Queer on the home front: Russian LGBTIQ activism and queer security in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine

The article investigates Russian LGBTIQ activism in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, a conflict framed in highly gendered and sexualized geopolitical terms. The study aims to develop a deeper understanding of queer security and is based on interviews with Russian LGBTIQ activists, their international funders, as well as a text analysis of Russian official documents and news media. It shows how the safety of queer and trans people in Russia is undermined by wartime state discourses producing them as hypervisible enemies within, the complex ways in which activists navigate security and visibility, that international allies intervene in these negotiations in ways that may or may not align with activists’ priorities, and how the circumstances of war themselves reshape LGBTIQ activism. The study argues for a notion of queer security as geopolitically shaped but embodied and experienced in the everyday, and realized through horizontal grassroot networking. The findings broaden our understanding of queer security by going beyond the scope of institutionalized rights regimes, decentering the state and international organizations as providers of security for queer and trans people, and invite researchers to consider queer activists as actors of international security.

Emil Edenborg has a PhD of Political Science from Lund University. He is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Stockholm University and Associate Research Fellow in the Global Politics and Security Programme at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI). His research focuses on politics of “traditional values,” geopolitical framings of gender and sexuality, and – most recently – on international development policy and LGBTIQ activism. He is the author of Politics of Visibility and Belonging: From Russia’s “Homosexual Propaganda” Laws to the Ukraine War and peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Geopolitics, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Problems of Post-Communism.