At the margins of ‘Europe’? LGBTQ+ rights and the construction of British national identity during EU membership

In this paper, I explore the role of gender and sexuality in the construction of British national identity in relation to ‘Europe’. Existing literature demonstrates how ‘Europe’ has functioned as an external ‘Other’ against which British / English – identity has been constructed. Scholars have argued that pro-Europeans justified EEC/EU membership in ‘pragmatic’ economic and political terms in the post-imperial context. Opponents, in contrast, argued that it eroded national identity and sovereignty. However, this work misses the wide body of feminist and queer literature on nationalism and identity. I trace the way in which the UK’s eventual participation in European integration took place in an era of profound changes to gender and sexual norms following the social revolutions of the late 1960s. The EU, alongside the ECHR – often conflated with the EU in British discourse – later became a key driver of UK anti-discrimination law. This has resulted in constructions of ‘Europe’ as a threat to the moral integrity of the British nation on the one hand, and as a progressive space in contrast to a ‘backwards’ Britain on the other. Gender and sexuality have therefore been entangled with ideas about national sovereignty and identity and the European ‘Other’. Using ‘feminist curiosity’ as method, I analyse constructions of nation and ‘Europe’ in debates about LGBTQ+ rights in both mainstream press and ‘subaltern counter-publics’ of key social movements. Applying feminist narrative analysis, I will reveal stories of national belonging and contestation over ‘Europe’ usually left at the margins of political science and sociological research.