## THE PERSONAL IS NATIONAL

Queering the nation in Denmark and Ireland

By: Liam Barrowcliffe Centre for Advanced Migration Studies

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ABSTRACT: This article analyses how those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in Denmark and the Republic of Ireland see themselves in relation to hegemonic narratives of the nation. A range of personal narratives from the two national contexts were collected and analysed as narrative texts for the ways they represented positionality, agency and belonging in the wider discourse of the nation. LGB lives are often reduced to legislative turning points in national narratives, but this study shifts the focus onto the  myriad  of  other  formative  experiences  that  contribute  to  their  national  sense  of  self.  While  a significant body of work has focused on the intersection of LGB(TQ) and national identity as harmful, leading  to  theories  such  as  homonationalism,  this  article  sees  the  relationship  as  more  nuanced,  and capable of going beyond acceptance/rejection or inclusion/exclusion dichotomies.

KEY WORDS: LGBTQ, national identity, homonationalism, narrative, queer

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## CULTURE AND HISTORY Nr. 01

January 2022

## Introduction

The idea that nation-states are in part sustained by the stories they tell about themselves is by no means new. In light of these national narratives, it is important to consider the ways in which sexual minorities react to, experience, and form (or don't form) attachments to the nation. Probing the exact nature of the tension between nationally promoted versions of national identity and individuals' experience of it is the central driver of this article. Using the case of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people from Denmark and the Republic of Ireland, 1 this article argues for a more nuanced view of the intersection between sexual and national identity, whereby it is not reduced to either harmful co-option or rejection.

Based  on  ten  qualitative  interviews  with  Irish  and  Danish  LGBs,  the  potential  for  articulating  an alternative (queer) national sense of self with draws on, subverts, and ultimately transforms hegemonic 2 narratives around sexuality will be highlighted. Adhering to the principle that perspective and sense of self are best revealed by the spontaneous language used in the narration of events (Bauer & Jovchelovitch 2020: 4), interviews were relatively unstructured. While participants were oriented towards the topic with a warmup exercise, pre-planned questioning was restricted to asking for life stories as either an Irish or Danish LGB. Follow-up questions were related only to events already described, and generally involved invitations for further description. 3

The  idea  that  hegemonic  national  narratives  would  be  entirely  relatable  to  individual  experience  is evidently presumptuous. As Homi Bhabha points out, there is 'a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write it and the lives of those who live it' (Bhabha 2006: 1). However, this contrast between mundane experiences of the nation and official narratives does not mean that  the  former  should  be  ignored.  Instead,  the  nation's  pervasiveness  in  many  people's  everyday experience means that the banal cannot be divorced from discussions of national identity. Michael Billig has emphasised that the 'world of nations is the everyday world', citing 'a whole complex of beliefs, assumptions, habits, representations and practices' that must be reproduced 'in a banally mundane way'

1 This is not meant as exclusionary to those with other non-heterosexual and/or cisgendered identities, but was a methodological choice based on access to participants and retaining a narrow focus on narratives of homosexuality/same-sex attraction. I use the more extensive acronym 'LGBTQ+' on occasions when it is relevant to wider political discourses.

2 By 'hegemonic' I refer simply to the idea that these narratives are considered strong, powerful and widespread in discussions of Denmark and Ireland, rather than specifically to Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony.

3 For more information on this interview technique, see Tom Wengraf, 'Preparing Lightly-Structured Depth Interviews: A Design for a BNIM-Type Biographic-Narrative Interview' (2011).

## CULTURE AND HISTORY Nr. 01 January 2022

(Billig  1995:  11).  My  research  draws  on  Billig's  banal  nationalism  theory  and  centres  these  everyday practices/experiences of the nation, recasting them as national narratives in their own right, that are equally worthy of analysis.

