Keywords

Scaling Resistance

In this book, resistance is defined as a response to relations of domination that undermines, negotiates, and challenges power (Baaz et al. 2017a, b). As a set of complex and multiple acts from “below,” this understanding of resistance is anchored in an approach to power in Foucauldian terms, as a network of dispersed micro-practices of control including, but not limited to, visible contentious forms of challenging political and state power. Scholars in resistance studies (Baaz et al. 2017a; Murru and Polese 2020) distinguish two traditions in conceptualizing resistance. One is rooted in research on social movements and contentious politics, and has its focus on visible forms of resistance such as street protests, social movements campaigns, or strikes (Della Porta 2014; Tarrow 2001; Tilly 2008). Another focuses on everyday, subtle forms of resistance that may or may not lead to a change in relations of domination but bring other gains to resistant subjects. Scott (1987) defines such resistance as “victories of the weak,” de Certeau (1984) as maneuvering tactics of the powerless in the space of the powerful while, in the conceptualization of Butler (1993, 22), it is described as “[…] failure to approximate the norm,” or the process of undermining norms through a reiteration of dominant discourses with a slightly different meaning. Our understanding of resistance lies in between these, or rather covers both, situated in a “grey zone” (Murru 2020, 172) between everyday resistance, carried out by individuals in the form of unorganized resistance with low awareness of, or interest in, shared actions, and more organized forms of collective action, in which protesters gather in broader social or political movements to challenge authorities or hegemonic powers in national or transnational realms. From this outset, this book focuses, on the one hand, on transnational social movements represented by the struggles of feminist and LGBTI+ activists across Russia, the Scandinavian countries, and Turkey. On the other hand, the book brings forth small-scale, in/visible resistant tactics and the mundane work of activists aimed at redefining established relations of power. As we argue throughout the book, these two modes of resistance are not exclusive of each other, but, on the contrary, mutually determining. The empirical case studies that we consider vary from large-scale feminist gatherings such as Women’s March in Istanbul to almost invisible activist practices such as Church singing in a small Norwegian town or a flashmob with rainbow balloons in celebration of the Day against Homophobia and Transphobia in the south of Russia.

The current trend in resistance studies to reveal the invisible and subtle forms of resistance (Baaz et al. 2017a; Murru and Polese 2020) aligns with similar discussions in feminist and queer literature which puts under scrutiny the preoccupation with visible public forms of resistance in feminist and LGBTI+ activism. Researchers of transnational LGBTI+ politics argue that visibility and contentious public actions might not only be undesirable but also dangerous in particular contexts (Brock and Edenborg 2021; Ritchie 2010; Stella 2015). Feminist scholars maintain that a narrow focus on the public sphere as a space of resistance undermines the value of feminized resistance that is often contained in the private domain or around presumably apolitical matters such as social reproduction or care (Mason-Deese 2016; Murru 2020). Nonetheless, instead of dichotomizing public and private or visible and invisible forms of resistance, we, along with other scholars in the field (Motta and Seppälä 2016; Polese and Murru 2020), suggest a multi-scalar analysis of resistance which acknowledges that resistance occurs on various levels, from large-scale transnational feminist protests to small-scale but meaningful LGBTI+ community-based interventions. In the following chapters, we consider resistant practices on three levels: macro level as relations between civil society, the state, and the market; meso level as relations within civil society—between activists and organizations from different geopolitical regions and countries as well as between small- and large-scale activist organizations and groups; and on micro level—as individual resistance practices and individual bodies as a part of collective political struggles.

This multi-scalar understanding of resistance brings to the fore the agentive experience of marginalized and less powerful actors whose resistant tactics otherwise may remain unnoticed. It is, however, important to distinguish between agency and resistance. Agency is a broader term and captures the subjects’ capacity for action (Baaz et al. 2017b, 17; Mahmood 2005), while resistance is the exercise of actions aimed at destabilizing relations of power (Baaz et al. 2017b, 17). Using multi-scalar analysis in relation to feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Russia, Turkey, and the Scandinavian countries, we problematize the superficial assumption that activists in Scandinavia have more freedom and capacity to resist the state and other relations of power than our research partners in Turkey and Russia where the general climate for LGBTI+ and feminist activists is more hostile (see Chapters 1 and 3 in this book). While activists in Scandinavia may have more resources to resist state power through direct negotiations with politicians or state bodies, activists in Russia and Turkey may be better equipped for informal resistant practices such as maneuvering the repressive state apparatus or relying on non-contentious forms of action in the space of community activism or culture. As we argue elsewhere (Arik et al., 2022), in all three contexts, the strategies and tactics of resistance depend on the scope and positionality of an activist group/organization in relation to hegemonic struggles embodied by relations between the state, global and local civil society, and markets. This also means that resistance is not universal, it depends on, adjusts to, and reproduces existing relations of power, which, as feminist anthropologists argue, are context-specific (Abu-Lughod 1990; Mahmood 2005). Thus, any understanding of resistance should be accompanied by an analysis of established hierarchies existing in particular spaces constructed at the intersection of entities such as geopolitical regions, national states, dominant cultures, and social and economic relations.

