Homonationalism across borders. Exploring cross-border exchange and strategic homonationalism in the construction of progressive nationalism

Abstract

While scholars have shown the significance of transnational exchanges for shaping feminist and LGBTI+ connectivities across borders to challenge national exclusions and global divides, less attention has been directed at exploring the complex and ambiguous ways in which transnational collaborations and cross-border exchanges also may facilitate and support national agendas. That is what this article sets out to explore. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTI+ actors in a Scandinavian context, this article uses the notion of strategic homonationalism to examine the ambiguous ways in which transnational, diasporic, and refugee LGBTI+ politics and locations in the Scandinavian region strategically engage with regulatory notions of liberal-mindedness and with exclusionary discourses of genuine LGBTI+ subjectivity in this context. Rather than being restricted to national contexts, I show, forms of progressive nationalism may be facilitated by cross-border exchange of various kind. Influenced by scholars who argue for the need to bring back a focus on racialization and national belonging in analyses of the making of sexualized and/or gendered difference, the article attends to the complex politics involved in inhabiting the impossible position of not being able to “not want rights.” To this end, this article reworks homonationalism, from a concept that emerges or is rooted in a US context, to a concept that travels and is differently shaped and picked up in various located sites, showing that homonationalism in a Scandinavian context takes shape through a moralistically superior position.

Introduction

Queer of color and postcolonial feminist scholars have shown the significance of transnational exchanges for shaping feminist and LGBTI+ connectivities across borders to challenge national exclusions and hierarchies between the global North and South (Gopinath, 2018; Browne et al., 2017; Carty and Mohanty, 2015), and developed important interventions into the ways in which logics of homonationalism reinforce national agendas in close affinity with neo-liberalism (Puar, 2013; Browne and Nash, 2017). Less attention, however, has been directed at exploring the complex and ambiguous ways in which transnational collaborations, diasporic politics and cross-border exchanges also may facilitate and support national agendas. That is what this article sets out to explore. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTI+ ¹ actors in a Scandinavian context, this article aims to examine constructions of homonationalism in exchanges between queer and trans actors from the Global South, East, and North. I locate this article within the frames of a wider discussion around the expected and unexpected effects of the ongoing neoliberal fractioning of gender and sexuality with “white racial, capital and citizenship privilege” (Puar, 2007: 128) and argue that gender and sexuality cannot be addressed in isolation from exclusionary nationalist agendas in any context (Suchland, 2018).

In what follows, I use the notion of strategic homonationalism to explore the ambiguous ways in which transnational, diasporic, and refugee LGBTI+ politics and locations in the Scandinavian region strategically engage with regulatory notions of liberal-mindedness in this context and with discourses of genuine LGBTI+ subjectivity (Hansen, 2021; Akin, 2018). In doing so, I am inspired by Christine M. Klapeer’s (2017: 43) discussion of how queer and gender activists from the Global South and East “strategically engage with the ‘requirements’ and ‘languages’ of development institutions.” The recognition of a discursively constructed strategic deployment of homonationalism should not be read as an attempt to underestimate the human rights abuses encountered by sexual and gendered minoritized populations, but is based on an ambition to illuminate and challenge the exclusionary aspects of discourses of deserving immigrants, worthy asylum seekers, healthy sexualities and good citizens, which currently are on the rise, within as well as beyond a Scandinavian context (Kehl, 2018; Akin, 2018; Klapeer, 2017). I direct my attention to the complex politics involved in inhabiting the impossible position of not being able to “not want rights” (Rao, 2020). In doing so, I am influenced by scholars who argue for the need to bring back a focus on racialization and national belonging in analyses of the making of sexualized and/or gendered difference (Kehl, 2020; Weber, 2016; El-Tayeb, 2015), and to recognize these “impossibly queer” subjectivities (Gopinath, 2005).

Influenced by scholars who have produced far-reaching critiques of the ways in which regional hierarchies and global divides are sustained through feminist and queer scholarship and activism (Wiedlack et al., 2019), in this article, I am interested in exploring how cross-border exchanges in feminist and queer activism may work to strengthen such exclusionary agendas. The concept cross-border exchange deployed in this article includes attention to multiple attachments and affiliations of border-crossing LGBTI+ subjects and discourses in relation to the dynamics that characterize various local and global positionings of gender and sexual politics. While transnational refers to an exchange across borders, which can be discursive or material and take place on multiple scales, both locally embedded and situated in global discourses (Mohanty and Carty, 2015; Gopinath, 2018), the notion cross-border exchange focuses on the ways in which affiliations and attachments travel across borders, and their transnational resonances, as they are expressed in particular, located places. To this end, I take a critical stance in relation to the assumption that rescue narratives ² only flow in one direction, from the global North/West to the global East/South, and illuminate the multiple directions in which such narratives travel, as I seek to bring forth the ambiguous and complex role of transnational collaborations, diasporic politics, and cross-border exchanges for the reinforcement and legitimization of homonationalism as an exclusionary, national project. Working in these traditions of scholarship, this article reworks homonationalism, from a concept that emerges or is rooted in a US context, to a concept that travels and is differently shaped and picked up in different contexts.

