Decentering the 1969 Stonewall Riots: One Foundational Myth for Global LGBTQ Communities or many? Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre

29 November 2023

This talk centred on Francesca’s research on the ‘founding myth of Stonewall’, as part of the book she is currently writing titled Pride Politics and Modernity: Local and Global Challenges (Bristol University Press).

In this talk, Francesca showed that using the 1969 Stonewall riots as a ‘founding myth’ for the birth of Pride events and LGBTQIA+ movements across the world has both a unifying function, but also a homogenising function that contributes to the flattening of sexual and gender diversity, particularly in the Global South but also, in some respect, in the peripheries of the Global North. Whilst holding the 1969 Stonewall riots as certainly important in the genealogy of contemporary LGBTQIA+ social movements, Francesca seeks to decentre Stonewall from its role of unique ‘originator’ of queer self-consciousness drawing from both Decolonial and Queer scholars, in order to charter a history of Pride events from the perspective of the ‘peripheries’ rather than the Euro-American ‘centre’.

Francesca seeks to contribute to understanding how we can engage with multiple, autochthonous, and diverse histories of LGBTQIA+ activism in relation to Pride events that transcend, partially or fully, the legacy of the myth of the 1969 ‘Stonewall riots’.

Speaker:

Dr Francesca Romana Ammaturo is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and International Relations at London Metropolitan University. Francesca’s expertise is on LGBTQIA+ human rights and social movements, with a particular focus on Europe. She has written on homonationalism at the European Court of Human Rights, children’s rights and gender identity, and reproductive rights and surrogacy in Italy, among other things. In 2017 she published her monograph European Sexual Citizenship: Human Rights, Bodies, and Identities for Palgrave. One of her main strands of research explores the sociology and politics of Pride events, with a particular focus on the rural/urban dichotomy and with a global decolonial outlook. She has published several peer-reviewed articles on these topics, and she is currently writing a monograph for Bristol University Press, titled Pride Politics and Modernity: Local and Global Challenges.