11:20 - 13:00
P12-S293
Room: -1.A.03
Chair/s:
Rebecca Cordell
Discussant/s:
Rebecca Cordell, Melissa Pavlik
Repertoires of Queer (Non)Violent Resistance in Armed Conflict: The Ukrainian LGBTQ+ Communities' Responses to the 2022 Russian Full-scale Invasion
P12-S293-2
Presented by: Daniel Santos
Daniel Santos
Master's Student at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra
In a context of armed conflict, the resistance of LGBTQ+ communities fighting for their survival and rights can manifest itself in different ways, both violent and nonviolent. Since the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian LGBTQ+ communities have faced an ambivalent situation and have resorted to a wide variety of actions to seek to (non)violently undermine non-egalitarian power relations. Following the ABC framework of resistance, this study aims to collect data on the expressions of queer (non)violent resistance in armed conflict, within the context of the War in Ukraine, to explore and comprehend, in an entangled way, how these forms of queer struggle are manifested, intertwined, and in an ongoing dialogue with power. An analysis of social media content concerning Ukrainian violent and nonviolent resistance is developed and complemented by individual semi-structured interviews with professionals involved in queer nonviolent activism in Ukraine. This project results in a set of narratives about these forms of queer agency, involving multiple themes, that inform about how these acts of resistance both undermine and reinforce power relations in contexts of armed conflict, as well as how they entangle each other in (non)violent ways. Such results allow for a wider discussion on how Ukrainian queer violent and nonviolent resistance may inform the debate regarding the conceptualization of resistance acts, the resistance-resistance, and the resistance-power nexuses, as well as the potentialities, limitations, and intersections between forms of queer struggle during an armed conflict.
Keywords: resistance, LGBTQ+, (non)violence, war, Ukraine

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