Methodology and material

This article draws on data collected with LGBTI+ groups and initiatives in Scandinavia, constituted by Denmark, Norway and Sweden. ³ These countries are distinct and diverse, but share some significant features, as they are keen to position themselves at the forefront of global progress for women and LGBTI+ people (Liinason, 2018; Martinsson et al., 2016). In Scandinavia, LGBTI+ activism is vivid and takes shape through well-established civil society organizations as well as in more loosely structured grassroots initiatives. Fieldwork data in this context was distributed on both smaller regional areas and larger cities like Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Malmö, Oslo, Stockholm, Kristiansand, Trondheim, and Tromsø. Research participants particularly recognized the larger cities, such as Oslo, Malmö, or Copenhagen, as important sites for pursuing activism, especially among LGBTI+ people with migrant background and asylum seeking LGBTI+s.

The discussions in this article are rooted in a larger, collaborative research project, exploring transnational exchanges in feminist and LGBTI+ struggles across Russia, Turkey and the Scandinavian countries. The project used a multi-sited research design, conducting fieldwork in various field sites (Marcus, 1995). The multi-scalar methodology informed the analytical strategy in the project, as we developed a collaborative process of looking for “connections or points of convergence in our empirical material collected in different geopolitical contexts,” which we write elsewhere (Çağatay et al., 2022: 21). In developing this strategy, we were inspired by feminist and queer research that implemented dialogue as a method of knowledge production (Brosi and Hooks, 2012; Browne et al., 2017).

The research material upon which the discussions in this article is based includes data from this broader fieldwork, which begun in Spring 2017 with interviews and participant observation in Denmark, where I attended activities in several feminist and queer as well as queer-feminist activist groups, and during the Summer and Fall expanded to Norway and Sweden. The selection of material to analyze in this article includes fieldwork diaries and ten semi-structured interviews from fieldwork with the following LGBTI+ organizations across 2 years (2017–2018): the Danish LGBTI+ organization Sabaah, ⁴ a nation-wide organization for minority LGBTI+ people with a minority ethnic background, established 2006 in Copenhagen and organizes social, cultural, and political activities; the Norwegian Helsinki Committee (NHC), ⁵ a transnational non-governmental organization founded 1977, seeking to strengthen human rights by monitoring, writing reports, education, and supporting democratic initiatives. LGBTI+ issues are an integrated focus area across all their topics; Queer world [Skeiv verden], ⁶ a Norwegian nation-wide organization to support LGBTI+ people with minority background, established 2010. Influenced by an ambition to illuminate pluralist struggles in this context, I included these NGOs in my fieldwork because I wanted to gather material among feminist and LGBTI+ communities and initiatives who experience discrimination and express difficulties in receiving attention from state actors, news media and funders, but I also wanted to collect material with NGOs that take a more mainstream position in civil society in this context, such as Norwegian Helsinki Committee. The concept for this article was developed during a long period of time as I attended various events, workshops, conferences and meetings. The rich and long-term fieldwork encounters allowed me to develop insight into the ways in which sexuality works both to enforce and simultaneously destabilize dichotomous divides such as center/periphery, North/South, East/West (cf Liinason and Sasunkevich, 2022). In these organizations and initiatives, complexities of diasporic politics and locations and the unevenness of transnational terrains also came to the fore, as further discussed in this article. Since I wanted to receive deeper understandings of how cross-border exchanges, diasporic politics, and transnational collaborations also may contribute to reproduce imperialistic narratives of national progress, I selected material for analysis which illuminated these dimensions of the work in the organizations and that could highlight manifestations of homonationalism.

My strategy for processing and analyzing the material in this article was to conduct a contrastive analysis of the fieldwork data. Contrastive analysis involves a close reading of the material, with the goal to identify convergences and divergences (Johansson, 2007). In focus for the contrastive analysis are three events, organized by Sabaah, Queer world, respectively, NHC, taking place in 2017 and 2018: a celebration of Oslo Pride, a 1-day conference at the Danish parliament on the theme the double oppression of queer Muslims in Denmark, and a 3-day course on love and intimacy for asylum seeking LGBTI+s in Oslo. Ten in-depth interviews, carried out before and after the events, with actors involved in the events, either as organizers or as participants, are also part of the material. ⁷ I chose to include these events in this analysis because they bring forth a variety in terms of organizers and participants, types of location, and purpose, allowing me to grasp the meanings challenged and sustained in diverse contexts of interaction and negotiation around questions of LGBTI+ rights in relation to the nation. I organized the material thematically, and read each example with attention to the other examples and I highlighted overlaps and differences. I paid attention to how enactments of homonationalisms invoked a “here and now” of progressive nationalism through modes of affinity and belonging.

