Rainbow diplomacy: LGBTQ+ rights and everyday diplomatic practice at Pride
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores how LGBTQ+ advocacy and involvement in local LGBTQ+ activism is enacted by diplomats and mediated by everyday practices of diplomacy. The article analyses the interconnections and disconnections between high-level foreign and diplomatic policy discourses and local enactments and positions of embassies and diplomats. In doing so, the article considers states with an expressed commitment to feminist or LGBTQ+ advocacy in foreign policy, assessing the reality of these commitments on the ground. We argue that, as with debates about the ‘pinkwashing’ or ‘rainbow washing’ of LGBTQ+ rights activism by corporations and states at LGBTQ+ Pride events, a focus on ‘rainbow diplomacy’ at Pride reveals the inconsistent and changeable application of these commitments locally and transnationally, and across time. It also reveals the precarity and vicarious nature of human rights commitments in general and of LGBTQ+ advocacy in particular. The article draws from interviews and ethnographic participant observation of British, Canadian, European Union and Swedish diplomats' engagement with Pride events and LGBTQ+ advocacy in China, Cuba, India, Russia, South Africa and Taiwan. The article demonstrates the influence of individual diplomats in shaping and enacting LGBTQ+ rights support, but emphasizes that reliance on individual agency also makes such commitments precarious and subject to change. We argue for consistent leadership and material support in order that ‘rainbow diplomacy’ can be more than a symbolic and transient engagement at Pride.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".