Discontents of Professionalisation: Sexual Politics and Activism in Croatia in the Context of EU Accession

Abstract

This chapter examines Croatian LGBT activists’ engagement with discourses of human rights and European identity in their struggles for anti-discrimination legislation during the late 2000s. Utilising the external pressure imposed by European Union institutions, some Croatian activists and the organisations with which they collaborated focused their efforts toward lobbying for legislative protection again discrimination based on sexual orientation. Some activists construct a hierarchical differentiation between a professionalised sphere of civil society consisting of “serious”, professionalised types of activism vs. amateur, cultural-based activism and embrace similar lobbying strategies used by transnational LGBTIQ organisations in Europe. I discuss how these professionalised lobbying strategies reproduce certain discourses of human rights and European identity that can foreclose recognition of difference within the larger, diverse LGBTIQ community and its needs. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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