During fieldwork, my position in relation to the geopolitical contexts of the Scandinavian countries was looking “both from the outside in and from the inside out” (hooks 1984: vii), focusing my attention on the center as well as on the margins. Being based in Sweden, I was impregnated by a narrative of this country, and of the broader Scandinavian region, as a secular, gender-equal and LGBTI+ tolerant cluster of nations, frequently staged as a political role model for the rest of the world to follow (Puar, 2007; Keskinen et al., 2009). Informed by my structural social position as a non-migrant, queer-feminist researcher, and by my social positioning, situated in critical race and queer knowledges (Anthias, 2008; Shinozaki, 2012), I was involved in conversation with research partners about the tensions that shaped the limits and possibilities for feminist, people of color, trans* and queer lives and livabilities in Scandinavia. My work is influenced by and seeks to contribute to the knowledges produced by feminist, queer and postcolonial scholars in this context, showing that attempts for progressive nationhood are conditioned by “racialised processes, heteronormativity and cisnormativitiy” (Alm et al., 2020: 2; Keskinen et al., 2019).

Homonationalism and other exclusions in national agendas

With the goal to deepen our understandings of how exclusionary nationalist projects of LGBTI+ rights are sustained by cross-border discourses, affiliations and exchanges, this article highlights the various ways in which exclusionary forms of nationalism works to “define national (racialized) boundaries through sexual politics” (Suchland, 2018: 1073). I deploy a transnational approach to attend to the intersections of relations of power that encircle gendered and sexual politics in relation to national agendas (Bernal and Grewal, 2014), influenced by theorizations exploring linkages between queerness and the production of the nation. By coining the concept homonationalism, Jasbir Puar (2007) sought to address a kind of sexual “exceptionalism explicitly in relation to the nation” (2007: 39). Building further on Lisa Duggan’s notion of the depoliticized and privatized gay culture of homonormativity within an era of neoliberal consumerism, Puar extended this analysis to show how the narrative of progress for gay rights is contingent on the exclusion of racialized and sexualized others, as a split has appeared between the “proper, national (white) homosexuality” and “improper (colored) nonnational queerness” (2007:78) within a Post-Cold War discourse on the War on Terror. Puar shows how such forms of homonationalism are made possible through neoliberal divides where homosexuality is connected to “white racial, capital, and citizenship privilege” (2007: 128). As such, it is a result of the demarcation of a boundary between homonationalist subjects and other homosexual racial and class alliances, taking shape as a particular variant of the white liberal alibi which allow gays to disaffiliate from racism, xenophobia and nationalism in LGBTI+ communities and organizing. Such dynamics are fueled by queer liberal desires for state recognition, which ultimately become “indistinguishable from the racial and national exclusions upon which such affirmations afloat” (Puar, 2007: 128).

Since its launch, the concept homonationalism has traveled to theorize diverse geopolitical contexts throughout the globe (Puar, 2013). Some scholars suggest that the shifting meanings of the concept, away from its original US context, have diminished its critical force, as it is now being used as a more “generalized feature of imperialist formations,” losing its particular “distinctiveness” (Schotten, 2016: 352). Other scholars have used the concept of homotransnationalism to demonstrate how homonationalism in the form of an imperial gay assimilationism takes shape through universalist norms and standards on a transnational arena (Klapeer, 2017; Klapeer and Laskar, 2018), enacted by LGBTI+ NGOs and policy actors through a promotion of LGBTI+ human rights in aid policies and development strategies of NGOs on a transnational arena (Klapeer, 2017; Laskar, 2014). This article aspires to contribute to develop deeper insight into strategic modes of homonationalism, as I attend to the normative nature of rights in a Scandinavian context and to the impossible position among transnational, disasporic and refugee LGBTI+ subjects of not being able to “not want rights” (Rao, 2020). The concept strategic homonationalism allows me to explore the ambiguous ways in which the languages and requirements of state institutions are engaged with in LGBTI+ mobilizations in Scandinavia. My approach takes its departure in an understanding of homonationalism as a “structuring force of neoliberal subject formations” (Schotten, 2016: 359). I base my conceptualization on Jasbir Puar’s definition in Terrorist assemblages of three distinct but overlapping enactments of (i) queerness as biopolitical project, (ii) sexual exceptionalism in relation to the nation and (iii) the ascendancy of whiteness (2007: 2, 22, 160), as I seek to bring forth the particular ways in which these dimensions manifest in the languages and requirements of state institutions in the Scandinavian countries and how they are strategically engaged with by LGBTI+ actors. As I attend to more ambiguous forms of LGBTI+ mobilization in a Scandinavian context, I am influenced by Cynthia Weber’s “plural logics of and/or” (2016: 3), aspiring to highlight plural figures and logics that move beyond the dichotic either/or.