A multi-scalar conceptualization of resistance also problematizes the dichotomy between the powerful and the powerless. Actors can be simultaneously resisters and dominators within different hierarchies (Baaz et al. 2017a; Hollander and Einwohner 2004). As we argue in the book, the fact that activists resist unjust relations of power does not exclude their complicity with existing structures that produce inequality. The scholarship on co-optation of feminist and queer struggles in maintaining imperialism, nationalism, neoliberalism, and racism is but one example (Ghodsee 2004; Farris 2017; Fraser 2009; Grewal 2005; INCITE! 2007; Spade 2015). With this, we claim that it is crucial to de-romanticize resistance (Abu-Lughod 1990; Murru 2020) and to acknowledge, as we discuss further in Chapter 4, that well-meant forms of solidarity as resistance to state homophobia and global patriarchy within transnational civil society may not only risk to reproduce but also strengthen existing hierarchies in transnational activist struggles.

Our multi-scalar approach to resistance sheds light on how acts and performances of individual bodies can shape spaces of struggle against dominant powers. As we show in the book, corporeality of resistance is at the core of feminist and LGBTI+ activism, which in itself is a struggle against the biopolitical power of state and state experts over the self, bodies, and sexuality. Attention to individual bodies brings to the surface modes of resistance that oftentimes remain outside of the scope of analysis such as affect, emotions, tactile practices, and materiality. The significance of these, often overlooked, aspects of resistance for undermining power hierarchies is stressed in feminist and queer scholarship (Ahmed 2014; Butler 2015; Hemmings 2005). These aspects are also the focus of our analyses throughout this book. For example, as we show in Chapter 5, the individual body as a micro-scale locus of resistance has a potential to contribute to the most visible and acknowledged forms of contentious politics, such as public protests or rallies. During public protests, individual emotions such as rage, anger, or dissatisfaction are transformed into collective affects. Through these transformations, individual bodies form a collective body that, in return, becomes more than the sum of those individual bodies. Through our fieldwork experiences, we acknowledge that not only the media image but also personal experience of being part of a collectively resisting body is powerful. Collective bodily resistance in the form of public protests is also an important means of putting pressure on dominant powers and destabilizing and challenging the space of the powerful. Yet, the positive value we ascribe to public protests should not be read as one more affirmation of contentious politics in the public sphere as the dominant mode of dissent—the idea that we challenge throughout the book. Rather, we highlight the fluid and mutually determining relations between different scales, where resistance, which starts on the surface of an individual body, can incite and inspire collective practices of resistance, and in the longer run challenge and potentially dismantle established political, social, and economic hierarchies.

In our attention to spaces of resistance, we recognize both spatial and temporal dimensions of resistance. Rather than being a flat surface upon which people act, we conceptualize space as a product of our relationships and connections with each other (Massey 2005). When collective assemblies take place in space by demanding the right to appear, be listened to and heard, they are engaged in a claiming of space which, through the very act of resistance, create new relations of connectivity and belonging (Butler 2015). Using the notion of movement, Pile (1997) sees such spatial forms of resistance as the paths traversed in the course of struggle, which involves a change in location although without necessarily insisting on a clear origin or final destination. Being linked to our understanding of resistance in a grey zone, such movements, set into motion by resistance, do not have to be big or especially impressive but can be small-scale micro-movements, barely perceptible, even hidden or covert, difficult to categorize and define. This understanding also involves a temporal dimension of resistance which, unlike spatial, has been underrepresented in resistance studies (Baaz et al. 2017a, 119). Even though resistance, which is the focus of this book, does occur in the here and now, spaces of resistance simultaneously contain multiple temporalities (Ibid.) building on past struggles and aiming toward more open-ended futures. Attention to the temporal dimension of resistance questions pessimism or indifference toward less visible and less recognized resistant practices. As we argue, the activist struggles which this book features may not directly challenge or undermine current relations of power but they do have a potential to contribute to radical changes over time.

Transnational Civil Society : Between Co-optation and Resistance

The first scale of analyzing resistance in this book is relations between civil society, the state, and the market (Chapter 3). There is a rich tradition of scholarship studying the role of civil society as a space of resistance, which has become especially noticeable since the 1980s–1990s in the context of the 1980s anti-Soviet uprisings in Eastern Europe and protests against military dictatorships in Latin America (Edwards 2011; Katz 2009; Räthzel et al. 2015). In this tradition, civil society is understood as a distinctive space in relation to the state and the market (Edwards 2011). Civil society is believed to contribute to democratization and the building of good governance in non-democratic contexts and states in transition as well as to strengthening the existing democratic system in the Western world by balancing the potential excesses of state power (Edwards 2011; Eder 2009; Räthzel et al. 2015; Sundstrom 2006; Warren 2011). These normative assumptions about the role of civil society in maintaining sustainable democracies have been critically scrutinized by a disciplinarily, methodologically, and contextually diverse body of scholarship. Our own critique of these assumptions is informed by a Gramscian understanding of relations between the state and civil society, feminist critiques of NGOization and co-optation of progressive politics by the state and/or neoliberal markets, and our spatial approach to resistant studies which, according to Baaz et al. (2017a, 31), “offers a possibility to understand the leakiness of civil society, the market and the state, as people move between these spaces, carrying out resistance with unconventional methods in unexpected locations.”

