The Pink Line
The World’s Queer Frontiers
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Guardian's Best Paperback of the Month
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S and FINANCIAL TIMES' BOOKS OF 2020
'In intimate, often tender prose, Gevisser brings to life the complex movement for queer civil rights and the many people on whom it bears.' Colm Toibin, Guardian
'Powerful... meticulously researched' Andrew McMillan, Observer Book of the Week
Six years in the making, The Pink Line follows protagonists from nine countries all over the globe to tell the story of how LGBTQ+ Rights became one of the world's new human rights frontiers in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
From refugees in South Africa to activists in Egypt, transgender women in Russia and transitioning teens in the American Mid-West, The Pink Line folds intimate and deeply affecting stories of individuals, families and communities into a definitive account of how the world has changed, so dramatically, in just a decade.
And in doing so he reveals a troubling new equation that has come in to play: while same-sex marriage and gender transition are now celebrated in some parts of the world, laws to criminalise homosexuality and gender non-conformity have been strengthened in others. In a work of great scope and wonderful storytelling, this is the groundbreaking, definitive account of how issues of sexuality and gender identity divide and unite the world today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this expansive and deeply sourced inquiry into the 21st-century LGBTQ rights movement, South African journalist Gevisser (Lost and Found in Johannesburg) profiles gay and transgender people around the world living in "the Pink Line" "a borderland where queer people work to reconcile the liberation and community they might have experienced online or on TV or in circumscribed places, with the constraints of the street and the workplace, the courtroom and the living room." Gevisser's subjects include a transgender woman from Malawi, a gay Ugandan refugee living in Vancouver, and a lesbian couple running a caf in post Arab Spring Cairo. He alternates these portraits with discussions on how "nativist nationalist politicians" in Russia and Eastern Europe demonize European Union laws protecting LGBTQ rights, the spread of antihomosexual laws from Victorian England to the British colonies, the courting of "pink-dollar tourists" in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, the recent shift of public attention from gay issues to transgender ones, and the Vatican's longstanding advocacy against the concept of gender as a social construct. Though the book at times feels more like a collection of magazine profiles rather than a cohesive whole, Gevisser's non-Western point-of-view and exhaustive research provide essential perspective on the threads connecting gay, lesbian, and transgender communities worldwide. This impressive work is a must-read for anyone invested in social justice and LGBTQ rights.
