Queeing the ballot: The LGBTIQ+ vote in difficult times and contexts

During difficult times, marginalized individuals and communities – including LGBTIQ+ individuals and communities – are often further disempowered. This is particularly the case in contexts where historical legacies, the institutional environment, persisting notions of tradition and modernity, and prevailing heteronormative and cisnormative discourses of gender and sexuality have circumscribed understandings of politics and of political agency, and have rendered issues of nonconforming sexualities and gender identities as non-political or as less politically important when compared to other issues. Nonetheless, it has been argued that elections give the electorate, including marginalized groups, a platform for political participation. Moreover, research suggests that, in times of elections, attempting to court the LGBTIQ+ vote, political parties and candidates often include LGBTIQ+ equality issues in their manifestos and agendas while, attempting to queer their constituencies’ vote, national LGBTIQ+ organizations often launch campaigns to make political parties and candidates’ positions on LGBTIQ+ issues known to their constituencies. How do these processes and dynamics play out in difficult times and contexts? Do political parties and candidates’ considerations over the power of the LGBTIQ+ vote hold in times of pandemic and of economic hardship? In such times, do LGBTIQ+ voters prioritize their nonconforming sexual and gender identities and LGBTIQ+ rights at the ballot box? Answers to these questions are important for understanding the impact of major social, political, and economic upheavals on the LGBTIQ+ vote and on parties and candidates’ willingness to queer their manifestos and agendas, particularly in contexts where LGBTIQ+ politics and mobilization are relatively recent phenomena, and where ‘politics’ and ‘political agency’ continue to be narrowly conceptualized. Focusing on Cyprus and on the parliamentary elections of 2021, this paper offers novel responses to these questions. Drawing from questionnaires completed by LGBTIQ+ voters and election candidates, and from interviews with LGBTIQ+ activists, it examines LGBTIQ+ voters and election candidates’ priorities and choices in relation to the Cyprus 2021 parliamentary elections. It finds that, amidst difficult times, LGBTIQ+ voters prioritize their nonconforming sexual and gender identities and LGBTIQ+ rights at the ballot box. However, it also finds that LGBTIQ+ voters see their nonconforming sexualities and genders as intersecting with class, ethnicity, and other dimensions of inequality. Therefore, it argues that an intersectionality approach is needed to fully understand both the LGBTIQ+ vote and its impact on party and candidates’ manifestos and agendas and, subsequently, on how LGBTIQ+ rights and policies are defined and implemented in contexts resistant to LGBTIQ+ equality. In doing so, this paper contributes to the scholarly discussion on whether and how LGBTIQ+ politics translate at the ballot box and influence elections in contentious contexts in times of hardship.