Our theoretical take on civil society refers to the Gramscian conceptualization of symbiotic relations between civil society and the state. With his concept of the integral state, Gramsci undermines the distinction between the state and civil society naming it merely analytical (“methodological”) but not organic, i.e., really existing (Anderson 1976; Gramsci 1999 [1971], 371; Texier 1979). According to Gramsci, the state is inclusive of civil society and there is “dialectical unity of civil society and political society” (Bobbio 1979, 41). Thus, the state and civil society are neither separate nor autonomous but co-constructed entities. Hegemony describes the processes through which particular political practices of a certain class or group lead them to seize state power and thereby define the nature of politics (Thomas 2009a). Civil society is understood here as the hegemonic apparatus of the ruling class to gather consent for its moral and intellectual leadership (Texier 1979). The integral state, in return, describes the relationship between civil society (social interests and the relations between them) and the state (political society and the state apparatus) (Humphrys 2018; Thomas 2009b).

The Gramscian perspective on civil society as integrally linked to the state challenges “civil society orthodoxy”—the liberal idea according to which an institutionalized “strong” civil society counterbalances the state apparatus and is unavoidably good for the democratic process (Salmenniemi 2008, 5). On the contrary, in Gramscian terms, a “strong” (consistent) civil society works to ensure the solidity of the state (Texier 1979). Drawing on this understanding, Räthzel et al. (2015, 156) suggest that boundaries between the state and civil society are the strongest when the state power is most oppressive. In other words, the less civil society and the state are opposed to each other, the higher affinities between them are. This applies to both authoritarian and liberal states as civil society may become an extended arm of the state apparatus regardless of its agendas. As we reveal in Chapter 3, while non-democratic governments such as those in Turkey and Russia limit the space of the liberal civil society by restrictive legislation or repressive actions (Doyle 2018; Eldén and Levin 2018; Erensü and Alemdaroğlu 2018; Gradskova 2019; Kaya and Öğünç 2020; Skokova et al. 2018), they strengthen ties with civil societal actors with pro-government agendas in ways that are very similar to the liberal states of Scandinavia that co-opt civil society through neoliberal governance (Ålund 1995; Babül 2015; Silliman 1999; Fahlgren et al. 2011; Fink and Lundqvist 2010; Yabancı 2016). As Liinason (2017) shows in her analysis of relations between women’s organizations in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden and national governments, civil society organizations in Scandinavia have played a significant role in facilitating neoliberal reforms that Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish governments have implemented since the 1990s. As a result of its neoliberal reconfiguration, civil society is seen as more trustworthy than state actors, but the state still governs civil society through political decisions and distribution of funds to achieve certain goals such as social cohesion or gender equality, for example. Hence, the Gramscian conceptualization of civil society challenges the assumption that only in non-democratic countries such as Turkey and Russia the independent space of civil societies is endangered by repressive governments (Humphrys 2018; Thomas 2009b; Echagüe and Youngs 2017; Robinson 2005). In its most recognizable and legit forms such as NGOs or CSOs, civil society is entwined with the state through governmentality (Bernal and Grewal 2014). While relations between civil society and the state in Turkey and Russia are more antagonistic than in the Scandinavian countries, feminist and LGBTI+ organizations in Russia and Turkey are still aligned with foreign states that serve as donors and in the Scandinavian countries, as we detail further in Chapter 3, civil society organizations may experience exclusion from state-political channels due to power struggles in civil society. By including sub-national and transnational mechanisms of funding into our analysis of the conditions of feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Russia, Turkey, and the Scandinavian countries, we highlight structural commonalities in activist struggles across the West/East and North/South as well as the authoritarian–liberal/democratic divide.

Feminist critiques of the NGOization, professionalization, and depoliticization of civil society have long demonstrated that along with the state, the neoliberal market is an important factor that structures the conditions of activist work across the globe (Alvarez 1999; Bernal and Grewal 2014; Lang 1997). NGOs are located within transnational circuits of neoliberal power and even local ones are included in the space of transnational civil society through mechanisms of funding which are considered as the major ground for their co-optation by the institutes and discourses of neoliberal governmentality (Bernal and Grewal 2014). There are two distinctive ways of how the market and civil society interact. One way is that, as empirical research shows, NGOization often augments the expansion of neoliberal markets and the state’s withdrawal from or delegation of its functions such as welfare provision or social support (Alvarez 1999; Hemment 2007; Liinason 2017; Paley 2001; Silliman 1999). Donors’ investments in civil society often accompany economic restructuring in favor of the free market and the diminished role of the state in ensuring redistribution (Paley 2001; Hagemann et al. 2011; Hemment 2007). NGOs serve as a vehicle to encourage impoverished citizens to develop their entrepreneurial skills in the absence of state policies for economic inclusion (Hemment 2007). They contribute to the individualization of structural phenomena such as mass unemployment or rising inequality and, in the spirit of neoliberal governance, move responsibility from the crumbling/withdrawing states to individuals and private actors (Hemment 2007; Schild 2015; Suchland 2015).

