Tensions in the Struggle for Sexual Minority Rights in Europe

Book excerpt: Que(e)rying political practices in Europe is the first queer and poststructuralist reading of political rights concepts in the specific European transnational context. In the last thirty years Europe has seen the rise of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movements fighting nationally and transnationally for participation rights in society. In addition academic theorists have increasingly paid attention to the epistemological and ontological roles gender and sexuality play in modern politics. However, in the political process of arguing for rights the centrality of those roles is mostly hidden from view in official institutional and movement discourses. This book investigates the conceptual themes of lesbian, gay, and transgender rights and lobby politics in Europe and their open and hidden relations to binary and hierarchical orders of dominance. It contributes to an understanding of the conditions upon which politics of inclusion, participation, social justice, and equality rest and why struggles for sexual minority rights have been so difficult and slow. The book illuminates how the paradigms of political discourses constitute, consolidate, and contest the meaning and cultu