Ambiguous identities, ambiguous transitions: Lesbians, gays, and the sexual politics of citizenship in postsocialist Hungary.

This dissertation examines the changing meanings of sexual identity, community, and politics in postsocialist Hungary. Emerging as an organized movement in the years immediately preceding the collapse of Socialism in 1989, Hungarian lesbian and gay activists have striven to build stronger conceptions of identity and community, to create political consciousness, and to be seen as valid members of Hungarian society. Based on more than 2 1/2 years of fieldwork, my analysis focuses on the ideas and activities of Hungary's main lesbian and gay activist organizations in order to argue that through their efforts sexual identity has become a central site for competing visions of the boundaries of Hungarian cultural citizenship. Each chapter of the dissertation explores these efforts and their implications in a specific cultural field: the history and internal tensions of Hungary's lesbian and gay organizations; two public scandals over the public presence of lesbian and gay activists, and how they were used by different groups to frame competing boundaries for tolerance; several lesbian and gay history-making projects and their construction of narratives of identity and community; the use of symbolic public spaces by the Budapest Pride March to invoke national belonging; and the complex conjuncture of national and transnational symbols present in Budapest's Gay and Lesbian Festival and Pride March. I demonstrate how, in all of these contexts, lesbian and gay activists have created forms of identity, community, and politics that ground lesbians and gays in imagined connections to contrasting histories and cultural geographies, at once fusing and counterposing national and transnational models, meanings, and connections, to produce themselves as legitimate yet complex cultural citizens - people with both legal rights and cultural belonging. These efforts have provoked sustained tensions within and outside lesbian and gay circles. Yet, I contend, because they have critically shaped the broader contests over the restructuring of cultural and political boundaries that have characterized Hungary's transition, they have also contributed significantly to transforming the meanings of postsocialist citizenship.PhDCultural anthropologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126805/2/3276277.pd