Intersectionality in the Career Trajectories of LGBTIQ+ Politicians in a Traditional Context: the Italian Case Study

Until the 2000s, there were only a few known cases of elected gay, lesbian, and transgender people in Italy, exclusively at the parliamentary level and members of left and center-left parties or coalitions. In the Italian local elections of 2021, however, more than twenty LGBTIQ+ candidates were elected, i.e. candidates who have made their LGBTIQ+ identity a characterizing dimension of their profile. Moreover, although often isolated cases, even LGBTIQ+ members of the parliament (at both the Italian and European levels) are no longer scandalous exceptional profiles. More generally, LGBTIQ+ elected politicians are coming out increasingly in the left and center-left as well as in the right and center-right. A liberal and green “Gay Party” even appeared in 2020. Research interested in LGBTIQ+ politicians generally focuses on their effects on representation or their role in adopting specific public policies. Few works have studied the trajectories and political careers of such candidates, the factors within the party and electoral systems that either favor or hinder such careers, and most importantly the intersectionality of sexual orientation with gender identity and other socio-demographic characteristics. The paper proposes a qualitative analysis of LGBTIQ+ politicians in Italy, based on a theory-driven analysis centred around the interviews of several such elected representatives. Research on political careers has epistemological and methodological issues related to the difficulty of combining actor and context-oriented approaches. Thus, the research objective is twofold: to analyze the contextual factors that constitute the political ecology within which LGBTIQ+ elected politicians develop their career strategically; and to study the factors that characterize individual trajectories by either hindering or fostering them, and more specifically their intersection. Contextual factors to be explored mainly refer to the selection and the organizational structures of the parties or civic lists to which LGBTIQ+ politicians are affiliated; the degree of party-political integration; and the strategies and modalities of electoral campaigning at different levels (local, national and European). At the individual level, the research will analyze the influence of a previous career as an activist, the politicians' relationship to LGBTIQ+ activism and movements, and more particularly how their political profile is performed in term of identity models or intersectional patterns. Accordingly, through a mixed individual and context-oriented qualitative approach, the research aims to study how LGBTIQ+ political opportunity structures promote and hinder LGBTIQ+ political careers through the lens of the intersected roles of gender, sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity, age, ability, race, class, religion, and other factors.