In Paris, but also in Amiens, Biarritz, Calais, Carcassonne, Laval, Lorient, Nîmes or Tarbes, the 2024 edition of Pride will have a special flavor. Coincidentally with the calendar, the Pride March parade in these cities is in fact scheduled for Saturday June 29 – the day before the first round of the legislative elections. The vote worries many LGBT+ associations and activists, who see, for example, in the homophobic attack carried out by four ultra-right activists in Paris on June 9 a harbinger of what an extreme victory could mean. right for the safety of trans, queer and homosexual people.
If the French situation regarding LGBT+ rights may seem worrying, the international context is no less alarming. On a global scale, the trend could even be towards regression: in a summary covering the year 2023Amnesty International particularly highlights the proliferation in Africa of laws or bills aimed at persecuting members of the LGBT+ community.
Are we witnessing a backlash On a large scale, this conservative backlash often observed after progress in minority rights? The adoption by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2011 of a resolution on “human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity” seems a long time ago today. “It is certain that, since the 2010s, the proliferation of Western laws in favor of gay marriage, the questions raised by #metoo, but also the greater visibility given to trans people have provoked negative reactions around the world”notes Marie-Cécile Naves, director of the Gender and Geopolitics Observatory at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations.
The political scientist underlines in particular the indirect role of the entertainment and pop culture industries, today globalized, in this phenomenon of rejection: “As long as homosexuality and LGBT+ rights remained little-discussed themes outside of activist circles, they were seen as issues confined to the West. But with the expansion and diversification of the channels of dissemination of feminist and LGBT+ cultures, these issues become more visible and affect all spheres of socialization, to the point of being perceived by certain actors as a cultural threat coming from the West. »
“Anti-colonial perspective”
The way in which, since 2018, China has regularly attacked South Korean K-pop singers deemed “effeminate” and bearers of non-Asian Western values is an example: the LGBT+ issue now seems to crystallize resentment towards the West. To the point that on May 16, in Dakar, during a discussion devoted to relations between Africa and Europe, Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko warned his interlocutor – Jean-Luc Mélenchon –: “External attempts to impose on us the importation of lifestyles and ways of thinking contrary to our values risk constituting a new casus belli.” In its sights: LGBT+ minorities, widely considered in Senegal as a “phenomenon” of depravity in Western society. In front of an enthusiastic amphitheater and a stunned guest, the head of government then adds that the defense of these minorities can, more than political differences, nourish a “anti-Western sentiment in many parts of the world”.
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