Keywords

The political and intellectual work with this book has been sustained by an ambition to provide a pluralist image of feminist and LGBTI+ activisms. Influenced by significant interventions in feminist and queer postcolonial and postsocialist theory and inspired by new developments in critical geographies of resistance and space (Browne et al. 2017; Ghodsee 2019; Roy 2016; Stella 2015; Suchland 2011; Tlostanova et al. 2019), this ambition shaped our point of departure for the book as we have sought to develop a nuanced account of feminist and LGBTI+ formations and exchanges across diverse spaces and scales.

In our endeavor we have aimed to push forward an intellectual concern about the rigidity and taken-for-grantedness of categories such as North/West and South/East in current geopolitical and epistemological projects (Müller 2020; Tlostanova 2012). Struggling ourselves to clearly position Russia, Turkey, and even Scandinavia within these distinctions, we have strived to show throughout the book that the boundaries of these categories are contested, multiple, ambivalent, and fluid. By introducing such inconvenient geopolitical contexts within the same project, we have been doomed to “complicate and disrupt the binarism” (Tlostanova 2012, 131) of the West–East and the North–South divides. Rather than comparing two non-Western/Northern and “not-quite” Eastern/Southern (Müller 2020) contexts, such as Russia and Turkey, between each other or both of them with “the Western ideal” of gender progressive and homotolerant Scandinavia, in this book, we have employed a multi-scalar transnational methodology to analyze and draw new insights from our rich ethnographic material. This has enabled us to catch sight on the relationality between places, histories, and subjects, to grasp how such relationality has shaped gender and sexual politics differently in various times and places, and to shine a light on the multiplicities of activist practices within specific locations, highlighting some of the many and diversely situated lives and livabilities, as they are embedded in particular situations and affective and embodied relations.

Across the pages of this book, we have aligned with an understanding of resistance as context-specific. Such an understanding involves a recognition of resistance as contingent on, adaptive to, and reproductive of existing relations of power. This implies, in turn, that aspirations to understand resistance have to address the overlapping hierarchies that exist in situated contexts, at the intersections of notions and practices of geopolitical regions, national states, cultures, and social and economic relations. From this starting point, our analytical strategy consisted in a careful tracing of overlaps and convergences as well as shifts and differences in feminist and LGBTI+ activism across and within our respective contexts. Processing and analyzing our ethnographies took place in the shape of an ongoing dialogue between us three authors, in various constellations and intellectual spaces, in project meetings, during coffee breaks, in seminar rooms, in parks, at conferences, in one of our kitchens, in restaurants, on trains, in cafés, and in the shape of reflections on written accounts. We have had the true pleasure to engage in a generous amount of ethnographic material, collected over the course of five years (2016–2021) on various offline and online events, campaigns, demonstrations, protests, day-to-day exchanges, festivals, organizational activities, and ongoing struggles within feminist and LGBTI+ activisms. We have developed professional friendships with some of the activists whose accounts appear in this book, and deepened our affinities to the struggles exercised. Through this engagement, we have developed a multi-scalar understanding of resistance characterized by a mutually determining relation between resistances at different scales, from invisible or hidden practices of the everyday to large-scale events and street actions. Thinking feminist and queer struggles in terms of the multifaceted nature of resistance, we argue, carries a potential to challenge, dismantle, or transform political, social, and economic hierarchies because it incites and inspires new practices, fluctuating between mundane, invisible, or hidden forms of political action, and collective types of contentious politics.

Actors who struggle to realize social justice and strengthen democracy find the contradictions of present times perplexing and vexing: While feminist and queer solidarities and resistances show an unprecedent proliferation as diverse forms of feminist and queer activism are becoming increasingly visible (Alvarez 2014; Arruzza et al. 2019; Bacchetta 2017), current times reveal deep oppositions to rights-based movements, as far-right ideologies and neo- and ultra-conservatisms appropriate feminist and queer concepts to mobilize concerns about gender equality and sexual rights in support of their conservative or nationalist agendas (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017; Corrêa et al. 2018). In the meantime, neoliberal forms of governance administer populations by economic logics of calculation, forging new global patterns of exploitation and inequality (Newman 2014; Fraser 2009). This immediate context has impacted this book in several ways, not least in relation to our focus on the material conditions of feminist and LGBTI+ organizing in such unpredictable and changeable times as our contemporary present. As we have shown in Chapter 3, feminist and LGBTI+ activists from various localities develop innovative ways to navigate hegemonic relations at the intersections between the state, civil society, transnational actors, and the market. They do so with different rationales: while some seek to secure resources in order to continue or expand their activities, others wish to gain more visibility, and yet others seek to remain “under the radar.” While activists in Scandinavia are assumed to have more harmonious relations with the state, our analysis elaborates that activist-state relations in this context are dependent on the agenda of activists, the “maturity” of their collaborations with other political actors, and their proximity to the integral state. Small-scale organizations with more radical political interests, such as rights and livabilities of queer asylum seekers, are sidelined from direct interactions with the state by well-established mainstream women’s and LGBTI+ organizations. Whereas activists in Russia and Turkey are usually in explicit or implicit opposition to the anti-gender and homophobic governments in these contexts, mainstream CSOs in Scandinavia perceive contentious politics in relation to the state as unnecessarily provocative and politically damaging. With this, we also note the differential scholarly treatment of the alignment between NGOs/CSOs and the state in the three research contexts; while in Turkey and Russia activists are assumed to be indiscriminately against the oppressive state, in the Scandinavian context, the organic relationship between mainstream CSOs and the neoliberal state remains under-problematized.