In what follows, I explore the un-even terrains of transnational collaboration, and the complexities of diasporic and refugee politics and locations within Scandinavian contexts of imperialistic narratives of national progress, and illuminate how homonationalist agendas may be sustained and facilitated by diverse deployments of homonationalism. To begin with, I examine how LGBTI+ desires for state recognition in Norway move across borders in transnational space to enable connections between homonational subjects in various locations. Analyzing exchanges between transnational LGBTI+ activists in Norway, I illuminate how these cross-border interactions draw a boundary to other class and racial alliances, as they locate themselves in a common destiny/destination of the gay-friendly, white nation and global forerunner. After this, I highlight how regulatory discourses of ultra-liberal-mindedness (Hansen, 2021), seemingly void of cultural, ethnic and religious attachments, impact upon LGBTI+ mobilizations in Denmark. I analyze how strategic enactments of homonationalism among diasporic politics and locations sustains a split between on the one hand, state recognition, LGBTI+ rights and racial privilege within the nation, and on the other, trans- and LGBTI+-phobic traditional and religious (i.e., Muslim) family oriented communities/cultures positioned as not part of the nation. Finally, I examine how constraining notions of the “genuine LGBTI+ refugee” (Akin, 2018) frames mobilization around LGBTI+ refugees in Norway as stigmatized or vulnerable, genuinely in need of international protection, and I bring forth the regulatory and exclusionary production and circulation of discourses around the right kind of queer, deserving immigrant and worthy asylum seeker in this context. Drawing on ethnographic data with queer and trans activists, I highlight the ways in which these actors invoke a “here and now” of progressive forms of nationalism in the Global North, which is contrasted against a conservative nationalism of the global South or East, presented as a “then and there,” already left behind. In these dynamics, as I will illuminate, the gay-friendly nation appears as the ultimate location for non-heterosexual people who emerge as a uniform community when their shared gayness erase differences in terms of race or class. Unable to “not want rights,” these actors perform a more or less strategic engagement with the languages and requirements of Norwegian and Danish state institutions, which reflects the exclusive inclusions that characterize LGBTI+ policies in this context, highlighting how notions of “normal,” respectively, “deviant” sexualities and gender identities have become part of processes of national boundary making that also stretches beyond the borders of the nation (Luibhéid, 2020; Suchland, 2018).

Strategic homonationalisms in Scandinavia

During Oslo Pride 2018, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee (NHC) organized a panel to focus on LGBTI+ struggles and solidarities in authoritarian contexts. The panel was constituted by three panelists: Alexander—a LGBTI+ activist from Armenia; Igor—a journalist from Belarus; and Elena—a LGBTI+ activist from Russia. With previous experience from transnational LGBTI+ activism, Alexander was at the time involved in various initiatives for LGBTI+ people in Armenia. Elena was the founder of a community center in Moscow, having redirected her activities from activism to community-oriented services. Self-identifying as a gay person, Igor was working as a journalist in Belarus, and actively reporting on issues relating to LGBTI+ rights within and outside of the country. Belonging to a group of professional, skilled, and middle-class LGBTI+ activists (Bernal and Grewal, 2014), the panelists represented a new professional class of NGO activists (Sassen, 2006; Alvarez, 2014; Roy, 2017), carrying precarious, short-term and project based employments in which they received “respect and prestige,” felt empowered by their activities, and commanded “a new language” of transnational gender and LGBTI work (Bernal and Grewal, 2014: 307). The chairperson was a journalist from Norway, usually working for one of the public news channels in Norway as a reporter on foreign affairs. In the introduction of the panel, the chairperson emphasized the position of Norway as a model country for LGBTI-rights. As the conversation unfolded, panel members shared their insights about the situation for gay and trans people in their home countries but also expressed some resistance against the polarized conditions of the conversation, in which Norway was pictured as a model country while their countries were framed as the “worst of the worst,” as Igor said, upon which he turned to the other panel members and asked, rhetorically “How does it feel to be put in the category of the worst of the worst?” Later in the conversation, Igor directed the attention at Norway and turned to the audience and said, “You also had to fight. I see many here who belong to the older generation who took the fight years ago. […] It’s difficult to compare [here and there].” In the panel, Alexander joined him, and said, “I would never compare or be in competition with other countries, who are the best or the worst. But you should be proud over what you have.”

After the Pride panel, I had a conversation with Sonia, staff member in NHC, the organization arranging the pride conversation. We talked about how power dynamics between countries influence transnational interactions in her organization and Sonia acknowledged that there are power dynamics between transnational NGOs and local LGBTI+ organizations, not least because transnational NGOs have money and possibility to help local organizations to secure funds which result in a problematic reproduction of existing power dynamics. She also provided a reflection on these power dynamics from her experience of working with activists in other contexts. In her reflection, she referred to a conversation between her and Elena, from the panel, and said “But… when it comes to this ‘Norway knows better,’ which is a typical view from Norway,” she said, “this is, sort of, haunting us a bit.” She continued,

I was surprised to learn how relevant [activists from other countries] find experiences from Norway to be. I asked Elena: “why do you want to spend so much time learning about the Norwegian [LGBTI+] action plan, in Russia you won’t have this?” She said: “if you are going to make a strategy, are you going to settle for half good or do you want to see how good it can be and start from there?” The Norwegian experience… they see… as relevant.