For  LGBs,  this  reading  is  particularly  significant  given  that  these  everyday  national  experiences  or attachments have often been ignored. Histories of oppression have sometimes been assumed to lead to exclusion  and  an  outsider  status,  so  that  national  and  sexual  identities  are  seen  as  irreconcilable. Alternatively,  others  have  examined  the  intersection,  but  from  the  perspective  of  the  theory  of homonationalism, according to which queer identification with the nation is heavily linked to racism and exclusion of outsiders, who are deemed threats to the existence of LGBTQ+ people in Europe. 4 Without undermining the fact that homonationalism is clearly an issue in some contexts, it should be possible to describe and analyse national feelings or attachments in a way that goes beyond this theory. One scholar who has managed a more nuanced approach is Lukasz Szulc, whose study of queer national identity in the  Polish  and  Turkish  contexts  contains  the  assertion:  ''it  is  possible  for  queers  to  adopt  national discourses  without  inescapably  falling  into  homonationalism'  (Szulc  2016:  308).  By  extending  the discussion  to  different  national  contexts,  this  article  aims  to  both  continue  and  develop  Szulc's proposition.

Both the similarities and the contrasts between Denmark and Ireland make them particularly interesting cases to research.  While demographically alike in some senses, as two Western European countries with similar population sizes, their stories in relation to same-sex attraction in the 20th and 21st centuries are markedly different. In the case of Denmark, two closely connected narratives can be drawn out from its recent history in relation to same-sex attraction. The first of these is the idea that Danish national identity is  inextricably  bound  up  with  the  concept  of frisind ,  which  can  be  roughly  translated  as  'liberalmindedness' or 'enlightened tolerance in matters of personal belief and moral conduct' (Bech 1992: 146). Without getting into a discussion of whether Danes actually hold such attitudes, it is clear that there is a perception, particularly amongst legislators, that frisind has become central to what it means to be Danish. The second of these narratives is the nation as a global frontrunner when it comes to progressive social policy, so that while not perfect, Denmark represents a comparatively 'good' place to live as someone with  same-sex  attraction.  Denmark's  status  as  the  first  country  in  the  world  to  introduce  same-sex partnership legislation in 1989 is a central driver of both these narratives.

4 See Jasbir Puar (2007), Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham NC: Duke University Press.

## CULTURE AND HISTORY Nr. 01 January 2022

In contrast to these narratives' emphasis on stability, the relationship between Irish nationhood and samesex  attraction  has  been  much  more  tumultuous  during  the  second  half  of  the  20th  century  and  the opening of the 21st. Largely due to the influence of the Catholic Church's dominance over social life, Irishness and same-sex attraction can be read as historically oppositional concepts, a situation reflected in both legislation and accounts of popular culture during Ireland for most of the second half of the 20th century. The swift transformation from decriminalisation in 1993 to marriage equality in 2015 however has led to a strong narrative of the 'new Ireland'. This new Irishness is characterised by openness and liberalism, and the referendum that led to the 2015 marriage legislation is seen as its zenith. Consequently, a hegemonic narrative has emerged that Ireland is now a 'good' place to be LGB, but it used to be 'bad'.

With Bhabha's 'ambivalence' in mind, it seems clear that participants' lived experiences of the nation were  not  as  simple  as  these  narratives  suggest.  While  not  irrelevant,  their  dependence  on  legislation inevitably makes these narratives difficult to reconcile with the lived experience of being Irish/Danish and LGB. Following careful narrative analysis of these experiences, this article begins to chart a way out of a discussion dominated by success/failure as demonstrated by legislation.

## National Subjectivities and 'Floating Insiders'

LGBs  have  often  been  subjected  to  automatic  assumptions  of  exclusion,  whereby  they  are  passive outsiders only ever affected by, or represented by, discourses of the nation. 5 However, participants across both Irish and Danish contexts adopted subjectivities that implied belonging in the nation, or at the very least involvement, contesting straightforward included/excluded or insider/outsider binaries. A subtle linguistic feature that made this subjectivity apparent was participants' use of the national 'we'. Callum, a 26-year-old who identifies as gay or queer and grew up in Cork, and Pernille, another 26-year-old who has identified variously as lesbian, bisexual or queer and grew up in Kolding, both provided examples:

I feel like we've put in a good energy, you know like the craic 6 and… we're fun to have at a party (Callum) I guess that is also why we get so drunk (Pernille)

5 As an example, see Sally Munt's discussion of homosexuality as antithetical to the nation and Irish LGBT's exclusion from St Patrick's Day Parade in New York in Munt, Queer Attachments … 2017: 56-7.

