ABOUT THE LECTURE: 
In the last thirty years, the rights of people who are marginalized by their sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) have improved rapidly in many countries. For the most part, these achievements can be traced back to the “spiral model” of factors involving the transnational mobilization of the SOGI-rights movement, the actions of progressive governments in a few pioneering countries, and advances in the human rights frameworks of some IOs. Yet, such successes have not gone unchallenged. A rising and, in recent years, increasingly globally connected resistance works against SOGI rights. It rests predominantly in the hands of transnationally connected social movements—frequently with a religious-nationalist orientation—and conservative governments, actors that now also attempt to lay claim to international human rights law by rewriting or reinterpreting it. Drawing from over a decade of fieldwork and over 240 interviews with SOGI, anti-SOGI, and various state and IO actors, this article explores how the conservative transnational movement functions, in terms of who comprises it and how its agenda is constructed. We argue that these resistances have employed in the last decade many of the same transnational tools that garnered LGBTIQ people their widespread recognition. They also conform to the boomerang and spiral models of human rights diffusion, but in a process we reconceive as a double helix. As the double-helix metaphor suggests, rival TANs have a reciprocal relationship, having to navigate each other’s presence in an interactive space. In other words, both those who seek the advancement of SOGI rights and those who oppose them use related strategies and instruments for mutually exclusive ends.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: 
Phillip M. Ayoub is a professor in the Department of Political Science at University College London and Editor of the European Journal of Politics and Gender. He is the author of three books, including When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and his articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the European Journal of International Relations, the European Journal of Political Research, Mobilization, the European Political Science Review, among others.

Kristina Stoeckl is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck. Her research focuses on religion and (post)secular society, religion and liberal norms, theories of modernity, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She is the author of several books, including The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars (Fordham University Press, 2022) and The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (Routledge 2014). Her articles have appeared in the journals Religion, State & Society, European Journal of Social Theory, Studies in East European Thought, and Transit, among others.