Beyond Neoliberal LGBTQI Politics: On Duplicities, Challenges & Hope For Change
By Chamindra Weerawardhana –February 17, 2017
Dr. Chamindra Weerawardhana
In Sri Lanka, the LGBTIQ community – or many segments of that community – has come together last week to stand against the decision of the President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka to ‘bin’ a provision to ensure equality and justice to all citizens irrespective of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. The most recent collective action happened to be a press conference held in Colombo, attended by academics, legal experts, and most importantly, LGBTIQ people, with an intersectional representation of trans women, Trans men, cis gay women and men. This press conference, perhaps the first of its kind, included statements made in the local languages and in English, and was represented by LGBTIQ citizens of Sri Lanka who campaign fiercely for equality and justice, who, like this writer, travel with Sri Lankan passports, and have their feet on Sri Lankan soil.
This is of tremendous importance, in a world in which LGBTIQ rights are often deployed by powerful neoliberal Western governments and supranational bodies as a means of coercing governments in the global South, in dubious efforts to promote Western agendas, and in some cases, to topple democratically elected governments and coercively facilitate regime change operations. Similarly, LGBTIQ rights are also deployed as a means of upholding erroneously construed invasive agendas and in some cases, in justifying the oppression of minorities. The case in point of such ‘pinkwashing’ is the State of Israel. The work of organisations such as Al-Qaws, Mosaic and many other individual activists across the Middle East has been absolutely crucial in challenging Zionist pinkwashing as a strategy of continuing the shameless oppression of the Palestinian people.
The Obama administration: pinkwashing as foreign policy?
Yet another case in point of pinkwashing was the Obama administration. The White House website under that administration even had a page entitled ‘President Obama and the LGBT community’. Domestically, it was an extremely laudable approach. Indeed, the Obama presidency took unprecedented measures in promoting LGBTIQ rights in the USA, supporting marriage equality and standing in solidarity with the Transgender community. Towards the latter part of the Obama presidency, very important steps were taken to protect the Trans community from rising hatred, on matter as trivial as using public rest rooms. However, the same administration continued its policy of cooperation with the State of Israel, and despite very subtle and distant commitments to the ‘two-state’ solution, was never prepared to advocate a clear stance on the matter. When the UN decided to take action, this earned the Obama administration’s wrath. Similarly, close relations with extremely anti-LGBTIQ governments such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar continued unhindered. The plight of Palestinian LGBTIQ people, Yemeni LGBTIQ people, Lebanese LGBTIQ people were all of zero interest to the Obama administration when it launched fierce and destructive wars in these countries, with the plain and simply objective of advancing its strategic and natural-resource controller-economic interests.
Exposing the cracks: the Jennicet Guiérrez intervention
These duplicities were also apparent in the domestic sphere. At the 2015 White House Pride reception, Jennicet Gutiérrez, a committed activist especially for the rights of undocumented and incarcerated LGBTQI people of colour (and very especially trans people of colour), interrupted President Obama at the White House Pride reception. President Obama was very irate, and ordered security to escort Jennicet out. She was not invited for the 2016 Pride reception. However, the 2016 reception included a large number of prominent Trans people, all of them doing excellent work, but none of them were of the ilk that strongly provides a ‘voice for the voiceless’ and the marginalised. Jennicet’s case is a fine example of the duplicities inherent in the Obama administration’s neoliberal LGBTQI rights agenda. As it promoted and supported equal marriage, it ignored the plight of many hundreds of thousands of LGBTQI migrants and undocumented people, people held in incarceration under appalling conditions within the prison-industrial complex, and many hundreds of LGB and Trans/Queer people of colour, especially Trans women of colour, who continued to experience poverty, violence and brutal murder. Cases such as that of late Islan Nettles come to mind, and LGBTIQ people of colour represent a demographic who, to a large extent, continued to ‘not’ benefit from the dividends of a neoliberal pro-LGBTIQ policy agenda. Besides, the unsustainability of this policy approach, repeatedly highlighted by people such as Jennicet and many other activists, has been proven crystal-clearly by the elephant in the room – the Trump phenomenon. The Democratic Party hierarchy’s resolve to prevent Senator Sanders from progressing to the presidential candidacy was the strongest proof of its myopic commitment to domestically and internationally destructive neoliberal politics. The low inclination in that political fold to develop a new approach that corresponded to the challenges of the times is what resulted in the most unprecedented rise in neoconservative politics, in the form of Donald Trump and his endorsers.