Another concern is that neoliberal governmentality penetrates civil society through marketization of activism in the form of competition for funding, bureaucratization, and business rationality in measuring efficiency of activist work that is aimed at the production of “marketable expert knowledge or services” (Lang 2012, 64; Schultz 2010). Notwithstanding the source of funding—national or foreign governments, international donors, or corporations—marketization of activist work is believed to influence the activist agenda at the cost of communities’ needs and concerns (Bagić 2006; Ghodsee 2004; Kirey-Sitnikova 2020; Tadros 2010). The competitive conditions of obtaining funding urge activists to be innovative and creative while sacrificing sustainability and longevity of commitment to stakeholders and partners (Guenther 2011). The widely implemented scheme of project-based funding raises precarity among activists (Bernal and Grewal 2014; Liinason 2021; Lorenz-Meyer 2013) and, as a result, adds to the already high level of stress and burnout among civil society actors (Gorski and Chen 2015; Gorski 2019; Vaccaro and Mena 2011). Thus, marketization and dependence on external funding undermines the assumed independence of civil society in setting their own agenda or its separation from the state and the market (INCITE! 2007). Rather, these three spaces—the state, the market, and civil society—are closely entangled. However, the degree of their entanglement and the space of resistance that is still left for activist struggles vary across contexts, as we meticulously discuss in Chapter 3.

But does entanglement between the state, the market, and civil society mean that civil society has no resistant potential? Anticipating our analysis throughout the book, the answer is “no.” Instead of prioritizing either co-optation or resistance as explanatory models, we look at the ambiguities of activist struggles within and across our three contexts (Eschle and Maiguashca 2018; Liinason 2021). A number of scholars (Alvarez 2014; García-Del Moral et al. 2019; Guenther 2011; Roy 2011) argue that feminist and LGBTI+ activists’ relations with the state and the market are more complex than the “NGOization paradigm” (Hodžić 2014, 221) suggests. The critique of NGOization juxtaposes social movements and NGOs (Hodžić 2014; Roy 2011); yet, in practice, these two can co-exist or NGOs can have the potential to trigger social movements (Alvarez 1999; Helms 2014; Roy 2011). Grassroots movements which, in contrast to NGOs, are perceived as “the purest form of resistance,” do not always withstand the temptation of power hierarchies and exclusionary practices (García-Del Moral et al. 2019, 228). Both movements and NGOs can be hybrid in character and simultaneously combine institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of organizing (Alvarez 1999; Roy 2011). In many contexts, such as in the case of non-democratic governments of Russia and Turkey, foreign-funded NGOs and non-funded grassroots initiatives form alliances and work together against the repressive state apparatus. Moreover, as we reveal in Chapter 3, grassroots initiatives can create ersatz NGOs to become eligible subjects for receiving international donor funding or making claims to the state. The donor dependence that the “NGOization paradigm” condemns for its role in the increasing professionalization and managerialism of feminist and LGBTI+ movements (Roy 2011) does not necessarily lead to co-optation or top-down agenda setting. On the contrary, continuous funding may give activists more time and space for negotiating established relations of power and lobbying their local interests and concerns in the space of (trans)national civil society (García-Del Moral et al. 2019). Moreover, funding allows activists from a less privileged social background or without other sources of financial support to be engaged in socially and politically meaningful waged work (Roy 2011). Individual life trajectories (Räthzel et al. 2015) of particular activists, which we investigate throughout the book, also show that the boundaries between professional NGOs and grassroots movements are permeable. Activists’ trespassing of these boundaries, their choice to work for NGOs to access resources and expertise that can then be invested in grassroots movements is in itself a resistant practice, as some would argue (Baaz et al. 2017a; Guenther 2011; Lugones 2003). Thus, while we do consider it important to expose activists’ complicity and investments in the existing power relations (de Jong 2017), this book also aspires to reveal activists’ potential to resist and negotiate power. We regard this task as our scholarly contribution to conceptualization of the production of hope as an indispensable part of political struggles in transnational feminist and LGBTI+ organizing (Martinsson and Mulinari 2018, 10; Liinason and Cuesta 2016). Our understanding of resistance as navigating the space of the powerful (de Certeau 1984; Lugones 2003), the grey zone between everyday subtle resistant tactics and more visible strategies of undermining power (Murru 2020), underlines that power and resistance are constantly determining one another. Thus, our analysis of feminist and LGBTI+ activists’ resistant tactics is simultaneously an investigation of relations of domination and hierarchies that activists negotiate and challenge but simultaneously strengthen and reproduce (Abu-Lughod 1990). This ambivalence of the resistance/power dyad is especially striking in struggles around transnational solidarity-building that we further discuss.

