International LGBTIQ Seminar 2026
Agenda
new schedule : Agenda
Wednesday
- 8-9 Breakfast
- 9-9.30 clear up breakfast
- 09:30-10:30: Opening session
Intro to building, practical tasks? (IIRE Team) Presentation of the schools, latest updates since the last seminar, Overview of the previous seminars and their reports and the 2003 FI resolution Overview of the tasks of this seminar, the timetable and the programme. Organisation of practical tasks? LGBT Csnn
- 10:30-12:30: Country Reports.
- 12:30-14:30: Lunch break
- 14:30-16:00: Panel 1: Queer Utopias with Mafer, Peter and Lauren and questions and reactions
- 16:00-16.30 Coffee Break
- 16.30-18:30 language groups
- 20:00 Dinner
Thursday
- 7.30-8.30 Breakfast
- 8.30 -9clear up breakfast
- 09:30-11.00 Panel 1 Reports from the groups - 5 min each and final discussion
- 11:00-11:15 Coffee Break
- 11.15-12:45 Women’s self-organized group
- 12:45-14:45 Lunch break
- 14:45-16.15 Panel 2: How the rise of the far right impacts LGBTIQ people and our resistances with Hor and Valeried and one other comrade and questions and reactions
- 16:15-16.45 Coffee Break
- 16.45 -18.45 language groups
- 20.00 Dinner
Friday
- 7.30-8.30 Breakfast
- 8.30 -9 clear up breakfast
- 9.30-11.00 Panel 2 Reports from the groups - 5 min each and final discussion
- 11:00-11:15 Coffee Break
- 11.15-12:45 Trans self-organized group
- 12:45-14:45 Lunch break
- 14:30-16.15 Panel 3 Queer visibility and alternative prides with 3 comrades from participant lists and questions and reactions
- 16:15-16.45 Coffee Break
- 16.45 -18.45 language groups
- 20.00 Dinner
- 21.00 PARTY
Saturday
- 9.30-10.30 Breakfast
- 10.30 -11 clear up breakfast
- 11.00-12.30 Panel 3 Reports from the groups – 5 min each and final discussion
- 12.30-14.30 lunch
- 14.30- 16.00 Global South self-organized group
- 16:00-16.30 Coffee Break
- 16.30-18.00 Reports from Women’s, trans’ and Global South meetings and reflexions(15 min each)
- 19:30 Dinner
Sunday
- 8-9 Breakfast
- 9-9.30 clear up breakfast
- 10:00-12.00 Final Plenary – Evaluation and Future Plans
- 12.00 Cleaning and lunch
Please don’t plan departures before 2 pm and ideally not before 5pm if possible
Themes
Theme 1 Queer utopias in these dystopian times
In these very dystopian, scary times, keeping radical hope alive is more important than ever. And radical anti-capitalist hope needs to be queered, linking political economy and revolutionary politics to gender and sexual transformation.
Within the overall theme of Queer Utopias, this panel should address several specific topics: reimagining families/kinship (family abolition / transformation); reimagining a queer world without borders (decentring ‘the West’); reimagining gender (trans/non-binary horizons); reimagining relationships (polyamory / beyond romance).
Readings:
From Gender Identity Communism: A Gay Utopian Examination of Trans Healthcare in Britain
Theme 2 How the rise of the far right impacts LGBTIQ people and our resistances
In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of far-right movements around the world. One key feature of this new offensive is the promotion of a strong, transnationally coordinated anti-gender and anti-equality agenda that targets a wide range of sexual and reproductive rights of women and LGBTQIA+ people.
In doing so, they have complicated queer struggles and challenged the broader trend towards greater recognition of LGBTQIA+ rights we've seen since the beginning of the twenty-first century. With the support of religious groups and other political actors, these movements have taken power in many countries, often institutionalising anti-gender politics, with a particular focus on anti-trans policies, and increasingly criminalising, isolating, and stifling LGBTQIA+ activism.
At the same time, in our previous seminars, we have observed that these attacks on our lives and rights coexist with ongoing homonationalist politics within sectors of the right and far right, making LGBTQIA+ people both targets of attack and co-opted by exclusionary ideologies. How does this impact our struggles?
