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Dr. Christine Klapeer: Homodevelopmentalism as Epistemic Violence? Examining German Trans/National LGBTIQ* Politics From a Queer and Post-/Decolonial Perspective

In the last decade LGBTIQ*-rights have not only entered the international arena prominently, the “promotion” of LGBTIQ*-rights has also been adopted as a goal and objective of European as well as of German development and external policies. Moreover, LGBTIQ*- and human rights organizations in Germany increasingly engage in lobbying for “threatened” queer populations all over the world. 
By critically interlinking findings from the field of postcolonial and decolonial theory with transnational queer studies, ‘radical’ development studies and critical IR, this paper sheds light on how LGBTIQ* rights and ‘queer progress’ are being articulated, framed and negotiated within German trans/national LGBTIQ*-movements and politics. It also examines what “side effects” these policies and discourses entail. It will be argued that a new “queered” version of (sexual) modernization frameworks is being produced thus promoting a racialized, unilinear progress narrative of queer ‘liberation’, enlightenment and identity formation. 
I will argue that these complex political figurations and entanglements articulate themselves between the rise of a humanitarian homotransnationalism, established developmentalist thinking and an increased racialized and classed externalization of anti-LGBTIQ*-violence (e.g. in the figure of the ‘homophobic Muslim migrant or uneducated worker’). In order to grasp these entanglements, I will propose the concept of homo-developmentalism as a methodological tool and perspective. Against this backdrop I will discuss how homodevelopmentalism can be conceptualized as a form of epistemic violence that not only reproduces the “coloniality of gender” (Lugones) but also renders invisible the ongiong intersectional and structural violence of heteronormativity as it turns, for instance, LGBTIQ*s into victims of “singular” violent incidents by “backward” cultures, societies and people.