Promises and Pitfalls of Transnational Solidarity

The second scale of our investigation of resistance is by attending to the making of transnational solidarities. Feminist and queer struggles have been invested in community- and coalition-building among women and LGBTI+ people encountering gender- and sexuality-based oppression and marginalization. Efforts to build solidarity within and between feminist, LGBTI+, and “ally” activisms and social movements have been subject to extensive scholarly debate, especially in theoretical and empirical works by Black, queer, postcolonial, and left feminists who grappled with the question of solidarity across difference and were critical of universalistic approaches to women’s interests in terms of “global sisterhood” (Morgan 1984). These works highlighted the divisions among women based on race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality, and geographical location, which revoked the idea of a shared oppression of women by showing how it ultimately served the interests of women belonging to dominant classes and social groups (Combahee River Collective 1986; Crenshaw 1991; hooks 1984; Mahmood 2005; Lugones 2003; Mohanty 1984, 2003a; Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015; Narayan 1997; Young 2002). As bell hooks maintained in her essay, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Among Women,” women did not need to eliminate their differences to build solidarity; they did not “need to share common oppression to fight equally to end oppression” (hooks 1984, 67; Lorde 1984). Solidarity across difference could thus be built in alliances of “communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together” with diversity and difference as their core values (Mohanty 2003a, 7).

Forming a new basis of transnational feminist and queer coalition politics, this vision of solidarity across difference emphasized diversity and difference in a way that enabled a move beyond identity politics, toward “an inclusive and ultimately universal understanding” of solidarity (Dean 1996, 11). Jodi Dean’s notion of reflective solidarity, defined as “the mutual expectation of a responsible orientation to relationship” (1996, 3), implied that a collectivity must be a discursively achieved “we” that is always in the making, always seeking the inclusion of an “other” that is not yet part of the “we,” as opposed to the traditional model of solidarity based on “us” vs. “them.” Drawing on Jodi Dean’s (1996) concept of reflective solidarity, Chandra Talpade Mohanty developed her notion of “feminism without borders” with the aim:

to stress that our most expansive and inclusive visions of feminism need to be attentive to borders while learning to transcend them. Feminism without borders is not the same as ‘‘border-less’’ feminism. It acknowledges the fault lines, conflicts, differences, fears, and containment that borders represent. It acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border, that the lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities, religions, and disabilities, are real—and that a feminism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division. (Mohanty 2003a, 2)

This notion not only suggested a conceptualization of solidarity oriented toward praxis based on political and historical analysis but also paid special attention to the terms, possibilities, hindrances of solidarity in small, everyday resistant struggles as well as global coalitions for change (see also Mohanty 1984). Acknowledging that similarities as well as differences across borders, belongings, and movements “exist in relation and tension with each other in all contexts,” in this book, we follow the lead of Mohanty in implementing the idea of “common differences” in our approach to understanding activist practices of building solidarity across difference (Mohanty 2003b, 518; 521). It is these practices, we contend, that enable, foster, challenge, and hinder transnationalizing spaces of resistance.

The period of NGOization in the 1990s and 2000s created novel lines of demarcation within feminist and queer struggles based on their relationship with the state and mechanisms of global governance. Integrating previous insights on solidarity across difference with a focus on the co-optation of feminist and LGBTI+ activisms by dominant institutional structures, a new literature emerged that criticized transnational solidarities for privileging and universalizing Western/Northern feminisms and imposing gender-only agendas through transnational NGOs that implemented neoliberal policies. While acknowledging the positive outcomes of transnational gatherings (often endorsed by the UN) in terms of politicizing the issues of marginalized women, especially of those in the South/East, and setting up national mechanisms (e.g., via CEDAW) to address and eliminate gender-based oppression, this literature showed how the exclusion of working-class and minority women by local and global elites from transnational alliances worked to maintain capitalism, imperialism, and unequal relations of power on local, national, regional, and global levels simultaneously (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Basu 2016; Dhawan 2013; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Hawkesworth 2006; Meyer and Prügl 1999; Roy 2016; Wilson 2015). Local repercussions of transnational solidarities have been discussed in terms of politics of translation (Alvarez et al. 2014; Hemment 2007; Hodžić 2016; Thayer 2009) as well as the impact of “shaping orientations and agendas in ways that privilege Western style priorities, discourses, and models of feminist organizing over domestic ones; and, on the whole, of colonizing, dividing, and fragmenting domestic movements” (Dufour et al. 2010, 18). Scholars of postcolonial and critical theory specifically questioned the “complicities between liberal cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity and the global structures of domination they claim to resist” (Dhawan 2013, 144; Jabri 2007; Roy 2016; Spivak 1996; Wilson 2015). All in all, this body of literature has been immensely important for establishing a multi-scalar vision of solidarity by showing that transnational solidarities do not happen only on a global scale or between different nations or supranational organizations, and that solidarities within national boundaries are co-constructed by sub- and transnational processes.