In this panel, we explore different regional contexts to understand how far-right politics has affected LGBTQIA+ people and their forms of resistance. We are particularly interested in how this topic intersects with other dimensions of the current political conjuncture, including the spread of war and armed conflict, security, technology and militarisation, geopolitical tensions, national liberation, racism, anti-migration politics, and labour precariousness.
Readings:
Gender and Sexualities: The Far Right’s Reactionary Offensive
The Right, the anti-gender crusade and the transphobic offensive
The Revolution Will be Queer or it Will Not Be a Revolution
Theme 3
Visibility and the shift to opacity
Readings:
Coming out of the colonial closet
The genocide in Gaza and Israel’s war on Lebanon have reignited debates about queer visibility, liberation, and resistance to settler colonialism. Decades of homonationalism and the instrumentalization of queer identities by states have made visibility and identity politics central questions in struggles against imperialism. While some queer movements, particularly in the West, continue to view visibility as a key strategy for political mobilization, others have increasingly questioned its effectiveness and limitations. In Lebanon, for example, tensions exist between identity-based organizations that prioritize visibility and queer, feminist, and Marxist groups that organize around broader struggles against class oppression, patriarchy, and imperialism without centering visibility. Examining these different approaches can help us understand both the possibilities and the limits of visibility as a tool for liberation, as well as the growing interest in opacity, discretion, and alternative forms of political organizing. In Lebanon, international funding has contributed to a shift within parts of the LGBTIQ movement away from political organizing and toward service provision, creating tensions with queer, feminist, and Marxist groups that prioritize anti-imperialist struggle over visibility and institutional advocacy. In the Netherlands, conflicts over Israeli flags at Pride exposed divisions between mainstream and radical queer politics, prompting many queer activists—particularly Arab queers—to move away from visibility-centered organizing and toward broader pro-Palestinian and anti-colonial movements. The last decade has also witnessed the emergence and rise of critical prides (alternative prides) in countries like Spain, trying to repoliticize the pride parade, and fighting against the commercialisation of identities. What role does queer visibility play in contemporary struggles against settler colonialism and imperialism? When does visibility advance liberation, and when does it become vulnerable to co-optation? Can opacity function as a form of resistance, and what new forms of organizing emerge when visibility is no longer the primary political objective? What role can alternative prides in this context, combining visibility with a clear stance against homonationalism, genocide and pride commercialisation?
Questions for country reports
The purpose of this set of questions is to guide the writing and presentation of country reports for the seminar. Whether you answer question by question or write a short note please try to cover these points.(5000 signs without spaces)
1. To what extent has the position of LGBTIQ people changed in your country in the last four or five years? What are the main areas where the situation is worse and where it has improved?
2. Is the LGBTIQ movement in your country centrally organized?
3. To what extent are debates about trans inclusion polarizing in the movement and in public opinion? Are trans people included in the actions and leadership of brooder queer organizations? Do broader queer organisations take up the demands of trans people
4. To what extent do trade unions take up defence of LGBTIQ’s position in society? Are there structures within unions specifically organising LGBTIQ people
5. Are racialized people included in the actions and leadership of queer organizations? What debates around racism take place in these organizations? What are the relations between these organizations and the demands of racialized people?
6. To what extent are migrants involved in the actions and leadership of LQBTIQ organizations? What are their demands? What are the relations between these organizations and migrants
7. To what extent is international solidarity with LGTIQ people in other countries a theme of queer organizations? Are there particular countries or issues around which this is focused or particular organizations with whom you have built links? Are any solidarity links contentious – and if so why?
8. How have queer people responded to the genocide in Palestine since October 2023. Have new organisations been created? Have their been LGBTIQ contingents on Palestine solidarity demonstrations
9. To what extent do LGTIQ organisations in your country have relations with other social movements
10. How much is your political organisation involved in LGBTIQ movement organizing? Do you have internal structures to organize this?
Please complete this by July 1 and if at all possible translate into the 3 working languages of the seminar. You can use Deepl