Constructions of gender and sexuality
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 right-wing 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?
The chapter proceeds as follows: we start with a brief overview of existing research on right-wing populism, gender and sexuality. Then we discuss the theoretical background of our analysis, before we move on to present the three mechanisms of constructing exclusive intersections of gender and sexuality norms. The conclusion discusses the findings in the light of debates about gender and sexuality in right-wing populism across Europe.
Over the last ten years, social sciences, cultural science and linguistics became aware of the genderedness of right-wing populist and extremist parties and movements. Some studies elaborate on women’s engagement in right-wing parties in different countries (see, for example, Chapter 7), while a lack in comparative studies in this field of research still exists (Bacchetta and Power 2003; Amesberger and Halbmayr 2002; Meret 2015). Other studies focus on gender and right-wing populism and extremism trying to explain the composition of right-wing parties’ voters – who are usually young men (Bartlett et al. 2011; Rommelspacher 2011). Several empirical studies have elaborated on the gender dimension of right-wing populist and extremist parties’ discourses on gender (Geden 2006; Lange and Mügge 2015) and their use of gender to construct ‘internal’ and ‘external enemies’ (Reisigl 2012: 141). Norocel (2013), as well as Mudde and Kaltwasser (2015), scrutinised the masculinity inherent in right-wing discourses. They show how hegemonic masculinity is deeply engrained in the right-wing world-view. Recently, Wodak (2015: 151–175) analysed right-wing ‘politics of fear’ with respect to ‘gender and the body politic’, showing how gender (in)equality is mobilised to construct a threat by the ‘Other’ – mainly Muslim male immigrants – and create a general atmosphere of fear. Others have pointed to the use of intersectionality of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in European right-wing debates to construct Muslim men and women as different and not fitting into European societies (Mayer et al. 2014; Christensen and Siim 2010; Sauer 2013). Most of the research concludes that gender was always an important point of reference in right-wing populist and extremist discourses, following the ‘goal’ of ‘re-naturalizing gender relations’ (Götz 2014).
While the gender dimension of right-wing populism and extremism has already been acknowledged, research on the issue of sexuality in this context is rare. Some studies focus on (male) homosexuality and homophobia in these movements (Claus and Müller 2010). However, sexuality in the context of right-wing populist and extremist discourses has only now become an interesting field of research. Therefore, this chapter intends to fill two existing gaps in research, first by analysing gender and sexuality in right-wing populist discourse and second by a comparative and contrastive approach towards European right-wing discourse on gender and sexuality.
The theoretical foundations of this chapter are based on four theoretical strands: first, on Michel Foucault’s (1978) idea of governmentality, of new forms of governance, including his concept of bio-politics, as well as governing mechanisms such as normation – which takes the (legal) norm as a basis to define the subject – and normalisation – which is based on the idea of normality. Thus, while governing through normation is based on sovereign power, governing through normalisation is grounded in statistics and mean value. Second, we draw on Puars’ (2007) and Farris’ (2012) idea of using liberal values for nationalist and racist policy projects on the right-wing spectrum by introducing the concept of exclusive intersectionality. Finally, we read discursive strategies of right-wing populist groups as struggles for hegemony, as ways to create consensus and common sense of issues such as gender difference and equality and homosexuality.
Michel Foucault (1978) pointed out the emergence of governmentality, a process that began with capitalism in the Global North and includes new aims and mechanisms of governance. Individuals, as well as the population as such, became the target of the new mechanisms of control, through which governing, normation, discipline and normalisation of the population were performed. The birth of ‘bio-politics’ put the improvement of life or the living conditions of the individual and the population as a whole on the agenda of modern states. According to Foucault, sexuality has been one of the most instrumentalised phenomena in power relations in the Western world, but also gender, ethnicity and other ‘personal circumstances’. The medicalisation of (sexual) pleasure established a classificatory system through which behaviour could be controlled and consequently rewarded or punished. That was the birth of the ‘normal’ and, more importantly, of those who were constructed as not normal – i.e. the perverts or deviants.