In the past decade, political, economic, and social developments such as the rise of anti-gender mobilizations, repercussions of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, increased connectivity between activists from different world regions under the influence of digitalization and intensified global migration, encouraged researchers to dig deeper into the notion of solidarity across difference as praxis. Feminist scholars developed new conceptualizations of solidarity as “hands-on” (Rai 2018), “care-full” (Emejulu 2018), “active” (Einwohner et al. 2021), and “intersectional” (Tormos 2017). This revived interest in solidarity, located mostly in the fields of gender and politics, development studies, and political sociology, comes from an urge to bring back the issue of “difference” to the feminist agenda while addressing the shortcomings of previous approaches to and praxes of solidarity that flattened differences and overlooked structural inequalities in the name of establishing horizontal relationships (Mendoza 2002; Birey et al. 2019). In Rai’s account, “a ‘hands off’ approach to otherness (…) meant that most dialogue across cultural boundaries ceased to animate feminist work. (…) we have not yet been able to develop the vocabularies that would allow us to speak confidently and respectfully across (…) borders of difference” (2018, 13). Calls for a “new politics of solidarity” (Ibid.; Keskinen et al. 2019) thus contend that solidarity “requires intentionally confronting power; seeking to dismantle privilege and reducing its role in corrupting (…) discussions” (Einwohner et al. 2021, 706, emphasis original). For instance, Emejulu’s (2018) differentiation between “care-full” and “care-less” solidarity draws attention to the favorable and less desirable outcomes of activist practices, especially when mutual empathy and solidarity is presumed rather than fought for between hierarchically positioned individuals and groups involved. Similarly, considering the difficulties of achieving mutuality and reciprocity in solidarity action in an unequal world, Weldon (2018) challenges the insistence on symmetry between different constituents of solidarity projects and points at the necessity of solidarity between unequals for social and political change.

While these contributions are helpful in thinking in terms of the everyday, mundane, minute experiences of feminist and LGBTI+ activists that build up solidarities from below, they place little focus on face-to-face encounters between people with differential belongings and the role of affects that are produced in these encounters in shaping the outcomes of solidarity practices. Yet, at the time of writing, we observe an emerging body of literature that draws attention to everyday practices of activists that lie at the core of solidarities yet fall outside the scope of more programmatic understandings of solidarity across difference. Rooted in feminist and queer theorizations as well as historical and ethnographic accounts of the role of affects in solidarity practices, this literature offers a lens through which to discuss the contextually contingent dynamics of community- and coalition-building from a transnational perspective (Ahmed 2014; Butler 2018; Chowdhury and Philipose 2016; Connections 2020; Hemmings 2012; Salem 2017; Pedwell 2012; Wiedlack et al. 2019). In our view, the most significant feature of this new literature is its effort to go beyond dichotomous understandings of success and failure, consensus and conflict, harmony and dissonance, and pleasure and pain when discussing solidarity practices and their outcomes. For example, Hemmings’ conceptualization of “affective solidarity” considers the role of affects “as necessary for a sustainable feminist politics of transformation, but that does not root these in identity or other group characteristics” (2012, 148). Rather than viewing negative emotions involved in solidarity practices in terms of failure, Hemmings argues for the significance of affective dissonance in the development of one’s engagement with feminist politics. In Salem’s view, it is exactly “when mistakes are made, limits are pushed, lines are crossed, and feelings are hurt” the exercise of self-reflexivity and the productive use of difference becomes possible (2017, 259). In a similar vein, Wiedlack (2019) calls for the recognition of emotions such as frustration and disappointment and the feeling of failure as intrinsic to solidarity-building. Conceptualizing solidarity as “working together,” Wiedlack argues that the collective recognition of negative feelings enables parties to critically address the “assumption of a shared identity” (Wiedlack 2019, 37; see also Pedwell 2012).

Drawing inspiration from the work of these scholars, we contribute to this emerging literature by bringing in ethnographic examples to the discussion on transnational solidarities and its role in the making of spaces of resistance. As Dufour et al. (2010) argue, solidarities are always-already transnational in that they are produced, on an everyday basis, within and between organizations, networks, events, and movements that cannot be contained within the borders of one locale. This calls for simultaneous attention to multiple scales when discussing activist discourses and practices in our ethnographies. Transnationalization of solidarities refers not only to processes “by which solidarities travel beyond established national borders, but also by which they are deepened among women or among feminists. The deepening of solidarities involves mutual recognition and the constitution of stronger ties among activists” (Dufour et al. 2010, 4). It is these processes, their favorable outcomes and failures, and the affects involved in them, that we are interested in unraveling throughout the book. In Chapter 4, we attend to the recent calls for a “[n]ew politics of solidarity” (Keskinen et al. 2019, 1; Rai 2018, 13) in the light of current global shifts toward demands of cultural homogeneity and neo-assimilatory politics. We also examine notions and practices of solidarity that go beyond the particularities of individual actors or groups, and explore solidarities across differences situated within contexts of national assimilationist projects and demarcations of borders infused by ideas of homogeneity/sameness. Shedding light on the histories and presents of colonialism and on the sustained production of geopolitical hierarchies, such as those between the West/North and East/South, we address a politics of solidarity that goes beyond naturalized forms of belonging (i.e., familial, ethnic, national) (Yuval-Davis 2011) and propose practices of solidarity that are infused by understandings of social justice which incorporate and seek to repair experiences of cultural and economic injustices embedded in particular historical and societal landscapes (Keskinen et al. 2019).

