CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Butterfield, Nicole Ann |
|---|---|
| Title | LGBTIQ Advocacy at the Intersection of Transnational and Local Discourses on Human Rights and Citizenship in Croatia |
| Summary | This dissertation is an examination of the intersection of hegemonic discourses of human rights emerging in Europe in the past twenty years, the increasingly dominant practices of professionalization and NGO-ization of civil society, and Croatia’s EU accession process in the context of Croatian LGBTIQ activism. Based on my research conducted in the field from 2008 to 2011, I argue that discourses on human rights, professionalization, and European identity in Croatian activists’ collaborations with transnational activist organizations to lobby the Croatian government to adopt anti-discrimination legislation have relied on lobbying discourses of professionalization that have employed a narrow concept of human rights and a problematic conception of European identity as a marker of “progress” and “development” at the expense of a “Balkan” Other. Using early forms of gay and lesbian activism that developed during the 1980s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, embedded in broader solidarity-based movements as a point of comparison, I argue that contemporary Croatian activists’ involvement in community-based activism and larger regional networks have become an increasingly less important aspect of their activities as they began to professionalize. The valorization of professionalized LGBTIQ activism in Croatia has meant that certain Croatian activists have simultaneously re-oriented their priorities towards lobbying and advocating for legal rights and lessened their participation in regional and local networks and engagement with the larger Croatian LGBTIQ community. I attempt to construct a possible alternative to the anti-discrimination rights-based strategies by using critical feminist scholarship on reflexive solidarity and subjectivity. |
| Supervisor | Barát, Erzsébet |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/butterfield_nicole.pdf |
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