6 Irish slang, roughly translatable as 'fun' or 'good times'.

## CULTURE AND HISTORY Nr. 01 January 2022

The ease with which both participants employ the 'we', automatically understood to mean them and other  Irish  or  Danish  people,  reflects  an  assumed  and  naturalised  membership  of  the  national community. Pernille's  comment,  referring  to  a  perceived  reticence  to  talk  about  sex  in  Denmark,  is notable for the casual manner in which she evokes a shared national characteristic. The fact that the comment was preceded by a longer passage where Pernille details her personal experiences, before linking these to a conclusion about Danish traits in general, is also significant. It is simply taken as a given that the transition from 'I' to 'we' will be understood by both parties as the Danes in general.

One result of such casual self-inclusion into the national community, is the ability to confidently engage in  what specifically  constitutes  the  nation.  Distinguishing  national  'things' was  therefore  a  common feature of participants' narratives. Cara, a 47-year-old who identifies as lesbian, a gay woman or LGBT and lives near Dublin, and Oliver, a 27-year-old who identifies as gay or queer and lives in Copenhagen, both offer prime examples:

It's just you know one of those funny Irish things (Cara)

And I think that's also a very Danish thing, like Forenings-Danmark, like all the clubs (Oliver)

'Awkwardness' or 'close communities' were also examples of these 'things' in the Irish context, while another Danish participant mentioned that eating pork was not a 'Danish thing'. Rather than explicitly political or aggressive assertions of national identity, there is simply a comfort with using the nation as a frame of reference and descriptive tool. The off-hand, almost amiable nature of this familiarity defies simple exclusion from, or blind support of the nation.

Rather than uncritical spokespeople of the  nation,  I  see  these  expressions  of  national  attachments  as representative of being assertive enough to be in conversation with the nation. To capture the flexibility and agency of such a subjectivity, I have coined the term 'floating insider'. Self-inclusion into the national community and comfortable identification with certain aspects of it provide insider status, but this is accompanied by an agency to negotiate, be self-reflexive, and critique one's own position in relation to hegemonic narratives on sexuality.

The ways in which a 'floating insider' positionality was expressed were particularly illuminating for what they revealed about the specificities of the Danish and Irish contexts. For the Irish LGBs in this research, language centred around the idea of a collective journey or transformation was common. All participants

## CULTURE AND HISTORY Nr. 01 January 2022

at some point or another used language that situated themselves as part of an Irish people somewhere along the 'way'. Consistent use of the national 'we', combined with language of paths and directions, evoked membership of a cohesive unit moving forward, as though speaking themselves into  a fused narrative of Irishness and homosexuality. However, to interpret these statements as simply reproducing the dominant narrative of a straightforward liberal transformation and post-2015 harmony would be misguided. For example, Oonagh, a 27-year-old who identifies as lesbian and lives in Limerick stated that 'we're on the right path, but we've a long, long way to go still'. The key to Oonagh's words lies in their simplicity. The national story of a rapid improvement in the conditions for LGBs is relatable and relevant for the individual, but the direct note of caution reminds us that individual feeling is generally messier than the straightforward celebration implied by the 'new Ireland' narrative.

For the Danish LGBs in this research, a similar, although differently expressed, phenomenon can be observed. While they did not tend to evoke such collective images, one can see how their expressions of national identity both related to hegemonic narratives of Danish frisind and Denmark as a frontrunner, while simultaneously critiquing and externalising from them to a degree.

A repeated  pattern  of  speech  involved  some  kind  of  pleasurable  identification  with  Danishness  and positioning alongside other Danes, immediately followed by a distancing from this statement. Victor, a 43-year-old gay man from Herning, for example declared himself proud of being Danish in a country where 'we generally treat people good', before qualifying this with a recognition of 'privilege blindness' and that 'some are more equal than others.' Peter, a 50-year-old gay man from Randers, also expressed pride at the fact that 'we do have quite a big voice' for 'such a small country' and that this was 'really fantastic' because 'we go out and we have the connections so our voice is recognised I would say', before retracting this somewhat by stating that he is just proud if something is a good idea, 'wherever it comes from.' Of note is not so much the content of these statements, in terms of whether they are 'true' or not in their assessment of equality in Denmark or the country's voice on the world stage, but how they continue to exemplify the idea of a 'floating' subjectivity. Naturalised self-inclusion into the national community does not equate to simplistic endorsement of a nation's narratives. In other words, we can identify a working within the boundaries of Danish subjectivity, as opposed to complete dissociation, but also a flexibility to probe its own dominant assumptions.

