ABSTRACT
Introduction Numerous EU countries have introduced marriage equality into their national legal systems and other anti-discrimination measures for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons or are in processes of negotiating such policies. Also, gender equality policies and state institutions for gender mainstreaming have been established at the level of the European Union, as well as in most EU countries. As a reaction to these developments, we have witnessed the mobilisation of anti-feminist, anti-gender and homophobic views in many countries of the EU and beyond. The continuously re-appearing debates about the reproductive rights of women, of social, economic and political equality between men and women and the vocal demands of the LBGT communities for equal rights (including the resounding debates on marriage equality, rainbow families and adoption rights) open discursive fields in which emerging and growing rightwing populist and extremist groups struggle for their world-view. Hence, issues related to gender, gender equality, sexuality and LGBT people became one of the constitutive elements of a right-wing populist and extremist discourse across Europe. Right-wing populist and extremist mobilisation strategies construct images of men and women, which prescribe how the two presumably distinct genders should behave, think and feel (Rommelspacher 2011; Claus and Müller 2010; Norocel 2013). Moreover, these images are linked to the heteronormative interpretation of gender and sexual identities, to the notion of a traditional family, a gendered division of labour and a clear-cut division of public and private. Overall, right-wing strategies aim at constructing a heteronormative gender and sexual order and a clear hierarchy between men and women in all spheres of social life. To render their perspective ‘common sense’ in European societies, these groups combine sexist, racist, nationalist and homophobic arguments in order to construct the ‘Other’ that needs to be excluded and ‘Us’, who are normalised and normed at the same time. To do so, some right-wing actors provide ambivalent and contradicting arguments: while on one hand they blame feminism, gender equality and LGBT rights as being too radical and disconnected from their essential interpretations of gender and sexuality, they nevertheless use the
concepts of equality and respect for human rights as important elements of liberal and ‘Western values’ that are in contrast to the ‘backwardness’ of the constructed ‘Other’. Hence, right-wing populist and extremist mobilisation across Europe constructs an exclusive, while ambiguous and somehow flexible intersectionality. This exclusive form of intersectionality – a combination of different inequalities, such as gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity and nationality – is addressed in the existing literature: Jasbir Puar (1997, 2013) coined the term ‘homonationalism’ to point to the instrumentalisation and misuse of LGBT human rights for the disqualification, marginalisation and social exclusion of other minorities, particularly immigrants. Sara Farris (2012) similarly uses the notion of ‘femonationalism’ to criticise the misuse of a liberal gender equality discourse against so-called patriarchal immigrant groups. Our chapter wants to contribute to this strand of literature. It aims at offering empirical insights into how debates by right-wing actors present gender relations in Muslim communities as patriarchal – headscarf debates are the most prominent examples of this constructed backwardness (Rosenberger and Sauer 2012) – and how the treatment of sexual minorities in these communities is seen as illiberal. Against this ambivalent background, our chapter scrutinises the mechanisms right-wing populist and extremist groups from Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Finland, Greece, Great Britain, Italy and Slovenia use in order to both construct homo-and femonationalist exclusions and exclusions based on the heteronormative matrix, but also construct what – at least on the surface – looks like inclusive images of gender and sexuality norms. We want to elaborate on these discursive strategies, in order to describe the link between gender and sexuality and ideas on the nation and nationality. Hence, the chapter will depict the connections between gender inequality, sexism, homophobia, nationalism and racism of right-wing populist and extremist groups and will show how exclusive intersectionality works in their discourse. Our analysis identifies three discursive strategies of right-wing populist and extremist groups’ discourse with respect to gender and sexuality: we label these mechanisms as (1) bio-political argumentation; (2) normation and the division of public and private; and (3) homonationalist and/or femonationalist argumentation (normalisation). Moreover, from a country-comparative perspective, the chapter aims to analyse how these mechanisms differ in the countries under scrutiny. How do right-wing populist and extremist groups deal differently in different national contexts with the ambivalence of normalising homosexuality and feminist emancipation on one hand and excluding gays and lesbians and demonising gender mainstreaming on the other? Do we find similar argumentation in different countries, arguments which travel from one country to another? Do national differences in gender equality policies and in the acknowledgement of LGBT rights impact on right-wing populist and extremist discursive strategies and thus can explain why some right-wing populist parties and movements follow a more liberal position with regard to issues such as same-sex marriage, family and gender equality measures?