The goal of governing was on the one hand to strengthen the ‘healthy’ parts of society and on the other to marginalise and exclude those who were constructed and defined as ‘unhealthy’ – i.e. deviant or not contributing to the growth and the ‘sanity’ of the population. These ‘deviants’ are defined on different grounds, including ‘sex’ and ‘race’, among others (Foucault 1978). The constructed ‘others’, those to be excluded, can be ‘the ills’, ‘the delinquents’, members of a different ‘race’1 or those whose sexuality is seen as abnormal and as such do not fit into what Judith Butler calls the ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler 1990). Hence, the construction of ‘races’ and racism is linked to the bio-political concept of a ‘healthy’ nation, but so are ‘sex’ and issues of sexuality and gender. Heterosexuality was assumed to be a natural – and therefore normal and normative – desire of male and female genders. Thus, heterosexuality was perceived as the only justifiable form of sexuality. Other forms, primarily homosexuality, are at best tolerated.
George Mosse (1985) discussed the emergence of the new standards of sexual respectability in the eighteenth century and showed how this process of normation was linked to the idea of the nation. These new standards, according to Mosse, spread among all classes during the nineteenth century and led to fierce attacks on constructed forms of sexual deviance or abnormality. Sexual abstinence became one of the defining elements of nationalism, as well as a nationalist imaginary of proper women (as mothers of the nation) and proper (i.e. manly) men. Both male and female bodies were formed as passionless and, as such, respectable. Nevertheless, sexualised ‘others’ – primarily homosexuals, but also some women who were understood as the antithesis of respectability – were (and remained) an obstacle to the nationalist project in the same way as racialised Others, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were Jews. Biopolitics thus included normation as well as normalisation – the latter, for instance, visible in prostitution policies normalising male sexuality.
Puar (1997) noticed an important shift at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the perception of deviant sexuality: homosexuality increasingly becomes incorporated in the nationalist political project of defining who belongs and who does not (i.e. who is the proper citizen). Her concept of homonationalism questions the classic (feminist) ideas that the nation is a heteronormative project, in which LGBT people are automatic outcasts. In fact, it questions that heterosexuality (as the respectable sexual practice) is at the core of the nationalist discourse by showing how protection of gay and lesbian rights becomes a political tool of some populist parties and movements (such were some statements from members of the French Front National and English Defence League, see below), in order to exclude others at the expense of those who now ‘belong’ (i.e. gays and lesbians). This might be called the normalisation of homosexuality. But homonationalism, as Puar has argued, is not
simply a synonym for gay racism, or another way to mark how gay and lesbian identities became available to conservative political imaginaries. […] It is rather a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationships between the state, capitalism, and sexuality.
(Puar 2013: 337)
Overall, this points to new neo-liberal bio-political strategies and governmentality.
Referring to Puar’s (1997) concept of homonationalism, Sara Farris (2012) developed the concept of femonationalism, arguing that gender equality and women’s rights have similarly become political tools for right-wing populist parties in their project of excluding the ethnicised ‘other’: ‘[F]emonationalism describes the attempts of European right-wing parties, among others, to co-opt feminist ideals into anti-immigrant and anti-Islam campaigns’ (Farris 2012: 187). This includes not only the call to free ‘Muslim women’ from their veils, but also the portrayal of ‘Muslim men’ as a threat to Muslim women and, moreover, to ‘Western values’, including gender equality. Farris (2012: 188) furthermore argues that the reason why gender equality is used as the ‘weapon against Islam’ is political–economic: migrant women have a specific ‘political-economic role in the current conjuncture, which could explain why they, as opposed to non-western men, have been targeted by femonationalist discourses’. Migrant women, Farris explains, are perceived as valuable to the economy, as they do the jobs which nobody wants to do, while migrant men are perceived as a threat, as they are competitors in the labour market – and that is why migrant men are, in particular, targeted by an exclusionary discourse (2012: 188).
