Rating: Transsupportive, Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, October 11, 2023 (PDF archive) (HTML archive) (Take Action)
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Content Summary
See also: Overview, Full Report
Global Resistance to Anti-gender Opposition
LGBTQI+ Activism in Colombia, India, Kenya, Peru, and Serbia
Those most impacted by oppression hold the deepest knowledge of the manifestations, impact, and solutions of that oppression. The growing anti-gender and fundamentalist opposition to LGBTQI+ rights across the globe present activists with concerning new challenges and opportunities for collaboration. It is clear that opposition forces are gaining influence, utilize multiple strategies, are building alliances across their differences, and target women, LGBTQI+, and other oppressed communities to gain power and control.
Sustained, long term, well-resourced tactics and strategies that are distinct and context-specific are necessary to disrupt the variety of opposition to LGBTQI+ rights and justice. When asked what would make resisting the opposition much easier and more successful, LGBTQI+ activists shared four main areas of need, including financial resources; an enabling environment; additional skills, knowledge, and strategies; strong movements and inter- movement solidarity.
While resourcing for LGBTQI+ movements still remains scarce, LGBTQI+ activists across the globe are countering the cisgender heterosexual patriarchal opposition with multiple tactics and on many fronts, while also building possibilities for queer futures.
Our mission is to fuel local and global movements that shift power to LGBTQI+ people and organizations pursuing social justice and human rights. We do this by providing support in the form of grantmaking, philanthropic advocacy, communications, and capacity building.
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Country Focus Colombia
Country Focus India
“We dream of living in a world with social justice. We reach out to other movements and we see cis-heteropatriarchy replicated there. That is a shock. But it is still good that our horizon is to make that fair world a reality for all.”
– Colombian activist
Within the last ten years an openly anti-rights fundamentalist discourse has emerged. To confront this threat, it is vital for LGBTQI+ movements to identify new tools to confront essentialist or fundamentalist discourse in spaces where different agendas and multiple systems of oppression intersect.
Country Focus Kenya
“Those pleasures may be fleeting and accessible only to the few. But they should not be dismissed, nor should we underestimate the role that pleasures of any variety play in enabling those who are otherwise distressed to reclaim some sense of their humanity”
– Moradewun Adejunmobi
Affirming space-making through ballroom in Kenya is undocumented, hidden, and under-resourced. Embodied disruption, as in the Nairobi ballroom, reinvigorates hope and reimagines space and place in which queer people can live their lives to the fullest. They provide a joyful space to imagine our freedom and dreams and to dream queer people out of the bleak and suffocating place of fear and despair.
Country Focus Serbia
“As queers our task is to provide our own narratives about current issues i.e. air pollution that [are] huge. The biggest problem is that queer organizations sometimes do not recognize that these are also their issues.”
– Serbian activist
Most human rights in Serbia were established during socialist Yugoslavia. The so-called new democratic society has not proved to be safer for the queer community. In the face of nationalistic, fascistic groups, Serbian LGBTQI+ movements are seeking to spark imaginations for a new, vibrant, and just society that embraces diversity, love, and joy.
“Histories are divergent, alliances are contingent, meeting in spite of ourselves, sharing rooms even if we don’t share agendas.”
– Indian activist reviewer
In India, when adult women run away from their birth homes and challenge the moral expectations of society, families often take legal action against them and their partners, even when they have left of their own volition. Emerging jurisprudence on the right to love in India has shown that the desire to seek justice within the law is not unwarranted and that the law could be a useful tool in challenging status quo.
Country Focus Peru
“Feminists are our main allies. We cooperate in a very horizontal way, their vision is to share knowledge so we can grow together. They are not selfish at all”
– Peruvian trans woman activist
Despite conservative attacks in Peru from 2016 to 2020, LGBTQI+ movements managed to maintain the status quo on a wide array of gender issues. However, in the wake of Dina Boluarte’s rise to office, LGBTQI+ activists have not had a common position on the social and political crisis. This is a window of opportunity to build a more articulated, representative, and diverse Peruvian LGBTQI+ movement.
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