While it may not seem ground-breaking to be able to both praise and criticise one's own nation, it is nonetheless important to highlight given previous discussions in relation to sexuality and the nation.

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LGBs (and many other minorities) have often not been allowed such nuanced opinions when it comes to national identity. Establishing this space and the idea of a 'floating insider' subjectivity allows for an analysis  that  pays  attention  to  the  specificities  of  individual  experiences  of  the  nation.  Rather  than dismissing any form of attachment as homonationalism, the interesting and subtle ways in which these attachments actually subvert hegemonic national narratives can subsequently be brought to light.

## Subversion but not rejection

As national subjects then, as opposed to merely abjects, individual LGBs can be seen as alternative writers of the nation. As a result, I see the stories articulated during this research as alternative, yet equally valid, stories of Danishness or Irishness. Bringing these narratives to the fore in this way allows for a spotlight on  their  complexities,  and  consequently  the  similarities  and  differences  with  well-known  stories  of Irishness and Danishness. I chose three areas in particular to analyse: narrative structure (turning points, temporality), characters and settings. Above all, what emerged was the impossibility of reconciling the features of hegemonic narratives with individual lives. For example, 1989 as the year of justice in Denmark or the Catholic Church as a simplistic villain in Ireland.  As a result, hegemonic narratives are destabilised and space for alternative attachments to the nation is created. In essence, while hegemonic narratives are by no means irrelevant, they are reductive and subverted by individual experience in interesting ways.

Fundamentally, participants' stories highlighted the fact that human experience, and subsequently our sense of self, derives from a rich tapestry of moments, conversations, places and much more. Narratives were therefore structured in a way that contained many more highs, lows and turning points than the hegemonic national narratives. Bhabha describes this contrast as the 'split' between the 'performative' (i.e. the everyday, dynamic experiences of the nation) and the 'pedagogical' (i.e. the instructive, 'official' version of the nation), with the latter assigning a linear quality to the narration of the nation (Bhabha 2006: 297). As evidenced by this research however, individual narration resists the neat directionality and chronological plot development of the pedagogical. Hegemonic narratives are often constructed around legislative turning points, dramatising the idea of singular and overnight shifts in LGB people's lives, and leading to the idea of a steady, upward plot development. Personal narratives on the other hand were heavy on anecdotes and tangents, meaning that the timelines of Irishness/Danishness they recounted were anything but linear. One example of this messy temporality was the way past experiences were often realised as homophobic or negative only once they were narrated in the present. I therefore see them as

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inherently disruptive of the blunt directionality that the linear timelines of hegemonic narratives assign to a whole group's experience.

As well as this temporal instability, it was interesting to note the events seemingly unrelated to the nation that participants constructed plots around. By foregrounding these, the authority of any official, singular, 'story' of sexuality in Denmark and Ireland is again destabilised. Participants across both national contexts invariably structured their story around individual experiences such as: 'coming out', moving away from where they grew up, significant relationships, their first Pride event or their first crush.

For  example,  Oliver  described  the  years  between  2016  and  2020  as  fundamental  to  his  identity construction. These years were marked by events such as: moving to Copenhagen, making his first gay friends and going to his first gay club. He described how his experiences in Copenhagen have contributed to his belief that it would not have been wise to come out in Bornholm, for the sake of maintaining friendships. Peter also emphasised events unique to his circumstances. He framed his coming out at age 20, in 1990, as a central turning point in his transition into adulthood, particularly in terms of his decision to leave Randers two years earlier, where he did not feel comfortable coming out.

