Transnational LGBTQ+ Networks in Europe and the Americas

Enriching our understanding of transnational networks and advocacy forged and sustained by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, this open access collection offers keen insights into sites and expressions of LGBTQ+ identity and community, highlights transnational efforts to challenge homophobia and assesses why such efforts have succeeded in some places and failed in others.

Exploring the complexity of transnational processes, contributors question and contextualize how groups outside the North Atlantic, English-speaking, and Germanic cultural spheres accessed, mediated, and appropriated Anglo-American, Canadian, Swiss, and Scandinavian queer liberationist ideologies and practices. Tracing the ways in which queer ideas, activists and publications followed traditional flows of knowledge and trade through established regional and colonial circuits it shows how ideas, people, forms of resistance and activism flowed back and forth between countries and places at different times. Taking relations between countries, places and groups as its point of departure, this book challenges the methodological nationalism that is so common in this field, showing how LGBTQ+ movements developed in transnational virtual and practical networks, complicating progress narratives and illustrating how and why moves toward LGBT+ equality are incremental and sometimes reversed.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Virginia Tech, USA.

Laura A. Belmonte is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, USA. A specialist in the history of U.S. foreign relations, she is the author of The International LGBT Movement (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Peter Edelberg is Teaching Associate Professor of History at University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Víctor M. Macías-González is Professor of History and Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Faculty Fellow for Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA.