Hadley Z. Renkin. “Homophobia and Queer Belonging in Hungary,” Focaal 53, 2009:
20-37.
From attacks at pride to attempted bans from music festivals, LGBT people have been facing increased homophobia in Hungary and Eastern Europe in the last ten years.
Psychological Homophobia - "a deeply individual reaction grounded in personal fear of sexual “Others.” In this view, expressions of homophobia result inevitably from the internal feelings of hatred and fear with which non-heteronormative sexualities are regarded by certain people. Homophobic reactions are unconscious and individual" p.22
Heteronormative nationalism - " For nationalism, the proper member of the Nation is both heterosexual and reproductive. Seen as neither, LGBT people come to represent the Nation’s Other. In this analysis, to be gay is to deny the Nation and its needs, and so to align oneself with its transnational enemies." p.23
Homophobia as anti-“Europe” - "Rather than assuming it to be irreducibly personal, or the past’s ineluctable legacy, they tie it to postsocialism’s transnational tensions, notably those between “Europe” and “the Nation” (Eglitis 2002; Verdery 1996). Viewing right-wing homophobia as a rejection of a perceived “moral colonialism” by Western Europe, they locate it within the larger frameworks of dominance and subordination currently shaping East European cultural politics." p.24
"LGBT people appear here as a kind of “indicator species” for the postsocialist creation of inclusive society—for “normal” social progress." p.25
Gays as the new Jews - "The claim, then, that gays are the new Jews in postsocialist politics once again begs the question of why, in such strikingly visible, public fashion, LGBT people have become such significant targets of rightwing mobilization at this particular moment in time." p.26
Practice and its implications - "looking more closely at how LGBT people themselves are shaping and reshaping the structures of sentiment and power that surround them in postsocialist Eastern Europe." p.26
"I argue that by producing, in publicly meaningful ways, forms of identity that simultaneously claim national and transnational connections, LGBT activists propose their own competing vision for postsocialist Hungarian identity" p.27
Hungarian LGBT activism: Queering belonging - Many Hungarian LGBT organisations sprung up in the 80's.
The Budapest Pride March - "Even the March’s scheduling conforms to global gay liturgy: its timing is carefully calculated to fit in with other European Pride Marches. These practices demonstrate the connections Hungarian LGBT people perceive between themselves and LGBT people and movements elsewhere." p.28
"the Pride March has over time associated its participants with the spaces of a specifically Hungarian history, constructing LGBT people as legitimate inhabitants of national community" p.28
The Kertbeny Memorial - "Following the discovery of his unmarked grave in Budapest’s national cemetery in 2001, Lambda Budapest and the gay magazine Mások organized the dedication of a new gravestone for Kertbeny; a memorial service is now held there every summer." p.29
"The memorial also ties Hungarian LGBT people into transnational gay history and community practically, as it was explicitly intended to be not merely a local ritual, but a site of international gay “pilgrimage.”" p.29 - As well as being notable Hungarian!
Reactions to LGBT activism - "In the Hungarian case the public nature of homophobic reaction is not new, but has grown in size and visibility over the years" p.30
"for the right, it is not simply the presence of LGBT people in spaces where they should not be that is problematic, and fuels homophobic response, but the claims of combined national and transnational belonging they invoke there." p.30
"LBGT people are through their public actions proposing—and are understood by the Hungarian right, and others, as proposing—an alternative vision of Hungarian society, one which fundamentally defies its traditional boundaries of identity and community." p.31
The unbearable queerness of being - "Through events like the Pride March and the Kertbeny memorial service, Hungary’s LGBT community consistently constructs boundaries of belonging whose contours, by embracing both national and transnational meanings, fundamentally defy assumptions of their necessary opposition, and undermine assumptions of the inevitability of the borders between them." p.31
"“Queering” thus came to refer not simply to the proposal of an “alternative” within existing systems of sexual-political meaning and possibility, but to a radical challenge to and refusal of such systems and their founding assumptions" p.32
From attacks at pride to attempted bans from music festivals, LGBT people have been facing increased homophobia in Hungary and Eastern Europe in the last ten years.