One more issue of relevance is the population decline argument. In this discussion, Muslim women are treated in contradictory terms: on the one hand, they are blamed for giving birth to too many children; on the other hand, little attention is paid to the fact that after settling down their fertility lowers to come closer to the national level (this is, for instance, the case with the Austrian FPÖ).
The third theoretical strand is the combination of different dimensions of difference and inequality to highlight specific positions in society. While the concept of intersectionality has been used in feminist thought to focus on and criticise multiple and overlapping forms of exclusion and marginalisation (Crenshaw 1991), political actors use intersecting differences to create political arguments. While Crenshaw’s (1991) notion of ‘political intersectionality’ refers to women’s movements, we can also witness the use and misuse of combinations of categories of inequality to mark specific groups of society, such as Muslim women. We label this strategy ‘exclusive intersectionality’ (Christensen and Siim 2010), as the aim of this argumentation is to create subjects that do not fit into the modern, liberal Western community.
The last theoretical argument aims to contribute to the question of national differences. We locate right-wing strategies of mobilising gender and sexuality arguments as part of their struggle for hegemony in their national contexts. We suggest to see the struggle over gender and sexuality as a struggle for organising a consensus and a struggle for power of right-wing activists. Biological arguments – the nature of men, women and heterosexuality – seem easy to grasp and are familiar and hence are common sense. Therefore, reference to gender and sexuality might easily be used as a discursive tool to naturalise other social and political conditions and situations: ‘natural’ gender positions form a paradigm not only for social inequality, but also for the general, quasi-natural composition of ‘the people’. Gender and sexuality, hence, can be perceived of as empty signifiers (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) referring to natural inequality. Nevertheless, to be successful, the struggle for hegemony needs to be located in national traditions and national consensus on, for instance, gender equality and LGBT rights. This chapter will elaborate on these different national consensus strategies.
In the following section, we outline how the right-wing populist and extremist groups in nine countries refer to gender and sexuality at the intersection of ethnicity, religion and nationality in their discourses. Also, we are interested in the ambivalences and ambiguities that emerge from the different references made to these categories. In our analysis, we found three different approaches of how right-wing populist discourses refer to gender and sexuality. Furthermore, we contend that, although current right-wing discourse in Europe focuses on the ‘core’ topics, such as anti-Islam and anti-immigration policies, right-wing populist and extremist parties and civil society organisations also refer to different national contexts.
The first approach to gender and sexuality can be labelled as bio-political argumentation. It is concerned with mostly essentialist and nationalist ideas about proper gender and sexual roles, which are seen as ‘natural’ and considered as the basis of the existence of the nation. Anyone who is constructed as not fitting them is seen as a potential threat to the – in the words of one Golden Dawn member – ‘purity of my people’ (Konsta and Lazaridis 2013). The concern about the purity of the nation not only refers to the racist idea of an ethnically ‘pure’ Greek people, but rather to the exclusion of people within the nation, who are perceived as contaminating or polluting this purity. Homosexuals are counted as such a group. ‘It is something that is unnatural and we cannot accept them’, said a member of the Golden Dawn, because ‘what is unnatural spoils our fine race, which is Greek’ (Konsta and Lazaridis 2013).
Some right-wing actors base their opposition to homosexual bodies on medicalised interpretations of what is natural and what is not. These actors hold an essentialist position towards sexuality in which heterosexuality is understood as a healthy and natural condition of the two presumably distinct genders, of men and women. Homosexuality is, in contrast, perceived of not only as a deviation, but as an illness, a sign of both biological and mental defect. All of the Greek Golden Dawn interviewees considered homosexuality an illness: ‘Whoever is gay is sick’. Homosexuality is an ‘unnatural love’, where ‘there is no source of pleasure and ecstasy’. He stressed that homosexuality is a psychological disorder, the perversion of men, but that is not his own interpretation; rather, ‘this is pure medicine’ (Konsta and Lazaridis 2013).