Placing Oliver and Peter's stories alongside the frisind narrative, or as Peter Edelberg helpfully describes it, the 'traditional liberal story of stable identity categories and an overall sense of progress', where '1989 is  the  year  of  justice  for  homosexuals  and  Danish frisind '  (Edelberg  2014:  59),  a  subversion  of  this reductive narrative becomes apparent. Nonetheless, rather than somehow disproving this liberal story, or denying the importance of 1989, I see participants stories as adding depth and complicating it. In the case of Peter, the juxtaposition of 1989 as a 'year of justice' with his description of moving away in 1988 and coming out in 1990, which he sees as 'kind of traumatic' is stark; finding comfort with his identity was clearly not an easy journey with overnight changes. While 1989 was before Oliver's lifetime, the trajectory  of  steady  upward  progress  that  it  has  come  to  symbolise  is  nonetheless  disrupted  by  the fluctuating temporality of the way he represents coming out. His story suggests that it is necessary for time to pass before he is able to revise his understanding of how both himself and others perceived his sexual orientation growing up in Bornholm.

Irish stories also disrupted neat timelines of progress constructed around legislation (i.e. 1993 & 2015). Cara showed similarities to Peter and Oliver in the sense that she emphasised her move to Dublin in 1995 as the key moment in her story and identity construction. Oonagh also offered an interesting story

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in this regard. She dedicated a large part of her story to the process of coming out, that is to say the events related to if and when her family and friends were aware of her sexual orientation. She described a period of secrecy between the years of 2013 and 2016, where she was seeing other women but hiding it from her family. When invited to tell her story as an Irish LGB subject, Oonagh made decisions which discursively constructed an identity and experience of Irishness that did not follow a timeline based on a narrative of 2015 as the culmination of acceptance.

Much like 1989 and the story of frisind , pointing this out is not about denying the significance of legislation or its effect on LGBs as a group, but disrupting the idea that one's sense of self and identity as an LGB person derives purely from being granted certain rights or not at a given moment in history.

In  the  same  way  that  individual  timelines  inevitably  diverged  from  legislative  ones,  the  individual characters of their stories, in all their richness and variety, could never conform to the neat categories laid down by hegemonic narratives. Once again, I see this aspect of participants' narratives as containing a subversive potential. The Irish context was particularly revealing from a character perspective, with figures such as the 'Irish mammy', 'the school nurse' and above all 'the Catholic priest' appearing across multiple stories. Danes on the other hand tended to speak in much more general terms about 'Danes vs. non-Danes'.

The representation of the Catholic priest was a particularly interesting example of characterisation. As previously discussed, hegemonic narratives around contemporary Ireland and sexual orientation have tended to revolve around seeing the Catholic Church and its representatives as 'villains' or at the very least 'of the past'. LGB(TQ+) people on the other hand are presented as former pariahs that have now become shining emblems of the 'new Ireland'. By contrast, this study demonstrates that the Church is capable of being an inescapable frame of reference in Irish LGB lives and experiences, without falling into a reductive hero/villain dichotomy where the relationship is purely oppositional. When it came to the figure of the priest, although he often carried negative connotations or homophobic implications, he inevitably appeared as a more complex, albeit flawed figure than a caricatured villain. Whether in 1983 rural Ireland or modern-day Limerick, anecdotes characterised the priest richly, and did not represent him as simply the antagonist of the story. Rather than any judgment on the role of the Church in Irish life, I argue that this characterisation serves as a reminder that LGB people's everyday relationships and interactions negotiate societal changes in a more complex way than hegemonic narratives allow for.

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Much  as  the  priest  did  not  conform  to  the  caricatures  of  hegemonic  narratives  once  actualised  in individual  stories,  the  particular  settings  in  individual  LGB  lives  could  not  conform  to  the  idea  of 'Denmark' or 'Ireland' as monolithic spaces, where the effects of a concept like frisind are experienced uniformly. In one way then, the multiplicity of descriptions I received of cities, villages and farms across Denmark and Ireland are already a subversion in themselves. To lean on Anderson, the nation-state as a space is intrinsically imaginary, as it is physically impossible to experience the whole of one territory at any time. 7 Ideas of 'Denmark' or 'Ireland' that have proved so influential in legislation-based narratives are not such a factor in individual experience of the physical world.