In this book, we also regard religiosity as of significance in linking solidarity practices to quests for social justice and repair. Situating religion and religious practice in a broader genealogy of struggles for solidarity and justice, we aspire to question and problematize the oft-repeated narrative in feminist and queer theory of religion as by definition harmful or oppressive for women and LGBTI+ people. Instead of locating the socialist project entirely in secular culture and in strivings for emancipation from nature and society, as is canonically the case, a branch of critical scholars have traced the material and spiritual roots of the socialist project to the popular democratic and religious traditions of the poor, such as for example, in the liberation theologies of Latin America (Gorringe 2017; Gutiérrez 1974; Kelliher 2018; Mansueto 1988). Similar connections between solidarity, justice, and religious practice are made in post/de-colonial scholarship, illuminating how indigenous communities engaged in anti-colonial struggles sustain community and struggle through spiritual cosmology and religious ritual (MacKenzie 2017; Wane et al. 2019). These contributions show how religion can take shape as a binding glue in the heterogeneous contexts of organic solidarities and struggles for justice. Indeed, despite the deep investment in secular forms of feminist and queer critique and analytic approaches (Appelros 2005; Comas-Diaz 2008; Valkonen and Wallenius-Korkalo 2015; Watson 1993), there is today a growing number of studies located at the intersection of religion and queer and gendered life (Brintnall 2013; Daly 2010; Taylor et al. 2014). In this emergent tradition, scholars intervene into the assumption of a dichotomous divide between religious feelings and secular reason, and between practices of faith and worldly practices (Evans 2014; Harris and Ott 2011; Scott 2009; van den Brandt 2014). Feminist scholars have provided important insights into why and how feminists appropriate seemingly secular and liberal political standpoints and agendas in the encounter with expanding misogynistic religious movements or institutions, recognizing significant geopolitical specificities in the particular ways in which a revival of religiosity in alliance with national projects have marginalized women in contemporary political and social life (Braidotti 2011; Grabowska 2012; Watson 1993). Nonetheless, despite this bourgeoning interest for explorations of religiosity in the study of gender and sexuality, scholars argue that relatively little attention has been paid to the ethnocentrisms of secular feminist paradigms, or to the intersection of gender, religion, and postcoloniality (Hawthorne 2017; Mahmood 2005). Navigating through the complex, and varied, role of religiosity and secularity in feminist, queer, and anti-colonial forms of resistance against national assimilationist politics, in Chapter 4 we attend to how practices of faith can shape a framework for the shared labor of renegotiating and reclaiming pasts erased, silenced, or forgotten.

Conceptualizing various kinds of solidarity practices as forms of resistance, in this book we build on the revived interest in conceptualizing solidarity across difference by showing the co-construction of and the fluidity between community- and coalition-building action on multiple scales. The two ways of understanding resistance, as contentious politics in the public sphere and as subtle, everyday forms of action through which the resistant subject emerges, overlap with the two main trends in solidarity research; one that looks into co-ordinated struggles for sharing resources, engaging in symbolic action, and organizing mutually beneficial programs, campaigns, and advocacy coalitions (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Weldon 2018), the other into small-scale, mundane acts of affinity and friendship (Ahmed 2014; Chowdhury and Philipose 2016; Hemmings 2012; Wiedlack et al. 2019). Similar to our engagement with resistance, we are interested in the “grey zone” that lies between and connects these two mutually determining modes of solidarity. Attention to this grey zone, we assert, gives us an insight into the processes by which individual bodies and their “minor” practices add up to collective struggles for social justice.

From Individual Bodies to Transnational Organizing: Beyond the Dichotomy of Visibility–Invisibility

The third scale in which we explore resistance is through the body. By scrutinizing embodied struggles as spaces of resistance in an analysis of the International Women’s Day (Chapter 5), our discussion reveals relationalities between places and struggles, as locally embedded feminist or trans struggles carry references to similar resistances in other places. We build further on our approach to resistance in the grey zone, focusing both on visible struggles of feminist and LGBTI+ activists in public spaces as well as the small-scale, hidden, or in/visible tactics of resistance among activists to redefine existing relations of power. The attention to bodily practices in this book allows us to trace core questions in feminist and LGBTI+ struggles, such as exclusion/inclusion, invisibility/visibility, silence/speech, and examine their multiple layers across time and space, often carrying a transnational point of reference. Rooted in our interest in reaching deeper insights into the multi-scalar relationship of resistance and the fluid relationship between individual and collective forms of protest and claiming of space, Chapter 5 is devoted to examining bodily assemblies in public spaces. Bringing together themes stretching across the whole book, we hope to demonstrate in this chapter the significance of embodied forms of resistance for the (re)making of space. As we elaborate how such a focus on the body allows for questions of materiality and affect to appear as key aspects in feminism and LGBTI+ action, we approach the International Women’s Day as a prism for the analyses of activities in various sites in Russia, Turkey, and the Scandinavian countries, and trace routes for coalitional frameworks and solidarity expressions which are less often considered in activism or scholarship through a multi-scalar discussion around corporeality and embodiment. We show that corporeality, as a condition for action, is shared across contexts and we pay attention to the ways in which corporeality reveals itself differently in different contexts.

March 8 represents a history of struggles built around an explicit wish to exchange experiences, strengths, and vulnerabilities across national borders and against multiple injustices—which also travel across national borders. In this book, we are influenced by theorizations in which the body has been understood as not only a site of control but also a site of resistance (Alcoff 2006; Cuesta and Mulinari 2018; Sutton 2007), and we examine the embodied nature of struggles against attempts at policing or controlling bodies and their movements, as we inquire into how vulnerability can be mobilized as a form of resistance (Butler 2015). By focusing on questions of materiality in feminist and LGBTI+ struggles, we illuminate the broad socioeconomic agenda that characterizes present-day resistances, recognize the long genealogies in struggles for gender equality and sexual rights and show how actors embedded in particular sites bring new dimensions to these genealogies.