These arguments, we can conclude, feed into the bio-political argument, because homosexuality is understood as a sick (and dangerous) fabric of the nation. In other words, these actors agitate – implicitly or explicitly – for the elimination of such degeneration in their nations, but also among their own membership. Again, members of the Greek Golden Dawn seem to follow the most ‘radical’ line in this context. For instance, at the Pride Parade in Athens in 2005 a member of Golden Dawn handed out flyers to the participants of the parade, stating: ‘After the immigrants, you are next’. Similarly, the leader of the Golden Dawn, Nikos Michaloliakos, in one of his speeches, regretted that there is no test for homosexuality, which would enable him to find homosexuals among Golden Dawn (Konsta and Lazaridis 2013; see also Tsolakidou 2012).
Along the same lines, the Finnish Legal Party (FLP) – a new and marginal non-parliamentary party – denies homosexuals party membership, considering homosexuality a sin (Aitamurto and Puurunen 2013). The Bulgarian party Bulgarian National Union follows a similar line and links homosexuality with ‘paedophilia’ (Krasteva 2013) and an abasement of morality that threatens the society and nation: ‘We defend values such as religion, family, morality. Homosexuality directly threatens them, as it puts in danger basic moral pillars of our society’ (Krasteva 2013). In order to make their point effective, their populist strategy is to bring children, the weakest members of ‘our society’, into the picture. In the interviews they either linked homosexuality to paedophilia by equating the two or threatened that recognition of gay and lesbian rights opens the door to recognition of the rights of paedophiles.
Following the same bio-political argumentation of the preservation of the nation or its moral values (with less radical wording), some right-wing populist and extremist actors discuss issues regarding gender equality. The main point of reference here is the preservation of the family and what ‘real’ motherhood is. Hence, it is not only the imagined ‘Other’ – the homosexual and the ethnicised ‘Other’ – which threatens the ‘sanity’ of the nation, but gender equality claims as well. It is in employing this logic of ensuring the preservation of the nation that a French National Front member argued:
We are for a mother income, because we have a lot of women nowadays who must work in jobs they don’t like […]. We realize that a mother’s income would be a way to solve it. On the other hand it is a way to enforce nativity. Because today you often hear: ‘I can’t have kids, I could not feed them.’
(Benveniste and Pingaud 2013)
Usually in right-wing populist discourse, the ‘Other’ is constructed with significant emphasis and meaning, while the ‘We’ group (the nativist people) remains rather vague. At the same time, women of the ‘We’ group are marked as mothers. They are given a specific place in this argumentation: they are seen as reproducing the nation. Reproductive issues, therefore, build a core bio-political argument in some right-wing debates. Referring to abortions and blaming the right to abortion, an Italian New Force member invokes at the same time ‘the problem of moral crisis and of values’ (Campani 2013). Not only do some actors condemn a women’s right to abort, but a member of the Italian New Force compares abortion to the Holocaust:
A Holocaust called abortion. More than a billion of innocent victims in the last hundred years in Europe, more than all the wars fought in the last century, this is called the abortion holocaust As justification of this, many lies: self-determination of women, individual freedom, ideological pluralism, but do we speak of a Human life or do we talk about an object?
(Forza Nuova Sannicola 2009; see Campani 2013)
In contrast to this blaming of women’s emancipation and self-determination, the interviewee sees family, God and the country as a unity, which women have to respect and serve. This framing of the role of women resembles arguments of the Catholic Church since the 1970s, when second wave feminism claimed women’s reproductive rights. Since the UN conference in Beijing in 1985, the Vatican started a campaign against women’s reproductive rights and the notion of ‘gender’ which some European right-wing groups include in their strategy (Buss 1998). Gender issues, hence, are also linked to right-wing bio-political ideas and the notion of the power over life:
Of course, there is a crisis of values. In a country where the natural right to life is transformed into the right to abortion means that there is something wrong. The right is the right to live, and not the right to die before to be born, and from there everything follows.