The varieties detected here have brought attention to the complex nature of state–civil society relations, highlighting that while relations with the state are important, they are by no means exhaustive in explaining the conditions of activist work. The strategies and tactics of resistance depend on the positionality of activist groups in relation to hegemonic struggles as these are embodied by relations between state actors, global and local civil society actors, and the market. The state still remains an important source of financial support for activist work, even though in the case of Turkey and Russia this support usually comes from the states abroad. However, there are many intermediaries in this process—from large transnational organizations responsible for distributing governmental and private funds to individual employees—whose relations with activists on the ground—whether paternalist or supportive, bureaucratic, or personal—can substantially influence the process and the outcome of activist work.

Our findings have illuminated that, as much as transnational activism has the potential to transgress national borders, it can also contribute to the reproduction of inequalities among activists, both within and between countries. Thus, rather than drawing the major line of distinction in transnational feminist and LGBTI+ activism along the hierarchies of the North–South and West–East, we have attended to an array of differences including generational and geographical (e.g. metropole/province) belongings, the content and nature of activist work, political commitments, and ethical concerns. By bringing to the fore the agentive experience of activists across the three contexts and the critical potential of “similarity in difference” (Tlostanova 2012, 131) in their work, our research destabilizes the North–South and West–East divisions.

Moving from a focus on material conditions in feminist and LGBTI+ activism to embodied and affective processes, Chapter 4 examined practices of solidarity across difference in community- and coalition-building efforts in transnational as well as local settings, and revealed the affective dissonances and ambivalences inscribed in transnational solidarities. Focusing on relationships in multiple life fields and between as well as within borders, belongings, and movements, this chapter highlighted the fluidity between informal, small-scale action, and more co-ordinated, institutionalized organizing with important implications for the making of spaces of resistance, resilience, and repair. Engaging with examples ranging from transnational campaigns and conferences with actors from Turkey and postsocialist geographies to local anti-colonial struggles of Sami people, our discussions in this chapter illuminated that tensions, disagreements, and conflicts between feminist and LGBTI+ actors are inseparable from friendship, affinity, and care, and thus important aspects of solidarity work that call for more attention in solidarity research. This chapter also brought forth the significance of solidarity as involving a practical and emotional shared labor on an everyday basis over time. We found that solidarity practices necessarily ask for critical interrogation and confrontation of power dynamics, and we became convinced that a focus on temporality in explorations of solidarity practices is key, seeing that longevity appeared as a crucial aspect of solidarity in broader struggles for social justice.

In Chapter 4, our analysis further highlighted the need for a critical reconsideration of the North–South and East–West binaries as the salient framework in which to understand transnational solidarities and the hierarchies inscribed in them. While global inequalities along the North/West and South/East axis certainly shape—and jeopardize—community- and coalition-building efforts in feminist and queer struggles, activists’ multiple belongings beyond the national context, for example, professional, geo/political, religious, and racial/ethnic identifications on sub-national and regional levels, complicate the picture.

