Excerpt from an Interview with Colin Robinson, Trinidadian gay rights activist
Has the spread of Western GBLT politics impacted your local organizing?
Hello!? Many in T&Tâs GLBT communities are quite enamoured of the visible manifestations of North American or European GLBT political advocacy, see these forms as the standard to emulate, against which local performance should be judged, and show limited imagination about how to practise an indigenous politics on sexual orientation and gender identity. And recently Christian Right homophobia has begun to target the Caribbean and Trinidad & Tobago specifically.
However, the most dangerous impact of the âspreadâ of Western GBLT politics is not that certain understandings and assumptions about how GLBT politics is practised in the North are being exported to us. The larger danger instead is that ideas about how GLBT politics should be practised in the Global South, quite differently from in the North, and related ideas about political conditions in the South, are being conceived in, and spread from, the North. This queer internationalism makes the Global South an important target of Global North GLBT concerns â and fundraising; codifies differences in âfreedomâ between North and South, representing one as advanced and the other as primitive; and positions the North in a missionary relationship and one of pity with regard to the South. This has especially been the case with the Caribbean, shaped by internationalist activism over Jamaica (which has been represented ridiculously as âthe most homophobic place on earthâ), and the larger region, therefore, as a place of homophobic darkness.
The emergence, with the formation of IGLHRC two decades ago, of human rights as a dominant paradigm for GLBT advocacy outside the Global North has also imposed on our organizing in the South an expectation of transnational struggle and the deployment of international human rights authorities and frameworks â neither of which are common in GLBT politics in the Global North, where the discourse is one of citizenship and the engagements are political and national or local in nature. Because of the assumptions that civil and political rights frameworks are weak, enlightened governance is not yet achieved, and GLBT communities are relatively powerless in Global South states, there is the expectation that GLBT liberation politics will rely on external advocates and look for moral authority to international covenants and arbitrating bodies rather than engaging in domestic political work. Combined with tax-code and liberal-values restrictions on involvement by the international human rights charities leading this work in electoral, partisan or foreign politics, this prescribes a âhuman rights-centredâ model of Global South organizing that extinguishes the very powerful political characteristics that have enabled GLBT maturity and successes in the Global North. In this imaginary, domestic political organizing, action and leadership are not conceived as essential and necessary aspects of GLBT advocacy for Africa and the Caribbean especially. Instead, alliances with foreign advocates who apply moral, economic and legal pressure on local powerholders becomes central to advocacy. And repeatedly assumptions are made about the victimhood and lack of agency of GLBT subjects, to the point where activists like Peter Tatchell, Wayne Besen, Michael Petrellis, Keith Boykin and Akim Ade Larcher and their affiliated groups â Ăgale, Stop Murder Music, OutRage! and Boycott Jamaica â have felt licence to speak like abolitionists on behalf of the GLBT interests of the region.3
This privileging of external policing of governments to achieve GLBT gains vs. domestic leveraging of various forms of power and influence distorts organizing strategies to ones in which domestic GLBT stakeholders invest in alliances with others with the ability to provide financial resources, travel, visibility and legitimacy, but who are positioned as foreign adversaries of their governments. They often do so at the expense of nurturing local political alliances, of building ownership of GLBT issues by other sexual rights stakeholders, of developing strategic power domestically, of building a local base to which leadership is accountable, of developing appeals and legitimacy in the currency of domestic and traditional values and frameworks, or simply of being politically innovative in response to local conditions. And this clearly reinforces the view of GLBT cultures and values as non-indigenous and outside the social order.
Full interview here:Â www.caribbeanhomophobias.org/colinrobinson
