Using excerpts from their academic work and personal experience, a panel of professors, a graduate student and a Madison photographer examined various issues presented to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community by globalization.
Over 80 countries have restrictive laws and legal provisions that criminalize homosexuality and encourage institutional harassment of LGBTQ individuals, according to International Student Services adviser Tina Hatch.
Communication arts professor Karma Chávez said globalization’s role in bringing the world together raises questions of how different cultural understandings of gender and sexuality are addressed and reconciled on the larger global stage.
These issues are prevalent within detainment and deportation in the immigration process, according to Chávez. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer migrants who are deported face additional concerns of abuse and injury when detained before deportation.
In fleeing conflict and abuse at home, these migrants run into unanticipated danger and harassment by authorities in detainment, Chávez said.
“It is important for a broad, human rights and LGBT-oriented program to account for the extensiveness of detention in incarceration systems inside and outside prison walls, and who they impact the most,” she said.
In traveling across Africa and Asia, photographer Kelly Doering’s experiences spoke to those of individuals attempting to navigate collisions of differing cultural perspectives of sexuality.
Doering’s time among friendly and tolerant Ugandans as a homosexual living in rural Uganda contrasts with the image Uganda presents via its Parliament’s “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” that would make homosexuality punishable by either death or life imprisonment.
“You can meet people who are part of that blanket, but you also meet individuals who are not that way,” he said.
LBGT Global Rights/Issues was held as part of the ongoing LGBT Global Rights & Issues Week sponsored by International Student Services, the LGBT Campus Center, University Housing’s Diversity Squad and the Departments of Chicano and Latino and Gender and Women’s Studies.