(Campani 2013)
In some cases – e.g. Golden Dawn and Bulgarian National Union – these bio-political arguments go hand in hand with claims for the exclusion or extinction of those who are imagined as ‘ethnically different’ or ‘unhealthy’ (Konsta and Lazaridis 2013). Hence, racism, sexism and homophobia build an argumentative formation and are legitimised by a bio-political argumentation of preserving the society or the nation, its ‘sanity’ and national or ethnical ‘purity’. This argumentation is apparent in self-declared extremist right-wing groups such as the Golden Dawn, but also in the French Republican tradition of citizenship – for example, where the National Front interviewee evokes the danger of French people dying out and being outnumbered by immigrants. In Italy, with a Catholic and neo-fascist tradition, the idea of reproduction is intermingled with the concept of bio-political control and discipline. Austrian right-wing discourse uses similar frames by referring to an idea of the ‘pure people’, defined by blood (see Chapter 3). Here, women are perceived not only as bearers and carers of the nation, but of the Volk.
Unlike the first group of arguments, there is a discourse of right-wing populists and extremists, which follows an apparently more pragmatic position. Rather than evoking bio-political ideas, they appeal to good morals and liberal values. This reference to values and morals is, however, multifaceted. Good morals should, for instance, ‘lead’ a woman to decide to become a mother, which is the role society or God has assigned her. This argumentation includes the (neo-) liberal argument of choice and free will: women should be given the right to choose and to decide between the private sphere of the family – i.e. of being a mother – and the public obligation of wage labour. Most women, these actors argue, would choose to be mothers and stay with their children, but – as an Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) member stated – an increasing number of women ‘are not able’ to become mothers, due to their (forced) participation in the labour market (Sauer and Ajanović 2013). Giving women the opportunity to become mothers would be a way ‘back to normality’. This is required to keep families intact and to ensure ‘self-responsibility’ of the youth in the future (Sauer and Ajanović 2013). By ‘self-responsibility’, the interviewee refers to the idea that the youth need to learn how to deal with the consequences of their behaviour, which apparently they are not able to do, because the family structure is falling apart and cannot teach them responsibility.
Furthermore, the FPÖ member glorifies ‘motherhood’ as a ‘wonderful career’ for women – alluding to the idea that women do not need (or wish) to have a career and be part of the labour market (Sauer and Ajanović 2013). Another Italian member of Forza Nuova had a similar opinion: ‘Women should stay at home […] I absolutely agree that the role of the woman is to be mother, that is the most beautiful in the world’ (Campani 2013). We can conclude that women in right-wing discourses are used as markers for the division between public and private. Women should perform and re-enact this modern division, which is seen by right-wing actors as a means to restore traditional gender and family relations. And moreover, the focus on tradition and families feeds into arguments against same-sex families. A member of Forza Nuova explains his opposition to same-sex families as follows: ‘The traditional value of the traditional family is the cornerstone of our history, our culture, a culture, which is traditionally catholic, apostolic and Roman’ (Campani 2013). Slovenian SDP (Slovene Democratic Party) respondents also reinforce the essentialist division of feminine and masculine qualities, in the private or professional sphere of life:
I had a talk once with our president and he actually found it good that women came to politics and he wishes that the number of women would further increase, because since women are more active in politics more is being discussed about these social issues, he himself pointed that out. Thus, about the family and such topics.
(Frank et al. 2013)
In the same vein, another Austrian Freedom Party member explains why he is against the introduction of a 50 per cent quota system for political mandates and party positions. This would, he claims, not only discriminate against men, but would also be against the interests of women. He argues: ‘[I]nterestingly, men are more interested in politics than women’ (Sauer and Ajanović 2013). In the Slovenian SDP, gender equality is also only discussed when it comes to shares of women in parliament, where interviewees of the SDP argue against gender quota – similarly to the Austrian case: ‘[We should] stop talking once and for all about what sex is somebody, but instead who is more capable and competent. Since this is the top nonsense. I’m also against all quotas and everything – it’s pure asininity’ (Frank et al. 2013).