In these conversations, activists and staff members were aware of geopolitical power dynamics around gay rights, which pushed them to express a protest against this emergent competitive approach. As Alexander emphasized, he disagrees with the idea of national comparison and would never contribute to it. Still, he acknowledged feelings of pride over national agendas in the context of gay rights. Igor highlighted that previously, also Norwegians had to fight for gay rights. Simultaneously, while contributions to the panel put a strong focus on recognition by the state, they disregarded the problematic ways in which recognition of LGBTI+ people intersect with racial, class and citizenship privileges in national contexts. Refraining from addressing the existence of racism, xenophobia and nationalism within queer communities, their desires for recognition were ambiguous, simultaneously rejecting national pride over queerness and adopting queerness as national pride. Similar ambiguous dynamics were underlined in Sonia’s recollection of her conversation with Elena from the panel, where Norway was both rejected and appointed as the role model for others to follow. ⁸

In all Scandinavian countries, gender and sexual rights are promoted as a part of a liberal ideology at the core of the national and regional self-understanding (Laskar, 2014; Klapeer, 2017; Breiding, 2021; Akin 2018). Having been described as a moral super power (Nilsson, 1991) and a harmonious cluster of nations, associated with “development aid, peace building and cooperation” (Keskinen et al., 2009, 16), the contemporary positionings of the Scandinavian countries connect with previous attempts at protecting human rights globally and take shape through the drawing of a boundary between a homotolerant “us” as part of a liberal democratic North/West and a homophobic “them,” represented by the global South and East. In neoliberal times, these positionings allow Norway, and other Scandinavian governments, to use discourses of human rights and gender and sexual equality in attempts to exercise dominance over seemingly less gender-equal or homotolerant countries or regions globally (Liinason, 2018). Simultaneously, within these national contexts, a growing resistance to migration is expressed, through discourses pointing out cultural tensions between immigrants and the national community and society. In Denmark and Norway, this discourse has emerged into a wide spread rhetoric which describes immigrants as intolerant of same-sex sexualities and trans rights. As a result, the homonational positionings of these countries take shape on both transnational and subnational levels: on the one hand, reproducing geopolitical hierarchies between the Global North, South and East, and on the other, constructing divisions between LGBTI+ people and immigrants within the country.

The transnational exchanges between the panel members in the Oslo pride panel illustrated complex negotiations around notions of progress and geopolitical comparison. Panelists and NGO-members simultaneously distanced themselves against ideas of Norway as a gay-friendly nation state, and embraced them. However, above all, when Norway was contrasted against another culture, nation or community, in this case in the Global East, framed as deeply trans- and homophobic, the gay-friendly nation emerged as the final destiny/destination for LGBTI+ people who, in the process, took shape as a uniform community through varying intersections of non-heterosexuality, non-binarism, whiteness and middle-classness. By highlighting the benefits of Norway as a gay-friendly national state and expressing a desire for a similar biopolitical regulation of queerness, panelists reiterated a particular Scandinavian variant of sexual exceptionalism within which sexual rights are shaped as a core part of the national self-understanding and moral mission globally (Klapeer and Laskar, 2018). Yet, these statements about national pride and being a role model for other countries to follow, could only make sense because differences in terms of race, ethnicity and class were erased and because of the lack in recognizing racism, islamophobia, xenophobia and exclusionary/neo-assimilatory forms of nationalism in the Scandinavian context (Puar, 2007; Keskinen et al., 2019).

As highlighted in the recollection of Sonia about the great interest for the Norwegian LGBTI+ action plan among Russian activists, the exchanges above also visualized that progress- and rescue narratives not necessarily are restricted to travel in only one direction, that is, from the global North/West, to the global South/East, but that the directions of such narratives can be multiple. In the discussion above, such progress- and rescue narratives were not only created through the construction of Norway as a queer haven by the chairperson’s insistence on Norway as a model country, but also through references from Elena, who saw the Norwegian experience as “relevant” and wanted to use this in order to start from “how good it can be.” Indeed, traveling from the global North to the East/South, and from the global East to the North, as illuminated above, such multi-directional flows, might even be facilitated by cross-border exchanges: if Sonia initially expressed skepticism to reproducing a progress narrative of Norway, when a similar narrative was brought to the conversation by Elena, the narrative changed its valence and could be re-narrated, after a de-tour through a fellow activist based in Russia.

Strategic homonationalism in-between positionings

Similar ambiguities were expressed in the event “På tværs og imellem” [“Across and in-between”] organized by Sabaah in 2017 and held at the Danish parliament in Christiansborg. ⁹ This event, a hearing with politicians, was organized to spread new insight on the topic of LGBTI+ migrants in Denmark. Adria, a queer and trans Muslim of color with a migrant background, based in Denmark and staff member of Sabaah, gave an introductory talk at the conference. Adria explained that queer Muslims experience a double oppression because they are located between two cultures: one strongly oriented around the community of the family and one strongly individualistic in the Danish culture. The speaker explained that “this position of in-between-ness which many queer new-Danes find themselves located within is important to recognize in order to shape a more inclusive culture.” While highlighting that queer migrants experience racist exclusion in Denmark, Adria emphasized that LGBTI+ new Danes also need to fight trans- and homophobia in their ethnic communities. Guided by an ambition to broaden the awareness of multiple forms of oppression, Adria highlighted the existence of intersecting power relations based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality. By so doing, they expressed a critique of a split between proper national white homosexual subjects and improper colored queerness, and referred to a division between queer and race within a broader context of the War on Terror, recognizable from a US-based homonational agenda in which gay rights are posited against the rights of Muslims and/or people of color (Puar, 2007). Adria also installed a new division—one where the Muslim community was described as family oriented, religious, trans- and homophobic and presented as not belonging to the Danish nation—and another where gay rights were attached to whiteness and Danish national secular belonging. When producing such a division, Adria reinforced transnational discourses in the global North/West, of Islam as the “quintessential ’other’”, meanwhile linkages between gender and sexual rights and privileges of white citizenship in Denmark were downplayed, and Muslim communities were defined as not part of Denmark (Bracke, 2011: 29; Haritaworn, 2015), staging a divide between gender and sexuality (anti-trans and anti-gay religious Muslim communities) and race (the white, Danish secular, gay- and trans-friendly national community).

