Perverse Frictions: Pride, Dignity, and the Budapest LGBT March

Abstract

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) marches are critical and contentious events throughout post-socialist Europe: key sites of emerging sexual politics, shifting tensions between national and transnational meanings, and competing visions of citizenship. Since 1997 a ‘Pride March’, in 2008 Budapest's LGBT march was renamed the ‘Dignity March’. Taking this change as its focus, this paper explores debates within and outside Hungary's LGBT community about the meanings of ‘Pride’, ‘Dignity’, and sexuality. I argue these debates reveal competing efforts to negotiate the perilous boundaries between national and transnational discourses of identity, politics, and belonging. Situating them within Hungary's shifting political context, including recent violent attacks on the March, I suggest the move from the politics of Pride to the politics of Dignity has failed to escape the frictions of intersecting global and local discourses, instead invoking new cultural–political tensions, exclusionary boundaries, and dilemmas of identity, belonging, and politics for Hungarian LGBT people and activism.

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