Similarly, as right-wing populist and extremist discourses allocate women to the ‘private sphere’, they do the same with homosexuality. Some groups believe that issues of sexuality and, primarily, non-heterosexuality should be a matter of privacy and not an issue of public debate or state protection and intervention. As their (religious) values assume marriage is a union between a man and a woman, issues such as same-sex marriage should not be debated at all. Non-heterosexuality is not a problem, as long as it is invisible and hidden in one’s private life. A member of the Italian Forza Nuova, for example, who bases their political activities and particularly their political programme on the family in a Catholic religious tradition, including morals and values, explained: ‘For centuries who wanted to do his own filth did it, all right? […] That’s the personal sphere and we do not go into that sphere’ (Campani 2013). The Forza Nuova activist further explains that his party does not advocate for political persecution of homosexuals (which allegedly proves that they cannot be accused of homophobia), but their relationships should not be publicly recognised, as ‘private life is private life’ (Campani 2013). Similarly, as another member of Forza Nuova stresses, there is no point in talking about different families, as there is only one true family: ‘We often make mistakes talking about traditional family […] there is no traditional or modern family. The family is one, made by a man, a woman and their children, if God wants them to have children’ (Campani 2013). Along the same lines – although with some internal tensions – the French National Front and other far right French actors intensively agitate for the eternal French values, cultural tradition, rejection of modernity and Catholic model of family, which was clearly demonstrated during the La Manif Pour Tous demonstrations2 against same-sex marriages (Benveniste and Pingaud 2013).
The above-cited statements show the perception of the right-wing populist and extremist actors on women and the public sphere probably having the same function as the bio-political argumentation – namely, to keep the nation growing – however, arguing more pragmatically and oriented towards good morals and liberal values. The Slovenian Civil Initiative for the Family and the Rights of Children (CIFRC) – working in close connection with the Roman Catholic Church and in many ways similar to the French La Manif Pour Tous movement – can also be placed within the group of right-wing populist actors that take religious values and morals as their grand narrative, but the interviews with its supporters showed that the techniques of exclusion have changed: they have become more subtle and hidden, not loud and explicit. That, however, does not necessarily mean greater acceptance (of minorities). Rather, it says something about the shifting perspectives of how to exclude certain social groups, while at the same time using normative human rights language. For that reason, ‘human rights’ increasingly function as an empty signifier. The interviews showed that ‘human rights’ can be filled in by opposing contents – even with the content, which is in total contradiction to the original philosophical basis of human rights as the legal and social tool of equality (Kuhar et al. 2013). A member of the Slovenian People’s Party argued in a parliamentary debate on registered same-sex partnership in Slovenia that ‘the formation of a same-sex partnership is not a human right. Human rights protect the values for which we must strive. Same-sex partnerships are not among them’ (Kuhar et al. 2013).
The third group of populist and extremist right-wing actors expresses support for gay and lesbian rights, same-sex marriage or civil partnership and similarly point out gender equality as an intrinsic value of ‘Western culture’, sometimes presenting even themselves as supporters of gender equality. This form of argumentation stands in harsh contrast to the two strands of arguments discussed above. Nevertheless, some organisations seem to use all three lines of argumentation; however, in these instances, they emphasise one particular strand depending on the group they want to address. Hence, most of the parties and civil society movements take a liberal position, only in order to define the ‘external threat’ or the ethnicised other, which in right-wing populist and extremist discourses is ‘the Muslim (men)’, and not necessarily when it comes to negotiating gender equality and LGBT rights per se. Thus, this strand of argumentation can be identified as either femo- or homo-nationalist, referring to Puar’s (1997) and Farris’ (2012) concepts – as we will show in the following.
