Conclusion

The political and intellectual work with this book has been sustained by an ambition to provide a pluralist image of feminist and LGBTI+ activisms. Influenced by significant interventions in feminist and queer postcolonial and postsocialist theory and inspired by new developments in critical geographies of resistance and space (Browne et al. 2017; Ghodsee 2019; Roy 2016; Stella 2015; Suchland 2011; Tlostanova et al. 2019), this ambition shaped our point of departure for the book as we have sought to develop a nuanced account of feminist and LGBTI+ formations and exchanges across diverse spaces and scales. In our endeavor we have aimed to push forward an intellectual concern about the rigidity and taken-for-grantedness of categories such as North/West and South/East in current geopolitical and epistemological projects (Müller 2020; Tlostanova 2012). Struggling ourselves to clearly position Russia, Turkey, and even Scandinavia within these distinctions, we have strived to show throughout the book that the boundaries of these categories are contested, multiple, ambivalent, and fluid. By introducing such inconvenient geopolitical contexts within the same project, we have been doomed to “complicate and disrupt the binarism” (Tlostanova 2012, 131) of the West–East and the North–South