Szulc, Ł. orcid.org/0000-0003-3936-2933 (2022) Uncanny Europe and protective Europeanness: when European identity becomes a queerly viable option. Sociology, 56 (2). pp. 386-403. ISSN 0038-0385
Abstract
Europe has recently become closely associated with LGBTQ rights. It remains unclear, however, what is the role of this association in everyday European imaginations and identifications. Empirical research on European identity hardly ever discusses the role of LGBTQ rights. Nor do we know much about European identifications of LGBTQ people themselves. In this article, I address those gaps from the perspective of Polish LGBTQs in the UK. Drawing on 30 interviews from a recent two-year research project, I discuss my participants’ European imaginations and identifications by developing the concepts of ‘uncanny Europe’ and ‘protective Europeanness’. I show how my participants tend to view Europe as ‘diverse’, ‘open’ and ‘tolerant’, while attributing those characteristics exclusively to Western Europe. I also demonstrate that they tend to readily identify as European in the context of increasingly hostile national identities, with the increasing anti-Polish xenophobia in the UK and growing anti-LGBTQ discrimination in Poland.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | Brexit; Central and Eastern Europe; European identity; Fortress Europe; LGBTQ; Polish migration; protective Europeanness; Rainbow Europe; transnationalism; uncanny Europe |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number European Commission 699745-FACELOOK-MSCA-IF-EF-ST |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 May 2022 10:56 |
Last Modified: | 18 May 2022 10:56 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/00380385211024117 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:186864 |