Dr Francesca Romana Ammaturo and Dr Koen Slootmaeckers
Every year, around the International Day Against Homo, Bi, and Transphobia, ILGA Europe, the biggest LGBTQI+ umbrella organisation in Europe working on LGBTQI+ rights, releases its Rainbow Index and Rainbow Map into the world. This moment generates a lot of media attention to the plight of LGBTQI+ rights in Europe and provides an important moment in the work of ILGA-Europe. Whilst we recognise the usefulness of this resource in advocacy work, we also see several issues with the mapping of LGBTQI+ rights in this way.
In this two-part long read, we explain how maps (and the mapping of data onto them) do not only depict a world, but also generate political narratives that do not always reflect reality. We will particularly demonstrate how the focus on LGBTQI+ rights from its legal perspective can lead to a misunderstanding and sometimes even misrepresentation of actual LGBTQI+ lived experiences. We present our argument in two posts. In the first post, we consider how the use of maps create a new world-view, not always related to lived experiences, with its own political consequences. And in the second, we empirically analyse the disconnect between the rainbow map and lived experiences to highlight how an uncritical reading of the map leads to the projection of fictional queer utopias and dystopias in Europe.
Image credit: ILGA Europe
How the Rainbow map creates and projects a coloured image of the world
While maps help us to orientate through the complexities of the physical (and symbolic) world, they are never neutral. Rather, maps act as productive devices that shape and channel our understanding of the relationship between space, politics, and identity. Throughout history maps have been crucial tools in serving the interests of nationalist projects, war propaganda, as well as colonialism and imperialism.
Today the role of maps has expanded, and we see them being increasingly used by NGOs as a way to showcase human rights protections and violations. Within this context, (quantified) indicators and their map equivalences are normally deployed as advocacy tools that help to initiate conversations on human rights violations at both the national and international level. Whilst certainly useful, Salle Engle Merry reminds us that the indicators underpinning these maps are not technical and or free of politics; they do not simply reveal the truth but rather create it. As such, the growing use of maps in human rights work is not deprived of controversies and ambiguities, particularly when it comes to the widespread advocacy strategy of ‘naming and shaming’ governments that are not compliant with human rights standards. Although we do not intend to critique the NGOs that create these maps, one must reflect on the world these maps create and project as well as the political narratives they shape and how these relate to lived realities.
Last year’s publication marks the eleventh edition of the ‘Rainbow Map’, and the way in which ILGA Europe measures ‘progress’ appears to have changed over the years. Whilst the first two editions of the map (2009 and 2010) icons were used to symbolise which provisions existed in the different national legislations (i.e. same-sex marriage, anti-discrimination legislation, etc.), from 2012 onwards ILGA-Europe started measuring progress using a numerical scale, combined with the adoption of a traffic-light coding system with countries with better human rights compliance in green, those in intermediate positions in yellow, and those worse compliance in red.
Whereas the traffic-light coding has become an integral feature of the map, the methodology of the index has changed from 2012. Over time, more and more indicators and criteria of equality have been integrated, virtually moving the bar of equality year by year. At a glance, the use of traffic light colouring – with red signifying non-compliance or danger – contributes to create the illusion of a compartmentalised, as well as dichotomic, understanding of countries with ‘good’ track records on LGBTQI+ rights on the one hand, and countries with ‘bad’ records on the other. From a semiotic perspective, traffic light coding can be understood as being signals, that is to say signs that ‘trigger […] some reaction on the part of the receiver’. In this case, the ‘reaction’ could be intended as either the ‘mobilisation of shame’ towards non-compliant governments, or indignation from the part of civil society.
Indeed, once published the rainbow maps start leading a life of their own, beyond the imagined goals of ILGA-Europe and start influencing queer politics in Europe in a variety of ways. Amongst other things, they generate homonationalist discourses that project ‘queer utopias’ and ‘queer dystopias’ onto the map of Europe. As these projections are solely based on legal contexts, they have severe implication for how we conceptualise, envision and imagine queer lived realities.
As discussed somewhere else, homonationalist discourses also change how we consider the problem of persistent homophobia. Whilst in ‘green’ countries homophobia become a problem of not-yet-adjusted individuals, in ‘red’ countries homophobic experiences are a sign of backward not-yet-modernised cultures. Such thinking also displaces the lived experience of queer people. When those living in so-called LGBTQI+ friendly countries experience violence, their experience are interpreted as random instances and systemic structures of oppression are ignored, whilst at the other end of the spectrum queer people are imagined as eternal victims, and positive stories and individual/collective tools of resistance and abilities to create safe space are rendered impossible.
Talking about the use of a similar map produced at the global level by ILGA World to measure levels of homophobia globally, Rahul Rao reminds us that these maps are effectively constituted as ‘(…) ranking exercises [that] mobilise shame, not on the basis of the substantive values at stake in these disputes, but through a reiteration of familiar divides between shamers and shamed’. In turn, this sharp distinction between shamers and shamed can be used to mobilise homonationalist discourses in various national contexts, embodied in a form of ‘rainbow exceptionalism’ consisting in measuring one’s own performance in protecting LGBTQI+ rights vis-à-vis the ‘failures’ of other European states. Ultimately, the unfolding of this ‘rainbow exceptionalism’ creates fertile ground for an even sharper distinction between ‘LGBTQI+ friendly countries’ and ‘non-LGBTQI+ friendly countries’ within Europe, and well beyond its confines (for more on how this plays out in Europe, see our previous work on this here and here).
Hence, within the logics of international LGBTQI+ politics, the production of these maps reproduces hierarchies often mediated by Eurocentric understandings of linear progress, while discounting the crucial importance that an interpenetration of legal and social aspects has in evaluating national contexts in which LGBTQI+ persons live. Therefore, while ILGA Europe’s ‘Rainbow Maps’ have been accompanied since 2011 by an Annual Review that also acknowledges the social context within which the legislative framework is situated within each country, the snapshot provided by the maps themselves does not fully capture the complexity of this interconnection between the legal and how LGBTQI+ people experience inequalities in their daily lives.
Furthermore, the heightened emphasis on the legislative framework of protection of LGBTQI+ rights in each country conveyed by the ‘Rainbow Maps’, we would argue, partly displaces lived experiences of LGBTQI+ people in Europe. As we demonstrate in part two of this series, for some low ranking countries, the map in part perpetuates the image of eternal victimhood of LGBTQI+ people, which does not resonate with people’s daily experiences.
For some high ranking countries, on the other hand, it in part underestimates that access to justice (i.e. access to legal counsel, litigation, etc.) remains difficult for many LGBTQI+ persons across Europe, particularly those who already find themselves in marginalised positions, such as people from low socio-economic backgrounds, trans and intersex persons, individuals from ethnic or religious minorities, as well as asylum seekers, and persons with disabilities. This aspect is ever more crucial if one takes into account the growing importance that ILGA Europe has paid, in the last few years, in approaching LGBTQI+ rights from an intersectional perspective. Regrettably, the map does not capture the intersectional dimension of homo-, bi-, intersex- and transphobia across the European continent, and it would be good to consider how these crucial intersections can be addressed in a visual form in order to really give a complex and articulated overview of the lived experiences of LGBTQI+ persons across Europe.
Dr Francesca Romana Ammaturo is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Human Rights at the University of Roehampton. Dr Koen Slootmaeckers is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at City.
Reproduced with permission and minor alterations from LSE Department of Gender Studies blog. Original post from May, 2020 can be found here.
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