This article explores the significance of feminism in transnational activism around LGBTQ protest events, namely equality marches and associated festivals in Kraków, Poznań and Warsaw in Poland. The arguments advanced in this article are based on a multi-method qualitative research project focusing on transnational cooperation in the planning and realization of LGBTQ protest events in Poland, conducted in the years 2008–2009. The authors highlight the decisively coalitional nature of the activist networks around LGBTQ politics in some of the locations studied. (...) They argue that feminists are core actors in these ‘networked solidarities’ around the oppression and marginalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and transgender people both in local and transnational contexts. Solidarity is a concept used by many research participants to account for their political actions and to rationalize intra- and intergroup dynamics shaped by complex webs of differences. The authors draw on postcolonial feminist discussions on the limits and potentialities of politics of solidarity as a ‘politics of location’ to account for tensions which some activists reported regarding their experience of ‘coalition work’. Some of these tensions related to gender politics and gender relations, always articulated in the conjunction of wider webs of power relations. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of the transnational spatial politics of activism around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer politics in Poland. The authors discuss three key themes that emerged from their empirical research on activism associated with the equality marches in Krakow, Poznan and Warsaw. These are concerned with age and the intergenerational politics of solidarity; the connection between migration and activism, and the use of city-twinning links. The authors argue that research on the spatial politics of activism and (...) social movements can enhance existing understandings of the sustainability of activist struggles for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer politics in Poland. (shrink)