Bringing forth the ambiguity with which the body can appear both as an object of social control and as a site of agency, the discussions in this book highlight the relationship between power and bodies. We build further on the insights of queer and anti-racist feminist researchers, who have theorized dynamics of in/visibility in explorations of queer and/or feminist struggles in various, postcolonial and postsocialist, contexts (Alcoff 2006; Loftsdottír and Jensen 2012; Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2021; Stella 2012), and we recognize the tension between visibility as a way to achieve autonomy versus as a measure of control (Luibhéid 2020; Sager 2018). Our multi-scalar approach to resistance allows us to move beyond the dichotomy of visible and invisible forms and to recognize the fluid relations that determine resistance at various scales. Resistance, we show, can start with one individual body and incite collective practices which may result in social change in the long run (Butler 2015; Pile 1997). Engaging with tensions between invisibility/visibility and silence/speech, several scholars have recognized how actors located at the intersection of multiple non-dominant positionalities in particular contexts, such as trans, Black and Muslim and feminist women or LGBTI+ migrants in the global North, East and South carry a positionality whose “very nature resists the telling” since these positionalities lack or have weaker access to available broadly comprehended narratives with which to share the reality of one’s experiences to the world (Luibhéid 2020: 57; Liinason 2020; Story 2017). In order to change these dynamics, scholars argue for the need to work toward transforming knowledge production, because research and researchers frequently violate, silence, or erase the experiences of marginalized populations (Luibhéid 2020), and propose the usefulness of fostering forms of telling that may allow marginalized actors to share their experiences. Yet, as we argue, our focus on embodied or corporeal resistance does not privilege or put heavier weight on a politics of visibility or contentious forms of public action. Rather, as the discussions in this book emphasize, it is the fluidity between various scales of resistance—individually/collectively, on micro/meso/macro level—that carry a significant potential for developing forms of resistance which may build more open-ended futures, as it incites and inspires new practices of resistance on various levels.

While politics of visibility and rights struggles are oftentimes taken for granted as the dominant mode of resistance in academic circles as well as in NGOs, feminist and queer scholars have scrutinized the binaries between visible and invisible struggles. Claiming that “being out and proud is not a choice equally available to all queers” Francesca Stella (2012, 1841) argues that invisibility can take shape as both accommodation and resistance. Influenced by these critical insights, researchers find that there is no necessary correlation between increased visibility and strengthened rights and search for the possibility of modes of invisibility to work as a form of power that could interfere with, and potentially transform, power hegemonies.

Paying attention to the ambiguities of in/visibility and to the porous and fluid borders of various spaces and scales, this book examines the simultaneous exposure and agency of the body and highlights the various ways in which spaces of resistance take shape through bodily assemblies (Browne et al. 2017; Pile 1997). Bringing forth important dimensions to the contestations around modes of in/visibility, we emphasize the importance of complicating the debate within which visibility is equated with expanded rights, and to bring nuance to various, fluctuating or hybrid, modes of in/visibility in discussions about rights and representation. Building further on this theoretical understandings, in Chapter 5, we illuminate how embodied struggles for the right to appear, through a mixed use of tactics of visibility, invisibility, and anonymity, opens up a possibility for a coalitional framework in the struggle, where linkages between different positionalities can be established. By addressing the interactive functions of the individual as well as the collective body in public assemblies, highlighting their political aspects and illuminating the variegated roles of anonymity, respectively, visibility in these struggles, we demonstrate how embodied struggles express a protest against exclusion and relations of domination. In these struggles, we show, the body takes shape as a site of agency and takes part in co-creating space. As spaces of resistance, we conclude, these struggles have the potential to shape other spatialities instead of those defined through relations of domination.

From our understanding of resistance in the grey zone, oscillating in multi-scalar fashion between barely perceptible, hidden, or covert micro-movements and highly visible events or street protests gathering large crowds, the approaches to feminist and LGBTI+ struggles presented in this chapter serve to recognize the rich tradition of feminist and queer thought within which the discussions of the book are situated and to which it seeks to contribute. Bringing together various strands of feminist and queer research, these theorizations allow us to study, in the chapters ahead, the possibilities of feminist and LGBTI+ activists to resist and negotiate material conditions of struggle, the ambivalences of transnational solidarity-building, and the coeval exposure and agency of the body. As we devote our attention to explore spaces of resistance in transnational feminist and LGBTI+ struggles across Russia, Turkey, and the Scandinavian countries, in the pages that follow, we scrutinize these enactments and their movements across various scales, over state-market-civil society relations and solidarity struggles in local and transnational contexts, to the multifaceted potential of the body in individual and collective forms of resistance. Next, Chapter 3 takes a closer look at the material conditions of feminist and LGBTI+ activism in the contexts of our research, aspiring to unpack the complexity of these relations beyond dichotomous divides of East/West-South/North, local versus global, and passionate versus professional.