Probably the most uncontroversial argumentation – in the sense that these groups follow a clearly positive reference to gender equality – can be found in the right-wing populist groups from Denmark, the Danish People’s Party, and Finland, especially in the case of the Suomen Sisu (SuSi). One of the leading figures of SuSi – a founding member of the organisation, at present a MP – stressed: ‘The individual natural sexual identity, that must be secured […] a homosexual should not be forced to transform into a heterosexual, and vice versa, a heterosexual should not be forced to become a homosexual’ (Aitamurto and Puurunen 2013). This is one of the core differences among the nine countries: in the two Nordic countries gender equality, as well as LGBT rights to a certain extent, seem to have become mainstream and widely supported – at least on a discursive level. A Suomen Sisu member – also a Finn MP – for instance, traced the value of gender equality to pre-Christian times, linking it further to ‘Finnish culture’:
What we know about our prehistory, it was rather [gender] equal and even in our national epos, [Kalevala] there is a certain similar spirit. […] [E]ven though we have had Christianity for centuries, a religion that in some ways reflects the Middle-Eastern view of the gender equality, it still has not been able to disintegrate the culture, which we have beneath it.
(Aitamurto and Puurunen 2013)
Nevertheless, the long tradition is used to distinguish the Finnish culture from the orientalised ‘other’. A female interviewee of the Finns youth organisation who defines herself as bi-sexual is enthusiastic about world cultures, enjoys travelling and does not express hard criticism of Islam and Muslims. She emphasised that ‘only a small part is guilty of serious and violent crimes’.
Although ‘gender equality’ seems to be discussed in a non-controversial way in Finland and Denmark, the issue of LGBT rights is still debated: the Danish People’s Party representative, for instance, stated that same-sex marriages in the church and same-sex parenthood are ‘nonsense’ and referred to the importance of the ‘traditional’ nuclear family (Siim et al. 2013).
In comparison to the Scandinavian right-wing groups, the parties and organisations from other countries of our sample either support ‘traditional’ gender relations and a homophobic or value-laden discourse on homosexuality, as discussed above, or they claim ‘gender equality’ and LGBT rights solely for constructing the ‘Muslim other’. We were able to identify a femonationalist argumentation in the discourse of the Danish People’s Party, the Austrian Freedom Party – despite their rather value-loaded views as discussed above – the Austrian Anti-Mosque civil initiatives (BPÖ), as well as the National Front and the French Anti-Islam activists. In France, the issue of ‘back-warded, traditional and patriarchal Islam’ is mainly linked to headscarves and Muslim women’s body covering. These obvious and visible religious signs are interpreted as a threat to the French secularisation model. Muslim women’s alleged subordinate position seems to be the main argument against Islam and Muslim (immigrant) communities:
In Islam the woman is a slave. She has no legal rights, never. She depends on her father, and then on her husband. […] Even brothers can decide for women. Sometimes the worst man in the country is still considered as a better subject than any women. I mean all the rapes, the legal rapes, never sentenced rapes, all the molested women, the forced marriages […] and what about the circumcision? When will a brave political man in France say: I will put in jail all the circumcision makers?
(Benveniste and Pingaud 2013)
Also, the Finnish interviewees were bothered by the suppression of Muslim women. A young female party co-worker from the Finns Party expressed her concern about the disrespect of women in Muslim communities as follows: ‘I feel bad when seeing that some [women] must walk in a black robe…. Help, is this the person’s own choice?’ (Aitamurto and Puurunen 2013) These statements paint a picture of ‘Muslim women’ as victims and slaves to ‘Muslim men’. The latter are portrayed as perpetrators and rapists, while the call – in one case of the French Anti-Islam platforms – is to put those who condone ‘circumcisions’ in jail – by this, alluding to female genital mutilation and at the same time linking this practice (falsely) to Islam (Benveniste and Pingaud 2013). In the next sentence, the interviewee states that it is a ‘brave […] man in France’ who ‘rescue(s)’ the ‘poor Muslim women’ – uncovering the sheer femonationalist argumentation that has nothing much to do with feminist claims. This, however, does not change the fact that French feminists have built alliances with the right-wing populist and extremist movements in their fight to ‘free’ Muslim women.
