Abstract
Contemporary queer migration is shaped by regional and cultural attitudes toward sexual and gender minorities, a fact that is well known in both academic and activist spheres. Much less is mentioned about the ways that homophobic and discriminatory attitudes came to pervade certain regions, while others became the champions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) rights. This chapter employs Becker’s theory of moral entrepreneurship to examine Western influence over gender ideologies and the treatment of sexual and gender minorities across the globe, and seeks to explain why non-Western societies that once accepted sexual and gender minorities are now resistant to Western-led LGBTQ rights movements. Focusing on two case studies of imperials and their relationships with their colonies, the chapter discusses the acceptance of sexual minorities by non-Western societies prior to Western contact, and the ways that imperials controlled gender roles and behavior as an exercise of colonial rule. Next, it discusses how restrictive social and legal policies were retained in non-Western colonies, despite the shift to a more permissive stance in the Western countries themselves. In the postcolonial period, many non-Western societies held the antipathy toward sexual minorities as a way to differentiate themselves and resist Western influence, a theme that continues to appear in today’s landscape of LGBTQ rights and oppression.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, I (and Sigal) use relationships as one might in common parlance. Relationship connotes an emotional or affective tie, some form of mutual commitment, and recognition that this is a distinct social unit (different from a friendship or fictive kinship).
- 2.
Former British colonies that have received recent media attention for persecution and criminalization of LGBTQ people.
- 3.
Agreed upon by multiple North American groups to replace berdache.
- 4.
Here, Greenberg draws heavily on sociological theories of Max Weber on bureaucracy and social control. For more on these topics, see Weber’s 1946 Essays in Sociology and 1968 Economy and Society.
- 5.
While LGBTQ would not have been the terminology used at that time, LGBTQ activists recognize these efforts as nascent events and activities that enabled modern LGBTQ rights movements. As such, they are included as part of a timeline of LGBTQ history (for example, Ewing 2016).
- 6.
Published in 1948, Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior and the Human Male was a groundbreaking work that questioned normative ideas about sexuality at the time. The Kinsey Scale (which puts homosexuality and heterosexuality on a spectrum, arguing that attraction is a gradient and that heterosexual/homosexual is a false dichotomy) comes from this book. In the book, he argues that the illnesses (mental and behavioral) that disproportionately affect homosexuals are the result of societal problems, not character defects. This is an important change from previous medicalized understandings of homosexuality as a mental or personality disorder.
- 7.
Localization, in this context, refers to the process by which native cultural and explanatory frameworks are used to find justification for the acceptance of an element that has been brought in (often imposed) from another culture (Yan 2004).
- 8.
Biopolitics refers to the ways that some bodies or segments of a population are cultivated for political reasons, while others are excluded. See the work of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben for conceptual work; Adriana Petryna and Lisa Stevenson highlight this concept in their ethnographic work on Chernobyl survivors and Canadian public health initiatives for Inuit groups, respectively.
- 9.
Only some Western societies can truly be said to protect LGBTQ rights. For example, despite recent legalization of same-sex marriage, the United States still lags in workplace and housing protections for LGBTQ people. Prevalence of hate crimes and experience of discrimination toward LGBTQ people are other key indicators. See Dicklitch-Nelson et al. (2016) for more detail.
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Fox, K. (2019). Implementing Hostility and Acceptance: LGBTQ Persecution, Rights, and Mobility in the Context of Western Moral Entrepreneurship. In: Güler, A., Shevtsova, M., Venturi, D. (eds) LGBTI Asylum Seekers and Refugees from a Legal and Political Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91905-8_2
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