ABSTRACT
The Republic of Cyprus decriminalized homosexuality in 1998. In 2011, the first official Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) organization, ACCEPT, was created, and in 2014 the first Pride march took place. The government of Cyprus, in its struggle to Europeanize and posit itself as a “global” capitalist power, is working to change its legal instruments and promote social equality and justice. However, the social practices and circulating discourses used by certain political leaders and the Church reveal the convictions lying beneath the official policies. In this chapter, we discuss how the state is being constituted by imperial shifts of accumulation and financialization through the regulation of sexuality in the family unit. The Republic of Cyprus endorses a pro-LGBT set of material practices and discourses to orient and posit itself in the European family of sovereigns. But while it draws on the notion of sex as an important site of deliberation and distributive justice by attending to its LGBTQI community, it also jeopardizes notions of equality as a social redressing of sexual questions (i.e., AIDS, hate speech, and threats against queers) and other social problems (i.e., poverty or capitalist property relations). In not challenging the material effects of sexual discourses by certain political and religious leaders, the state is complicit with a politics of moralization, the integration and recognition technologies of a neoliberal capitalist project and its contingent sexual/racial sciences. We conclude with ideas about the notion of nervousness within a neoliberal global order.
