Dr Koen Slootmaeckers

Senior Lecturer in International Politics

What role do LGBT rights play in the EU enlargement process? Is the promotion of LGBT rights by the EU a means to re-affirm its own identity? How do candidate countries respond to such promotion of LGBT rights? How does changes in legislation impact LGBT people in candidate countries? These are all questions I am currently tacking in my forthcoming monograph Coming In: Sexuality Politics and EU Accession in Serbia (Manchester University Press). As this monograph project draws to a close, I am slowly shifting my attention to the transnational politics of Pride Parades. Here, I am very interested in the meaning of Pride to activists in different contexts (particularly the Western Balkans) and how the relate to, challenge and/or transform the history and global practices of Pride organising.

My work is very much driven my own personal life experiences in which struggles for belonging played a key role in shaping my identities. As such, I am particularly interested in the processes of Othering, and how sexuality and masculinities play a role in maintaining symbolic boundaries. With a background in sociology, I started these explorations by looking at attitudes towards homosexuality. When I made my disciplinary move to international politics, I continued to research these boundaries, but with a focus on how sexuality and gender processes play a role in establishing and maintaining normative hierarchies in international politics. In my work, I aim to bring these practices in question and seek to understand how they impact the lived experiences of LGBT people.