LGBT activism in Estonia: Identities, enactment and perceptions of LGBT people

Abstract

This article explores how Estonian LGBT activists make sense of their own activism. We analyze the activists’ perceptions of their activism, their identities and how those identities are deployed for action. All of these are, in turn, situated in how activists understand the broader Estonian LGBT community, and Estonian society’s historico-politically complex relationship with activism as such. The article is theoretically grounded within the new social movement theories and theories of emergent LGBT and activist identities. The analyzed material consists of interviews, observations, documents and meeting notes gathered via ethnographic fieldwork with Estonian LGBT activists in 2012–2013. Pragmatic and iterative qualitative analysis revealed that the activists studied resist the activist identity, and perceive there to be a weak collective identity among the broader Estonian LGBT population. However, the lobbying for the Registered Partnership Law (passed in 2014) brought a shift in LGBT activists’ ways of enacting their identities and their perception of the possibility of LGBT activism in Estonia.