ABSTRACT
In the 28-member bloc of the European Union (EU), gender and sexuality rights are highly regarded as part of the catalog of fundamental rights available to EU citizens, and the EU is viewed as a vanguard in promoting LGBTQ rights internationally. This chapter highlights an ambiguous aspect deduced from the EU's economic origin: the predication of sexual rights on neoliberal market policy creation. LGBTQ politics are a comparatively young field of policy action and analysis, and the bloc's general antidiscrimination agenda covering gender and sexual orientation specifically in employment results from the fact that all EU law has to be justified in relation to the liberalization of the single market. The chapter focuses on the politics of sexuality, and explores how the construction of sexual differences conditions the work of LGBT advocates in regional markets in the context of the EU's rights policy discourse, which has at least normatively been broadened to include all major ethnic and social minorities.