While in line with our approach to resistance oscillating between the mundane and the spectacular, we illuminated less remarkable, quotidian, even hidden and covert, modes of resistance in previous chapters, Chapter 5 brought attention to larger-scale forms of political action in the analysis of March 8 celebrations through our three contexts. With a departure in our theoretical interest in the multi-scalar nature of resistance, and in the role of such resistance in producing the space of appearance, we focused on corporeality and embodiment in struggles for the right to appear and attended to the distinct and overlapping ways in which face-to-face encounters and bodily assemblies took shape across Sweden, Russia, and Turkey. Throughout the discussions in this chapter, we recognized how bodily assemblies visualized a broad feminist agenda that reintroduced a focus on materiality in the intersectional strands of feminist and LGBTI+ resistance. Highlighting the frustration experienced by Muslim feminists in a Swedish context with being both hypervisible, such as in situations of racial profiling, and non-visible, like in the mainstream feminist movement, we interrogated the double-edged nature of visibility as both being a route to change and a measure of control. This was an issue that had resonance with the Turkish analysis and in particular with the responses to the “booing the Islamic call for prayer (ezan) debate” among feminists in this context. Taken against the background of a longer history of exchange, conflict, and collaboration between pious women and Muslim and secular feminists, which had shaped alliances across the religion-secularity divide and gave sustenance to the community at the Feminist Night March, this example also brought to the fore temporal aspects of coalitional frameworks between differently positioned activists. As we attended to the multi-scalar relationship between the individual and the collective in producing the space of appearance, this discussion also illuminated how the emphasis on being an anonymous collective presents an efficient resistance in contexts of police brutality and state intervention, as it at the same time allows for plurality in the struggle, providing space for many differential political belongings and bodily appearances.

Yet, in spite of the value and potential of bodily assemblies in resistance, our discussion also illuminated that bodily assemblies are not free from tensions. Rather, they can be illustrative of the brute reality in which particular groups often are excluded from more mainstream versions of queer and feminist politics. While offering examples of such exclusionist attempts, the occasions analyzed in Chapter 5 also provided contexts for contestation. In addition to and beyond the logocentrism of discourse and verbalized performance, these contestations took bodily expression, for instance, when other bodies took a stand on the line to lend support and empower a person in need. Demonstrating the capacity of corporeal action to signify by other means, and in excess of what is said, this and other examples in this chapter showed that the political body does not act alone, as one single body, but that the space of appearance takes place between bodies, claiming space (Butler 2015). As we kept a focus on political agency and subjectivity, this discussion developed insight into the ways in which the position of bodies shifts, from individual expression to collective agendas. Seeing that embodied struggles for the right to appear express a resistance against the biopolitical power of the state and state experts over the self, body, and sexuality, the corporeality of resistance is located at the core of feminist and LGBTI+ activism. This capacity of corporeality, we argued, makes bodily assemblies both individually rewarding and allows for a collective experience of resistance to emerge. We found these enactments shedding elucidating light on the empowering and political dimensions of embodied action.

Through the examples illuminated across the pages of this book, we have sought to unsettle the common West–East and North–South dichotomies by attending to the relationality between places, histories, and subjects in the contexts of our research and grasp the influence of this relationality on gender and sexual politics. In doing so, we have highlighted multiple convergences and shifts in the ways in which feminist and LGBTI+ actors in Russia, Turkey, and the Scandinavian countries resist and negotiate the material conditions of struggle in the state-market-civil society nexus. We have attended to how activists navigate the ambivalences of solidarity in various local and transnational contexts, and illuminated the simultaneous vulnerability and power of the body in corporeal modes of resistance, shifting from the individual to the collective. As spaces of resistance, we conclude, these feminist and LGBTI+ resistances have a potential to shape other spatialities than of those defined through relations of domination. In their capacity to both express collective forms of protest and to build new relations of connectivity and belonging, these spaces influence the multifaceted dynamics of political identities. However, we maintain, a focus on collective and larger-scale forms of resistance should not be read as emphasizing a politics of visibility as the preferred kind of activism. Rather, these enactments should be understood within a broader context of both more spectacular, attention-seeking forms of political expression as well as less visible and small-scale, everyday forms of resistance. Within such broader contexts of resistance, it is possible to catch sight on the fluidity between various scales of resistance—individual/collective, micro/meso/macro, local-transnational—which can incite and inspire new practices of resistance. By so doing, these struggles also carry a hope for more open-ended futures.

While this book finalizes our collaborative research on transnational feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Russia, Scandinavia, and Turkey, our commitment to activist struggles in these contexts is far from being over. As our concern throughout this 5-year research journey has been to bridge activism and academia in common struggles instead of dividing them in the dichotomy of a researching versus researched subject, we have launched the networking project “Feminist and Queer Solidarities beyond Borders” engaging further with some of our research partners from the respective contexts in the discussions we featured in this book. As this project develops, we are reminded again and again that our livabilities—as feminist and queer activists and academics—are in many ways similarly shaped by neoliberal conditions as well as anti-gender mobilizations that threaten the prospect of gender equality and sexual rights. Yet, in the spirit of our intellectual endeavor in this book, we do not take these conditions for granted but disrupt and challenge them from various sides, incorporating different resources that are available to us through our variegated experiences.