Single Review on past events

In her Jour Fixe talk on „Attitudes to confessional and sexual Minorities in the changing Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish Media Discourse“, Postdoctoral Fellow Joanna Chojnicka looked at the perception of gays in different media. While she examines the recent discourse from the decades following the breakdown of the communist system in Eastern Europe, she also looks at historical discourses that, as Chojnicka argues, form part of the underlying schemes of resistance against gay lifestyles. Like the jews in the interwar period, she argues, gays function as scapegoats, embodying the processes of modernization and fluidity that are resisted by conservatives. Although public opinion in the three countries is slowly changing and societies become more tolerant towards sexual minorities, politics and the church still dominate the discourse with the aid of the media. In this discourse, gays are equaled with the EU – and are incompatible with national identities.