The city, and above all the gay bar in the city (sometimes euphemistically referred to simply as 'the scene'), was  frequently  evoked  as  a  formative  setting.  In  turn,  I  propose  that  we  can  read  the  gay  bar  as  a subversive and non-national site of belonging. While talking about accessing the LGBTQ+ community, Pernille mentioned the following:

In Aarhus they had a gay bar, so they had like a way bigger gay community - they didn't have anything (in Kolding), like I never met a lesbian before I met the girl at Roskilde.

Although she locates the bar in Aarhus, and therefore Denmark, this detail feels incidental. The primary reason for the bar's inclusion as a setting in her story is that it was where she was able to spend nights 'kissing  girls'.  When  Irish  participants  described  experiences  in  gay  bars,  these  also  had  different geographical  descriptors  attached,  with  Cara  for  example  naming  specific  pubs  or  bars  in  Dublin. However, these descriptors do not negate the fact that the gay bar was represented universally across time and space as a site of negotiation, self-discovery, and security (or a combination of all three). While the broader national context and issues such as legislation may affect the existence of the gay bar in the first place, representations of it in this study were notable for what was shared across national contexts. The gay bar was experienced first and foremost as a gay bar in Ireland or Denmark as opposed to an Irish or Danish gay bar. Although it might seem natural that bars would not be explicitly framed in terms of a nationality, this is exactly why it is worth drawing attention to when thinking about how individuals experience the world. Sense of self as LGBs can be national in certain ways, while still deriving from more  complex  spatial  experiences  than  simply  'Denmark'  or  'Ireland'.  Settings  such  as  the  gay  bar

7 Benedict Anderson's influential Imagined Communities (1983), proposed the idea that national communities depend on the imagination, in the sense that their members must be able to imagine fellow, like-minded citizens without being physically co-present.

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highlighted this complexity and challenge the idea of monolithic national spaces where neat national narratives are experienced uniformly.

With a disruption in place, it is also important to acknowledge the ways in which hegemonic narratives were still drawn on to explore feelings of national attachment. After all, a subversion and opening up does not equate to complete detachment or rejection. For Irish LGBs, even if the legislation narrative based on 1993 and 2015 was not whole-heartedly endorsed, or significantly described in their personal lives, it still provided a framework when thinking about Irishness. Several described happy memories of the vote in 2015, and all expressed positive feelings of some sort around the decline of the Catholic Church's influence. Cara went as far as to say that on that day in 2015 she thought everyone felt 'very proud to be Irish', while two of the younger participants, Callum and Oonagh, specifically referred to 1993 in the sense that they were grateful to be living after that time. Even if participants didn't explicitly mention 2015 or 1993, all participants used temporal language to the effect of 'things are better now than before'. Regardless of empirical data about 2015, 8 it clearly has the potential to represent a comforting idea of 'Ireland' that has been capable of leading to greater feelings of proximity to Irishness.

For Danish LGBs, there was no such symbolic event to draw on for feelings of Danishness.  There were however a couple of interesting, albeit tentative, ways that dominant narratives were used to express individual national identity. As previously mentioned, there was often a sense of 'we the Danes' in the way participants spoke, which automatically produced a generic figure of the 'non-Dane'. This figure appeared across nearly all narratives at some point, as a way of exploring feelings of Danishness and relationships to the frontrunner and frisind narratives. Of course, the figure was given specificity and configured differently according to personal situations. Pernille's description of her Italian girlfriend led to  a  reflection  about  the  comparative  social  conservatism  between  the  countries,  while  Victor's encounters with American tourists as a waiter in Tivoli Gardens generated gratefulness for the Danish mentality of 'minding our own business'. Nonetheless I see all of the examples as evidence of a benign attachment  to  hegemonic  narratives,  rather  than  xenophobia  or  homonationalism.  As  Danes,  'we' understand and can draw on the ideas of Danishness or 'Denmark' embedded in these narratives, even if 'we' do not whole-heartedly endorse them and are nervous about explicit expressions of superiority.

8 The legislation was arguably late compared to many other Western European countries and only came about as a result of pressure from the junior party of the governing coalition, the Labour Party, rather than enthusiastic endorsement from the country's leaders.