While in the example of the panel during Oslo pride, homonational positioning took shape through ambiguous desires for state recognition and feelings of pride over the ways in which queerness has become part of the Norwegian nation—attachments which were made coherent through the absence of attention to racism and islamophobia—during Sabaah’s event, by contrast, questions of racism and Islamophobia were located at the center. Yet, although these exchanges recognized the double oppression of queer Muslims, they simultaneously reiterated a Scandinavian homonational agenda of linking trans- and homotolerance to Danish national affiliation, while Muslim communities, in return, were constructed as trans- and homophobic. Here, the migrant queer was located in a victimized position in-between Muslim ethnicized culture and Danish whiteness and nationality. Through these moves, the queer Muslims were both recognized as object-victims in the need of help and rejected from the national community, which was built around whiteness and exclusionary national belonging.

Informed by a broader ambition to increase the knowledge among Danish politicians of multiple forms of oppression, Adria’s speech reflected a dichotomous division between Danish/national/modern trans- and homotolerance and Muslim/familial/traditional trans- and homophobia in Denmark. While this dichotomy seemed to rely on the exclusion of the group of queer Muslims whom Adria themself was spokesperson for—a diverse group of very mixed backgrounds in Sabaah—it is possible to begin to unpack this ambiguous positioning as a form of strategic homonationalism, as a strategic use of the norms shaping homonationalism in Denmark, to destabilize or unsettle the requirements and discourses of nation-building.

As the result of its support of LGBTI+ freedom and rights, the Danish government presents the Danish nation as a global forerunner, as exceptional and as “the first country in the world” that has appointed certain rights for LGBTI+ people (Regeringen, 2018; Liinason and Cuesta, 2018; Hansen, 2018). In this context, the Danish government has established a particular kind of liberal-mindedness, based on a view of human nature in which one is an individual prior to any religious and cultural norms and traditions. This express a moralistic view on human rights-discourses that also are taken up by LGBTI+ organizations and actors in civil society (Hansen, 2021). While sanctioning the open and fully realized LGBTI+ person, this national standpoint defines those who do not subscribe to this liberal-minded view on human nature as non-members in the national community. Recognizing ethnic minority LGBTI+ people as the most vulnerable sub-group, particularly those who come from “environments and families characterized by […] strong traditional family patterns and norms” (Regeringen, 2018: 13–14), the government specifically attributes notions of culture, tradition and religion to ethnic minority constituents and “especially Muslim LGBT-persons [who] are being exposed to violence and social control” (Minister of Equality quoted in Hansen, 2021: 66). Here, proper LGBTI+ subjectivity emerges as a subjectivity disconnected with the culture, tradition and religion that characterizes ethnic minority communities, ready to merge with the liberal-minded subjectivity of the majoritized (white), nation-born Danish citizen.

As a kind of mimicry performance (Bhabha, 1994), it is possible to approach Adria’s speech as a strategic homonationalism (Lind, 2010), as an ambiguous, critical engagement with the language and requirement of the Danish government and its desire for white ascendancy in the global North/West (Klapeer, 2017; Bacchetta and Haritaworn, 2011). When focusing on “what work” such strategic homonationalism does (Hemmings and Treacher Kabesh, 2013), the broader structures and social relations that frame the (im)possibilities for LGBTI+ Muslims in Denmark can be grasped. Since 2010, Sabaah had been receiving economical support from the municipality of Copenhagen, a support which was renewed in 2015, and by the end of 2018 were about to expire. With the event in Christiansborg in 2017, Sabaah could showcase the importance of their work for Danish politicians by presenting Queer Muslims as exposed to a double oppression and by affirming a particular Danish mode of homonationalism, as described above. Later the same fall, Sabaah announced on their website that the support of 2, 4 million DKK to the organization had been renewed for another 5 years, and the document presenting the decision at Copenhagen municipality gives the very same motivation as a basis for the renewed funding as the description presented during the event in Christiansborg, ¹⁰ that is, that Queer Muslims belong to a “double minority […] with another ethnic background than Danish.” Such forms of strategic homonationalism highlight the complexities of diasporic politics and locations, and direct our attention to the normative and regulatory nature of rights and to the ambiguity of not being able to “not want rights” (Rao, 2020; Weber, 2016). These enactments could possibly, potentially, challenge the exclusionary liberal-minded individualism of Danish homonationalism. Nonetheless, above all, this example highlights how, in the Danish context, mainstream, xenophobic discourses highlight tensions between immigrants and the national community. Defined as intolerant of LGBTI+ rights, immigrants are pitted against LGBTI+ people, while LGBTI+ people are subsumed into the nation. In contrast to a US narrative of progress for gay rights, in which LGBTI+ rights are posited against the rights of Muslims and/or people of color (Puar, 2007), this Scandinavian version of homonationalism builds on a morally superior, liberally progressive, inclusion into the national community, enabled by exclusion of culture, race, ethnicity, and religion from the nation, depicting ethnic and religious minorities as morally inferior.

