Manon Tremblay,David Paternotte and Carol Johnson (eds),The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State

Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte and Carol Johnson (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State, Ashgate: Farnham, UK, 2011; 234 pp.: ISBN 9781409410669

This volume offers a quick portrait of the extraordinary changes occurring around the world in the advancement of gay and lesbian equality rights with a focus on the role of state systems in allowing or impeding change. This emphasis on the state may be seen as a useful corrective to new social movement theorists who have argued that social movements, like the LGBT movement, are essentially a case of ‘identity politics’ operating in the ‘cultural’ realm. The volume shows a major engagement of movement actors, sometimes even articulation, with state structures. At the same time, the focus on the state means that social change in the norms, expectations, and institutions of civil society receives less attention. For the most part, contributors offer concise narratives of changing equality rights while the social underpinnings of both movement and state practices receive uneven or sketchy treatment. The primary concern of this volume is with the role of state structures in shaping legal equality and it succeeds in covering 15 countries around the world in 13 chapters.

One of the outcomes of this treatment of the nexus between state systems and LGBT mobilization is a review of the diversity of state formations perceived through the lens of gay and lesbian equality rights. The Belgian state, for example, emerges as almost the opposite of the British state, with the former decentralized into regional and linguistic components allowing considerable power to devolve to civil society organizations including LGBT federations, while the latter offers so few avenues of entry that external EU-level institutions have to exert the necessary leverage to provoke progress in lesbian and gay equality rights. One of the strengths of this volume is the way it shows how state formations strongly influence the opportunity structure of lesbian and gay actors and shape how they may be included or barred from full participation in citizenship rights.

Comparing this book to The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics (Adam, et al., 1999) published 14 years ago, shows the quite remarkable achievements that have been made in gay and lesbian equality rights. Human rights legislation has been succeeded by same-sex relationship recognition, including marriage, in a number of jurisdictions around the world. Perhaps particularly new has been the way in which lesbian and gay equality has entered into the national imaginary of a few countries in constructing themselves as ‘modern’. Hekma and Duyvendak in this volume note that the embrace of lesbian and gay citizens in the Netherlands as part of the Dutch way of life has turned into something of a shibboleth demanded of Muslim immigrants who have become the new ‘other’ of Dutch society in the 21st century. The construction of lesbians and gay men as the embodiment of modernity seems to work more benignly in Latin America where they have benefited from a wave of social democratic governments that have come to power in recent years and equality rights have become identified with a progressive agenda of social reform. In Canada, as well, lesbian and gay rights have become a part of a progressivist discourse of diversity and multiculturalism where they have been taken up as a point of pride in contrast to the USA. On the other hand, the identification of lesbians and gay men with all things modern has been more problematic in Poland. Because the post-war Communist administration suppressed virtually all civil society organizations, forcing dissenters to find refuge under the umbrella of the Roman Catholic Church, the Church has emerged as an integral part of the post-Communist state. Nationalist governments in Poland have reinvigorated a discourse that has a long pedigree among conservative and fascist governments by constructing LGBT people as symbols of foreign modernity. LGBT people, in this instance, become symbolic targets in battles with the European Union. Another chapter treats a similar homophobic dynamic in Malaysia and one might add it also has considerable traction among a number of sub-Saharan African administrations today.

Overall the chapters in this volume are tightly written; contributors were clearly kept to a strict word limit. While this means that chapters deliver a great deal of useful information in an efficient manner, Bernstein’s USA chapter seems particularly constrained given that there are several different regional sexual and political cultures there, and the USA needs particular explanation, if not critical scrutiny, given its record as a laggard in LGBT rights among the liberal democratic states.

No volume of this kind can be fully comprehensive. Transgender movements and rights are not covered and regions where LGBT rights are emergent have sketchy treatment. Brazil and Argentina do have chapters in this volume, but the rapidity of change in nearly all of the countries of Latin America has been especially noteworthy over the last decade and these two countries are but the tip of an iceberg. This book could be profitably read with Same-Sex Marriage in the Americas (Pierceson et al., 2010) and Rafael de la Dehesa’s Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil (2010) for a more complete view of the recent gains made in this region. South Africa, as well, is the lone representative of a whole continent. It will be necessary to wait for another volume for analysis of the ferment currently occurring in several African nations where LGBT rights have attained new public visibility resulting in both pogroms and a few tentative steps in the direction of full citizenship.