase support for LGBTQ+ rights. Alberto Lopez examines common lobbying tactics from LGBTQ+ organizations and their unintended consequences. Lopez argues that maps and rankings designed to shame and blame underperforming governments may reinforce illiberal attitudes. Janine Clark and Julie Moreau address the political economy of activism through a case study of an LGBTQ+ sex workers’ rights and donor conference in Kenya. Clark and Moreau examine how the conference has shaped funding for activists and how funding has shaped LGBTQ+ activism.

Sub Unit

• Division 47: Sexuality & Politics

Individual Presentations

• Logics of Queer Justice: Disaggregating Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity - Kristopher Velasco, Princeton University

• Why Be Legible?: The Case of Transgender Minorities in India - Siddhartha Baral, University of California San Diego

• Do Remittances Increase Support for LGBTQ+ Rights? - Callan Hummel, University of British Columbia; Sarah Andrea Berens, University of Bremen

• Illiberalising Maps: Representations of LGBTQ+ Rights and Homonationalism - Alberto Lopez Ortega, VU Amsterdam

• The Political Economy of Transnational Activism: Changing Faces, Changing Spaces - Janine Clark, University of Toronto, Mississauga; Julie Moreau, University of Toronto

Chair

• Phillip M Ayoub University College London

Discussant

• Callan Hummel University of British Columbia