Psychological Homophobia - "a deeply individual reaction grounded in personal fear of sexual “Others.” In this view, expressions of homophobia result inevitably from the internal feelings of hatred and fear with which non-heteronormative sexualities are regarded by certain people. Homophobic reactions are unconscious and individual" p.22
Heteronormative nationalism - " For nationalism, the proper member of the Nation is both heterosexual and reproductive. Seen as neither, LGBT people come to represent the Nation’s Other. In this analysis, to be gay is to deny the Nation and its needs, and so to align oneself with its transnational enemies." p.23
Homophobia as anti-“Europe” - "Rather than assuming it to be irreducibly personal, or the past’s ineluctable legacy, they tie it to postsocialism’s transnational tensions, notably those between “Europe” and “the Nation” (Eglitis 2002; Verdery 1996). Viewing right-wing homophobia as a rejection of a perceived “moral colonialism” by Western Europe, they locate it within the larger frameworks of dominance and subordination currently shaping East European cultural politics." p.24
"LGBT people appear here as a kind of “indicator species” for the postsocialist creation of inclusive society—for “normal” social progress." p.25
Gays as the new Jews - "The claim, then, that gays are the new Jews in postsocialist politics once again begs the question of why, in such strikingly visible, public fashion, LGBT people have become such significant targets of rightwing mobilization at this particular moment in time." p.26
Practice and its implications - "looking more closely at how LGBT people themselves are shaping and reshaping the structures of sentiment and power that surround them in postsocialist Eastern Europe." p.26
"I argue that by producing, in publicly meaningful ways, forms of identity that simultaneously claim national and transnational connections, LGBT activists propose their own competing vision for postsocialist Hungarian identity" p.27
Hungarian LGBT activism: Queering belonging - Many Hungarian LGBT organisations sprung up in the 80's.
The Budapest Pride March - "Even the March’s scheduling conforms to global gay liturgy: its timing is carefully calculated to fit in with other European Pride Marches. These practices demonstrate the connections Hungarian LGBT people perceive between themselves and LGBT people and movements elsewhere." p.28
"the Pride March has over time associated its participants with the spaces of a specifically Hungarian history, constructing LGBT people as legitimate inhabitants of national community" p.28
The Kertbeny Memorial - "Following the discovery of his unmarked grave in Budapest’s national cemetery in 2001, Lambda Budapest and the gay magazine Mások organized the dedication of a new gravestone for Kertbeny; a memorial service is now held there every summer." p.29
"The memorial also ties Hungarian LGBT people into transnational gay history and community practically, as it was explicitly intended to be not merely a local ritual, but a site of international gay “pilgrimage.”" p.29 - As well as being notable Hungarian!
Reactions to LGBT activism - "In the Hungarian case the public nature of homophobic reaction is not new, but has grown in size and visibility over the years" p.30
"for the right, it is not simply the presence of LGBT people in spaces where they should not be that is problematic, and fuels homophobic response, but the claims of combined national and transnational belonging they invoke there." p.30
"LBGT people are through their public actions proposing—and are understood by the Hungarian right, and others, as proposing—an alternative vision of Hungarian society, one which fundamentally defies its traditional boundaries of identity and community." p.31
The unbearable queerness of being - "Through events like the Pride March and the Kertbeny memorial service, Hungary’s LGBT community consistently constructs boundaries of belonging whose contours, by embracing both national and transnational meanings, fundamentally defy assumptions of their necessary opposition, and undermine assumptions of the inevitability of the borders between them." p.31
"“Queering” thus came to refer not simply to the proposal of an “alternative” within existing systems of sexual-political meaning and possibility, but to a radical challenge to and refusal of such systems and their founding assumptions" p.32
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