Arqus marks Pride Day with a reflection by researcher Luca Trappolin: A return to the protest of its origins?

Every 28 June, Pride Day is celebrated as a moment to recognise the history, resilience and ongoing struggles of LGBTQIA+ communities around the world. It is also an opportunity to reflect on the role of universities in promoting equality, combating discrimination, fostering equal opportunities and supporting diversity within the European Higher Education Area.

In this context, Luca Trappolin, Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology (FiSPPA) at the University of Padua, explores the evolving meaning of Pride and its relationship with its origins as a movement of protest and activism. As Deputy Director of the University Centre “Elena Cornaro” on Gender Studies, Cultures and Policies, Trappolin has dedicated his research to LGBTQI+ mobilisations, the social construction of homo-transphobia, violence against LGBTQI+ people, and non-heteronormative family and parenting practices.

In his article “Pride Day Today: A Return to the Protest of Its Origins?”, he examines whether contemporary Pride celebrations are reconnecting with the political demands and activist spirit that shaped the movement from its beginnings.

We hope you enjoy the reading!

Pride Day Today: A Return to the Protest of Its Origins?

The current historical conjuncture in many Western countries is characterised by a renewed hostility towards sexual and gender difference, legitimised by the politics of nationalist right-wing parties occupying central positions within structures of governance. The rhetoric of opposition to the so-called gender ideology has proved, in this respect, a highly effective strategy, deployed by political leaders to disseminate alarm concerning the manifold risks purportedly arising from the notion that gender and sexuality are social constructs independent of any foundation in nature. Concurrently, at the international level, inter-state relations are increasingly shaped by the expansionist ambitions of superpowers, which demonstrate no compunction in violating human rights, employing military force to invade territories and imposing their own hegemonic visions.

Do these two factors bear upon the forms and meanings of the events and mobilisations occurring during Pride Days? We hypothesise that the answer is affirmative.

We know that, over time, the mobilisations of LGBTQI+ organisations and individuals have achieved significant levels of institutional recognition, giving rise to single-issue commemorations celebrated internationally. Examples of this include the establishment of the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR), observed annually on 20 November to commemorate the victims of hostility against transgender and non-binary individuals; the more recent – and less widely observed – Transgender Day of Visibility (TDoV), held on 31 March and dedicated to celebrating the pride of transgender and non-binary individuals; and the better known – and more broadly recognised – International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), observed on 17 May to commemorate the depathologisation – achieved at different historical junctures – of homosexuality and transsexuality.

Yet we also know that none of these commemorations has diminished the significance of Pride Month celebrations. During the various Pride Days held in June, contemporary claims reconnect with the “founding myth” – the Stonewall Inn uprising in New York on the night of 27/28 June 1969 – which symbolically represents the most significant political and cultural rupture in LGBTQI+ mobilisations: that which marks the transition from the homophile organisations’ demand for tolerance despite sexual and gender difference, to a struggle for the recognition of the positive and transformative value of such difference. The significance of Pride Day is thus rooted in the interpretation of pride as an act of political resistance against the structures that dictate the norms to which bodies, desires, and relationships are expected to conform.

From the early 1970s onwards, Pride celebrations have expanded enormously, both quantitatively and qualitatively. From a quantitative standpoint, the approximately 1,000 activists who gathered in New York in 1970 to commemorate the Stonewall events of the previous year have been progressively joined by hundreds of thousands of individuals — activists and supporters from outside the community — across a great number of cities and countries on every continent. From a qualitative standpoint, Pride celebrations have benefited from the broadening of the subjectivities — no longer exclusively gay and lesbian individuals, but also bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people — that give voice to such political resistance and articulate protest in accordance with the specificities of the context in which it takes shape.

The international diffusion of LGBTQI+ Pride celebrations has undoubtedly contributed to eroding the front of hostility against non-heterosexual and non-cisnormative individuals, even in contexts where sexual and gender differences remain institutionally unrecognised, or are indeed actively opposed. Nevertheless, particularly in Western contexts, the popularity achieved by Pride Day has also produced negative effects. On the one hand, the attainment of considerable successes in terms of public policy has generated processes of normalisation and depoliticisation of LGBTQI+ identities, in which the logics of individualisation and the demands of the market become increasingly prominent. This operates entirely to the advantage of those subjects who, by virtue of occupying dominant positions along other axes of social stratification, are able to interpret their own sexual and gender difference by reducing it to a matter of private life. For this reason, within the LGBTQI+ community, dissonant voices have emerged in the new century, expressed by racialised subjects, individuals with diverse gender expressions, and the materially deprived, who denounce the neoliberal and homo/cisnormative drift of Pride Day celebrations. On the other hand, demands for protection from violence and discrimination — and the implementation of corresponding policies — risk accentuating the stigmatisation of groups that, for cultural, religious, ethnic, or social class reasons, are deemed particularly hostile. In this way, one enters the complex terrain of inter-minority conflict (where the defence of one minority translates into an attack upon another), which favours the implementation of anti-migrant policies and, more broadly, the diffusion of homonationalist rhetorics claiming the primacy of the West. It is no coincidence that, during many Pride Days in the early years of the new century, mobilisations took place in defence of the victims of homo-transphobia in non-Western countries, or in protection of LGBTQI+ individuals with a migrant background from the risks of victimisation associated with the cultures in which they had been socialised.     

It is precisely upon these negative effects that the current historical period may exert a positive influence. In Western countries, the centrality assumed by political forces explicitly hostile to LGBTQI+ demands – particularly towards transgender individuals – has revealed the precariousness of the results achieved through the privatisation of sexual and gender differences. From this perspective, Pride Days in recent years have evidenced a recompacting of the LGBTQI+ community and its allies, and a return to the reading of Pride as a political act of resistance against hetero/cisnormative structures and the pitfalls of rainbow washing. Dissonant voices within the community have not disappeared, but have found a window of opportunity for the construction of strategic alliances with more affluent subjects that, until a few years ago, would have seemed unlikely. At the same time, wars of invasion and occupation on an international scale have brought complex issues back to the centre of Pride, such as the defence of populations victimised by sovereigntist imperialism. Although these remain deeply contested matters – as evidenced by the conflicts surrounding the presence of Jewish LGBTQI+ organisations at Pride events – they impel Pride to move beyond a quasi-ethnic approach to sexual and gender difference, triggering debates on the transversality of domination and the corresponding struggles for social justice.