## Beyond Subversion

Having highlighted the capacity to both draw on and subvert hegemonic narratives, it is possible to take the  findings  of  this  research  one  step  further  when  thinking  about  what  the  nation  can  mean  for individuals. In his analysis of sexuality and the nation in the Indonesian context, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff describes the relationship between gay and lesbian Indonesians and national discourse as 'one of resonances, borrowings, and transformations, rather than simply rejection' (Boellstorff 2005: 208). As Boellstorff suggests, sexual minorities' relationships with dominant national narratives do not have to be purely reactive, and can instead be marked by an agency to 'borrow' and 'transform'. In the case of my study, I argue that my participants are not only national subjects, but actively involved in a practice of queering the nation. In this way, hegemonic narratives are redefined, not to make new, fixed narratives, but to recast them as permanently malleable, so that national identification is allowed to occur on a much more flexible and situational basis. As we have seen already, everyday life does not tend to present us with  opportunities  or  situations  that  readily  conform  to  dominant  narratives,  and  the  idea  of customisation allows for a more relevant way of thinking about what the nation can mean for individuals.

Such a process, where the basic premise of the narrative is echoed before a personalised redefinition takes  place,  was  in  evidence  throughout  the  narratives  collected  in  this  study.  With  its  emphasis  on tolerance and arguably passivity or harmful assimilationism, 9 the agency implied by reshaping narratives is particularly interesting in the context of Danish frisind . In my conversations with Danish LGBs, there was undoubtedly a recognition of the potential negative effects of frisind , but this did not translate wholly into  feelings  of  alienation  or  apathy  towards  the  nation.  Instead,  there  was  an  engagement  with  the commonly  understood  aspects  of  Danishness  connected  to frisind ,  which  I  see  as  representative  of Boellstorff's 'borrowing' and 'transforming'.

Cecilie, a 73-year-old Danish woman who identifies as bisexual, homosexual, or bi-romantic, exemplified this idea of adopting distance towards received ideas of Danishness while also articulating a version of it relevant to her. She initially expressed reservations about the atmosphere of tolerance in Denmark, in that  you  were  allowed  to  be  only 'a  little  different  from  the  crowd'.  When  describing  her  life  story

9 See Karin Lützen, 'Gay and Lesbian Politics: Assimilation or Subversion: A Danish Perspective' (1998) for further discussion of Danish assimilationism and tolerance as a negative force for

LGBTQs.

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however, she demonstrated a more subtle interaction with the idea of Danishness. She recounted fond memories of involvement in a women's activist group in Denmark the 70s, followed by many years living in Norway. Reflecting on those years, she said:

I felt up there that there was something I missed from here, in some way it was a Danish tradition, a very new tradition you could say…Well I'm happy to be Danish, but it's not like oh I'm Danish!

The 'tradition' Cecilie refers to was the 'openness and ways of talking' that she experienced at the activist group in Denmark, which she mentioned several times during the interview as formative and having increased her sense of belonging as someone with same-sex attraction. Her experiences in the group were not experienced as 'Danish' at the time but became so afterwards during her time in Norway and its subsequent narration, so that we witness identification with the nation occurring situationally, or even momentarily.  Moreover, Cecilie's story once again exemplifies the floating insider status, as we see her negotiating her distance from the nation. By dwelling on the meaning of her experiences, she carves out a vision of Danishness relevant to her, demonstrating that hegemonic narratives of Danish tolerance or liberalism can carry more prosaic and less exceptionalist meanings, that are brought into fruition by different relationships and life experiences at different times in people's lives. Above all, the sense of compromise she finally arrives at takes us one step further than instability or Bhabha's 'ambivalence'. With Cecilie, destabilisation has occurred and the narrative re-worked to suit her personal life story.

The ways in which Irish individuals negotiated the significance of 2015 in their personal relationships with national identity correspond to Cecilie's moulding of her national identity. For Cara and Sean, a 53year-old gay man living in Dublin, the event represented a significant turning point because of the rights it gave them in areas such as inheritance and tax. At the other end of the spectrum, Aisling, a 29-year-old who grew up in Galway and identifies as bisexual or pansexual, approved of the vote as a sign that things were moving in the right direction but was otherwise disinterested and found the concept of the vote patronising. Regardless of the specificities, what is important is that the moment was capable of signifying many different things beyond simply celebration or an endpoint of inclusion. I argue that these meanings reflect an agency to mould the event to their particular life story as an Irish LGB, so that it is assigned a relevant position according to circumstance.