Sexuality and citizenship

Ambiguous positionings in relation to queer desires for state recognition were also expressed in a 3-day workshop on sexuality and intimacy for LGBTI+ people with minority background organized by Queer world in Norway 2017. I participated in the course within the frames of my research on transnational feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Scandinavia, Turkey, and Russia. As a researcher, I was situated in a framework highly critical of the inclusion of gender and sexual rights as part of national agendas and narratives of progress, understanding these as expressions of imperialism (Grewal, 2005). From this departure, my research was located in an ambition to understand better how discourses of power and relations of domination are made possible, how critique is made impossible, but also to illuminate the many pluralist struggles that exist at the margins of these. I had been collaborating with Queer world during approximately 3–4 months before the workshop and were given permission to attend the course in the dual role as researcher and course participant. In the course, I presented myself as both participant and researcher. During the days, I developed professional friendships with some workshop participants, whom I continued to have contact with long after the ending of the workshop.

In the course, there were 16 participants in ages between 16 and 45 years. Most were men, three were women and four did not identify as either male or female, they also did not explicitly identify as trans but wanted to be called by their name or ”they.” One identified as genderqueer. Most course participants were migrants who had arrived more or less recently to Norway as refugees from a large variety of countries in Southeast Asia, Middle East and North Africa region, Eastern Africa and Eastern Europe. During the course, no-one said anything explicitly about experiences of racism, but it was expressed through subtler comments, for example, when one course participant of color mentioned that they were excluded from a group of friends because they “looked different.” During the days of the course, many said that they liked to live in Norway because they were “allowed to be homosexual persons here,” as they explained it. When I asked Manuel, staff member of the organization, who was born and raised in a country in Latin America and moved to Norway in the early 2000s to live with his partner, if he had experienced any racism in Norway, he told me he had not. But he told me that migrants who are looking for employment in Norway encounter difficulties and he had himself started a company of his own because he had experienced similar difficulties. Manuel described that for him, the most important issue was to be able to hold his partner in the hand or kiss him in the city without being afraid of assault. In Norway, he said, this is possible and that is why he loves Norway. In the course, I also spoke with Abra. Abra was taking up university studies in Oslo and worked part time in a bar in evenings and weekends. We met for an interview after the course. In this meeting, Abra explained that:

In Norway, I am positioned as a person from Syria. But I identify more as Norwegian than Syrian. I have made an effort to integrate in the society. Syria was given to me, I was born there. In Norway, I have my rights, it makes me feel that I am part of Norway.

Abra said that his family who still is in Syria knows that he is gay, and they are on good terms, but that his family does not recognize his sexuality. In his understanding, a family are people who can accept him, and he concluded that he “felt more free since [my family] are three continents away.” In our conversation, Abra emphasized his commitment to the rights given to him by the nation, as a recognition from the state, which he put into contrast with the lack of such recognition from his family. By feeling close to the rights and freedoms in Norway, and a distance to his family, Abra expressed his freedom through a spatial thinking, invoking a queer-positive “here,” where sexual rights are part of the national agenda, posited against a queer-negative and -ambivalent “there.”

Later, I carried out an interview with Mandu from the course. Mandu came to Norway from Iran due to political reasons. He did not leave Iran because he was gay, but his family did not accept his homosexuality. At the time of the interview, Mandu lived with his partner in a regional city in the southern part of Norway, and had no contact with his family in Iran. This was because of disagreements around religiosity: “they are Muslim and I am atheist.” When we talked about Norway, Mandu explained,

As Iranian, I have the same rights in Norway as a Norwegian. Migrants have rights in Norway. If there is a problem with integration of migrants in Norway, that is not a Norwegian problem, that’s a problem for the migrants.

My conversation with Mandu and Abra contained many aspects. Here, however, I want to specifically highlight dimensions that can contribute to develop a better understanding of the ways in which sexuality intersects with national belongings, state agendas and processes of migration and racialization and shed light on the impossible position of LGBTI+ refugees within these modes of governmentality.

Norway has become internationally famous for marketing sexual freedom and LGBTI+ tolerance as a defining feature of the nation, recognized not least through its homodevelopmentalist agendas in international contexts (Klapeer, 2017: 51). Simultaneously, within the country, a rhetoric describing migrants as intolerant of sexual diversity is growing strong, accompanying an increasingly vocalized resistance to immigration. Within this frame, scholars show, there is a discursive construction of “genuine LGBTI+ refugees,” expected to appear as vulnerable victims, in need of international protection (Akin, 2018; Svendsen, 2014). These frames of recognizability for LGBTI+ refugees in Norway are shaped by the “asylum caseworkers, law, and the asylum seekers” together (Akin, 2018: 31), as they define and delimit the asylum accounts that are to be rendered true. Deniz Akin highlights the role of the lobbying efforts of LGBTI+ actors in civil society, exercised by equal rights advocacy and activist organizations which, in combination with homonationalist state agendas, reiterate sexual rights as a “constitutive feature of Western nationalities.” (2018: 29). These dynamics are the result of a shift in Norway, from an earlier focus on modes of LGBTI+ conduct, to the contemporary focus on the “right kind of LGBTI+ identity,” which is a display of vulnerability and victimization. This presents a person who is worthy of protection and who appears as a genuine LGBTI person (Akin, 2018; Svendsen, 2014). These developments feed into modes of being LGBTI+ more broadly and produces a monolithic narrative of sexualized and racialized asylum seekers specifically, building barriers to those whose claims are deemed as unrecognizable configurations of sexuality.

