In celebration of Pride Month, this Politics & Gender virtual special issue highlights research on LGBTQIA+ politics across distinct regional contexts. This selection of articles reflects the contributions of this scholarship to our understanding of the political world, encouraging us to consider how gender identities and sexuality shape and influence representation, social movements, activism, political beliefs and behaviors, and access to rights. Importantly, many of the pieces below also address the backlash against queer individuals, groups, and policies.
The first group of articles focuses on dimensions of LGBTQIA+ political representation. Quinn M. Albaugh, Elizabeth Baisley, and Kate Burke Pellizzari find that queer cis women and transgender and nonbinary candidates are particularly disadvantaged in terms of campaign finance, shaping their likelihood of being elected in Canada. In a further article, Quinn Albaugh and Elizabeth Baisley explore how lesbian leaders are evaluated by women and LGBTQIA+ people, finding affinity effects in terms of support but not necessarily in terms of vote choice.
Hanna K. Brant centers queer women in cisheteropatriarchal institutions, using the example of US legislatures, and considers how hostile environments can lead to negative outcomes for both substantive and descriptive representation. Looking at the cases of Germany and the Netherlands, Anne Louise Schotel and Liza Mügge find that increased visibility of trans identities does not always directly translate into equality. Trans representation calls for symbolic representation to the extent that it contributes to descriptive and substantive representation.
The second set of articles analyze social movements, activism, and public policy. Zein Murib reflects on how the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 has challenged the traditional policy strategies employed by LGBTQIA+ movements in the U.S. Analyzing data from 173 countries between 2000 and 2021, Myles Williamson finds strong evidence that transgender rights are lower in countries with more religious populations, and where policymakers consult more often with religious organizations on policy issues.
In a comparative analysis of the U.S., the UK, South Africa, and Australia, Christopher Pepin-Neff and Thomas Wynter investigate the affective costs of LGBTQIA+ pride on activists. They show that levels of emotional taxation vary among activists, with nonwhite, young, and transgender people carrying the heaviest burdens. Helping explain such dynamics, Caterina Nirta theorizes transgender subjectivity as being in constant search of an acceptable compromise beyond medical and political categories.
The last group of articles addresses attempts to curb progress through violence and backlash against LGBTQIA+ rights. Heath G. Fogg-Davis analyzes the political vulnerability of Black lesbians through the lens of street harassment as a form of sexual terrorism. M. McLoughlin maps the contradictory coalition of anti-trans feminists and anti-trans traditionalists that have coalesced into a transnational anti-trans network against transgender rights.
Zein Murib observes how political scientists have struggled to study anti-gender backlash, especially against trans people, due to disciplinary tendencies to root gender in relation to biological sex. Jo Wuest centers conflicts over transgender bathroom rights to show how the LGBTQIA+ movement has come to rely on biodeterminism, also employed in conservative discourse, to legitimate transgender identities.