Control and flexibility are significant for the way they broaden and reformulate the hegemonic 'new Ireland' narrative, which arguably reduces LGB lives to the single issue of marriage equality. In addition,

## CULTURE AND HISTORY Nr. 01 January 2022

some have argued that the celebratory aspect of this hegemonic narrative represents a loss of contact with alienation, which therefore 'neutralizes and mainstreams queer memory to the point that it becomes content with inclusion' (Cregan 2011: 194). Based on this study however, it is clear that a lack of alienation and positive memories of 2015 do not equate to contentment with inclusion. For example, Cara presented 2015 as one part of a wider fight to keep reforming Irish institutions and public life. For Oonagh and Aisling,  2015  undoubtedly has a positive presence in how they see themselves as Irish LGBs, but is reassigned as a mostly background event. The dominant narrative of 2015 as the epitome of a 'new Ireland' is therefore capable of being reworked individually, so that its celebratory aspect is maintained without it taking centre stage in people's stories and representing only inclusion.

Such a process of control and flexibility in one's identification with the nation is also productive in terms of how we interpret expressions of pride or pleasure in the nation, which were common to both sets of participants.  These  expressions  can  represent  a  form  of  attachment  operating  independently  of  cooption/transgression or acceptance/rejection dichotomies, and without the need to indicate essentialist identity categories or harm to others. When we hear Peter saying 'of course I'm proud of being (Danish), I like seeing a Danish flag', or Oliver that he 'enjoys' a lot the 'part of Danishness' where 'we are innovative' and 'first-movers', the pleasure derived from national identity in that moment does not need to  be  essentialised  as  a  permanent  attachment  to  Danishness.  If  we  trust  in  individuals'  ability  to customise  their  relationship  to  the  nation,  then  there  is  no  need  for  expressions  of  pleasure  to immediately be interpreted as feelings of Danish or Irish supremacy. As Billig points out, confessing to the pleasure of the nation is actually constructive for analysts. He personally uses the example of his greater interest in the home news pages or a 'citizen from the homeland' outperforming another country in a sporting event, but I see the same pattern in my participants' individual enjoyment of national things. The most important thing is that Billig responds to his pleasure with the confession 'why, I do not know' (Billig  1995:  113).  Once pleasure in national things is accepted, rather than scrutinised as a potential source of guilt or shame, then the focus can move onto how this customised way of identifying with narratives can be empowering.

## Conclusion

This study's discussion of a relationship at all between individual Irish and Danish LGBs and hegemonic national narratives is firstly important to emphasise. Instead of being simply something to dissociate from,  Irish  and  Danish  LGBs  are  capable  of  adopting  a  'floating  insider'  status  within  the  nation.

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Fundamentally, this positionality means that the personal is national, and individual LGB narratives can also be seen as national narratives.  Nonetheless, the range of Irish and Danish LGB experiences collected in  this  study  are  valuable  not  as  some  kind  of  alternative  truth  to  the  picture  painted  by  hegemonic narratives, but as in productive conversation with it. Allowing space for this process is valuable for the destabilising effect it has on the directional and accumulative nature of hegemonic narratives constructed around legislation, as opposed to being a way of supplanting them.

In the context of previous research on sexuality and the nation, this study is significant for its application of Billig's 'banal nationalism' and Anderson's 'imaginary community' theories on national identity in a queer context, without leading to the 'inescapable fall into homonationalism'. The results of my research are not intended to disprove the theory of homonationalism, but to push back against the idea that the nation is inherently reactionary territory for LGBs to enter. Attachment to, and even pleasure in, the nation must be confronted and analysed constructively. The author Biddy Martin declared that we need to 'stop defining queerness as mobile and fluid in relation to what then gets construed and stagnant and ensnaring' (Martin 1996: 46). Martin's words go to the heart of my research; mobility and fluidity are the exact  attributes  my  participants  embodied  in  their  relationship  to  the  nation  and  its  accompanying hegemonic narratives. Instead of a static concept that is 'stagnant and ensnaring' then, the nation can be queered into a site that is participatory and diffuse.

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