In relation to such expectations of genuineness, course participants took different positionings. While some kept a pragmatic and/or strategic attitude in relation to it, others were more critical, yet others expressed feelings of distress and anxiety. Abra and Mandu maintained that in Norway, they are given rights as gay persons and as migrants which makes them feel like they are a part of Norway and belong to the national community. In the interview excerpts, belonging to the Norwegian community was seen to require a foregrounding of gayness and a downplaying of racial or ethnic difference, and individual efforts to become proper citizens who deserves recognition from the state involved a fight for not only becoming legible but also desirable as prospective citizen (Akin, 2017; Shakhsari, 2014). Abra and Mandu’s different but interlinked narratives illuminated the multiple directions of homonational travel and its multi-scalar nature, showing that homonationalism is not only shaped from the state towards subjects, but also from subjects toward the state, by strategic expressions of attachment to the language and requirement of state institutions and to sexual rights as a national project (Bell and Binnie, 2000; Oswin, 2008; Mizieli'nska, 2018). One more dimension of Abra’s and Mandu’s enactments was located on the interpersonal scale, and reflected my own positioning, as the statements they presented to me raised a question around if or why they recognized me as someone they needed to present such a “genuine” status in relation to.

An acknowledgment of a discursively constructed genuineness among LGBTI+ refugees does not attempt to underestimate the multiple human rights abuses encountered by sexual minorities, but is developed based on an ambition to illuminate and challenge the exclusionary aspects of how such genuineness is distributed (Akin, 2018). It urges us to pay attention to the production and circulation of hierarchical and exclusionary discourses around the right kind of queer, deserving immigrants, worthy asylum seekers and healthy sexualities (Klapeer, 2017; Kehl, 2018). Within this complex situation, strategic deployments of the languages and requirements of state institutions, illuminate the uneven terrains of LGBTI+ activist collaborations at the borders of the nation, and shines a light on the very complicated politics involved in inhabiting the impossible position of not being able to “not want rights.”

Concluding discussion

This article has reworked homonationalism, as a concept that emerges in the USA, to illuminate the multi-directional travels of homonationalism, as it is picked up in and shaped by diverse actors situated in multiple located sites. The analysis demonstrated how homonationalism in a Scandinavian context takes shape through a moralistically superior position, and showed how homonationalism in this context is expressed through a narrative of sexual and gendered freedom, contingent on the exclusion or denigration of culture, race, ethnicity, and religion within a context of resistance to immigration. As highlighted in the discussion, both Denmark and Norway presented themselves as gay-friendly nations through state recognition and gay rights within the nation, a narrative that was built on the exclusion of ethnic and religious minorities as morally inferior. In Denmark these were contrasted against trans- and homophobic traditional and religious (i.e., Muslim) family oriented communities/cultures, not part of the nation. In Norway, a requirement on genuineness displayed through expressions of vulnerability and victimization produced the nation as a protective space. Yet, this was conditioned on the performance of LGBTI+ subjects as worthy of protection.

As discussed in this article, within these contexts, privileges of sexual citizenship, class, and whiteness were maintained by cross-border exchanges, at the same time as a border to other class and racial alliances were drawn. I highlighted that rescue narratives need to be recognized as flowing in multiple directions across the globe, facilitated by material and discursive cross-border exchanges, rather than being restricted to travel in one direction only. Within this context, a strategic deployment of homonationalism opened up for possibilities to unsettle the exclusions of national agendas from the impossible position of not being able to “not want rights.”

Within these contexts of homonationalism, the promotion of trans’ and gay rights as national projects remain double-edged, as such projects entwine with national discourses on gender and sexuality that code “race and class in sexual terms” (Ticktin, 2008: 165). On the one hand, these discourses result in obstacles for trans and queer people who refuse to reiterate such exclusionary tropes and who may experience difficulties in mobilizing the attention of the so called trans- or gay-friendly state in the global North/West (Luibhéid, 2018; Shakhsari, 2014). On the other hand, when gender and sexuality are made key elements to guard the borders of the modern nation of the global North, various homonationalist projects use discourses of gender and sexuality to re-draw the “material and symbolic belongings” to the nation (Bracke, 2011). Given the multiple directions of attachments and affiliations in such efforts, I propose the need to attend to more systemic understandings of racialization and national belongings in analyzes of the making of sexualized and/or gendered difference, in analyses of multiple, context-specific as well as border-crossing forms of power.