Romani LGBTIQ people experience specific non-normative (queer) intersectionalities within
mainstream, Romani and LGBTIQ communities on multiple grounds, including
ethnicity/race, sexuality, gender, class, social status, age, religion etc. The research
addresses a significant gap in knowledge by shedding light on an area of inquiry which
remains understudied, leading to invisibility and inadequate awareness of needs. The lived
experiences investigated herein are regionally diverse, allowing the research to highlight
commonly shared experiences of queer intersectionalities.
Historically, non-Roma have romanticised and simultaneously vilified Roma, leading to
stereotypical essentialist/essentialising representations of Roma, Romani identities and
identifications; and resulting in embedding marked essentialist difference at the core of
historic and modern negative social valuation of Romani ethnic identity. This thesis argues
that the lived experiences of Romani LGBTIQ people pose a fundamental challenge to
stereotypical, one-dimensional, homogenising and essentialising representations of Roma.
Guided by the research question ‘What are the experiences of Romani LGBTIQ people in
and beyond Europe?’, this qualitative research draws on ethnographic principles. It is
concerned with investigating and highlighting the experiences of Romani LGBTIQ people;
and unpacking, uncovering and exploring the strategies deployed by Romani LGBTIQ
people when negotiating multiple ethnic, sexual and gender identities and identifications,
oppression, (in)visibility, exclusion, as well as inclusion, recognition, and belonging (or lack
thereof) with, in and/or to mainstream societies, as well as Romani and LGBTIQ
communities. The fieldwork for this research was undertaken between summer 2015 and
autumn 2016. Data was collected in 14 interviews, 2
where participant observation was undertaken. Thematic analysis sensitive to queer
theoretical concepts, and to queer assemblages in particular, was used to identify key
themes.
The investigation contributes to queer(y)(ing) Romani Studies by challenging dominant
essentialist, homogenising conceptualisations of Romani identities; and to ongoing
discussions about the under-development of sexuality within intersectionality, and the
under-development of intersectionality within queer theorising. In order to help generate
insight into Romani LGBTIQ people’s queer intersectional identities and identifications, this
thesis proposes to employ queer intersectionalities: they allow us to identify and interrogate
the workings of interlocking axes of inequality whilst not assuming the supremacy of one
axis over the other, hence not re-inscribing marked essentialist difference embedded within
and constitutive of social norms, orthodoxies, and binaries. Simultaneously, employing
queer intersectionalities benefits understandings of identities and identifications as rhizomic
fluid assemblages that are not anchored in the notion of fixed ‘groupness’. Queer
intersectionalities thus enable an important reconceptualisation of Romani identities and
identifications that dismantles norms and normativities, doing away with marked essentialist
difference that has tended to fix and stabilise Romani identities and identifications.
The research found that although Antigypsyism — a direct manifestation of whitenormativity
— is a key aspect of the lived experiences of many Romani LGBTIQ people that
often eclipses other forms of oppression, it is not the only aspect of Romani LGBTIQ
people’s experiences. Romani LGBTIQ people experience queer intersectional
stigmatisation as both Roma and LGBTIQ due the interlocking negative social valuation of
Romani ethnicity, non-heteronormative sexuality and/or non-cis-normative gender identity.
These specific queer intersectionalities experienced by Romani LGBTIQ people are
inextricably linked to various degrees of ethnicised/racialised, sexed, gendered and queer
intersectional (in)visibilities, including hyper-visibility. Romani LGBTIQ people negotiate and
renegotiate the boundaries of various degrees of (in)visibilities delineating difference and
sameness that one may ‘step in’ or ‘step out of’ depending on how one ‘reads’ a given social
setting and on how one is ‘read’ within that context employing the notional spaces of ‘the
closet’ and/or passing: key survival strategies that are constituted and reconstituted through
social contexts and relationships, including through families and/or communities where both
inclusion and exclusion are present. The dimension of gender, particularly with respect to
femininity associated with some ‘passive’ gay men (receivers) and (trans)womanhood, is
key to the specific queer intersectionalities experienced by Romani LGBTIQ people,
especially lesbian women, some gay men, and trans and intersex people.
As mediators, bridges, halfies and in-betweens, in response to marked essentialist
difference lying at the root of white-normativity, heteronormativity, cis-normativity and
patriarchy, some Romani LGBTIQ people seek to create commonality, and indeed, strategic
sameness: the notion of a relational use of identities and identifications whereby
connections are created across difference for strategic purposes. Strategic sameness is a
political strategy of navigating spaces between difference and sameness; as such, strategic
sameness does not read through assimilation, conformity and/or normalisation.
Operationalised by and through (in)visibilities — and in some cases hyper-visibility —
associated with ‘the closet’ and passing, and deployed in a queer way to defy and subvert
dominant normativities within which it operates, strategic sameness is a positionality
resisting norms and binaries that enables the queer bearer to deploy sameness in order to
do away with social norms, orthodoxies and dualisms.
Queer non belonging by identification and disidentification is a transgressive, subversive
non/counter-normative positionality that some Romani LGBTIQ people may assume when
negotiating queer intersectionalities. It enables re-conceptualisations of identities and
identifications by identifying with aspects of ethnic/racial and/or sexual/gender identities that
are empowering while disidentifying with those aspects that are hostile, restrictive and/or
oppressive. Queer non belonging has an important political dimension: espousing a marked
(stigmatised) category of identification can be understood as a strategically subversive act
undermining key hegemonic systems of oppression: white-normativity, heteronormativity,
cis-normativity and patriarchy.
This investigation may benefit service providers, civil society organisations, community
initiatives and institutions in the area of application and policy recommendations and
potentially feed into larger national and transnational policy frameworks.
| Date of Award | Oct 2017 |
|---|
| Original language | English |
|---|
| Awarding Institution | |
|---|