Although the Danish People’s Party claims gender equality as a Danish value, it also uses it as an argument to point to the problem of ‘Muslim immigrants’. One interviewee of the Danish People’s Party stated that gender equality is a problem only for the ‘Muslim minority’. The fact that Muslim men refuse to shake hands with women is used as an example to portray Muslims as authoritarian and chauvinistic (Siim et al. 2013). The Austrian Anti-Mosque initiative similarly argues that ‘Muslim men’ need to be educated in ‘gender equality’, a value that is apparently respected ‘here’ in Austria: ‘We throw so much money away for integration. […] We have to start with the families. One has to tell him, that here the man and woman are equal, that boy and girl are equal’ (Sauer and Ajanović 2013).
It is interesting that in some cases, such as in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Slovenia, gender equality is not mentioned at all when it comes to the construction of the ethicised other. In the cases of the Golden Dawn and Bulgarian National Union as well as the Italian Forza Nuova and the Slovenian SDP, this can be explained by their rather radical and/or traditional stance towards gender equality and LGBT issues in general.
The issues of gender and sexuality are, indeed, handy ‘weapons’ in several ways in the hands of right-wing actors and their battle against immigrants and particularly Muslims (and Islam as such). Assuming the modern position of gender and marriage equality, they engage in the clash of civilisation: while the Western countries are discursively produced in their speeches as developed, progressive and respectful of human rights, the obvious submission of women and homosexuals in Islam is a paradigmatic sign of the threat that these people represent to ‘us’. ‘You can still be sentenced to death for homosexuality’, stressed a member of Marine Le Pen’s Young Front National (Benveniste and Pingaud 2013). In this sense, right-wing actors are the much-needed self-proclaimed guardians of Western values and of gender and sexual minorities. Hence, despite the above discussed positions towards homosexuality, LGBT rights are, to a certain extent, claimed in right-wing populist and extremist discourses, again especially when they are positioned against Islam: hence, right-wing support is either partial in terms of denying same-sex couples the right to matrimonial union, but agitating for civil partnerships (such as in the case of the French Front National, British UKIP or even Slovenian CIFRC), or in the context of more liberal and sometimes libertarian approaches, in which these rights are seen as the rights of individuals, where all people should be treated equally regardless of their sexual orientation. Some even take position that the state should not regulate the institution of marriage (such as in the case of Finnish SuSi).
Furthermore, some populist right-wing groups almost pride themselves in having gay membership. A representative of the English Defence League, for example, explained: ‘We don’t care if you’re black, if you’re gay, if you’re lesbian or whatever religious path you follow, if you want to join us to fight against Islamic extremism we’ll take you’ (Bailey and Lazaridis 2013). Regardless of the alterations in the supportive positions of non-heterosexuality, their distinctive differences with the first two groups of actors is the absence of references to the arguments of nature and/or religious and cultural morality. However, their positions are not always clear-cut: the same actors who dismiss Islam on the basis of its attitudes towards sexual and gender minorities might simultaneously agitate for traditional roles of women and one normal family, as is the case with the Austrian FPÖ.
Nevertheless, this support – especially with regard to gender equality – often has an excluding effect or function on the other side. Namely, gender equality, as well as the rights of gays and lesbians, are supported at the expense of denying citizenship rights to racialised others, particularly Muslims and immigrants as such. We would label this claim of gender and LGBT equality, which at the same time is used to present Muslims and minority communities, as backward ‘exclusive intersectionality’: intersections are deliberately constructed to exclude Muslims from an imagined community (see Chapter 4).
The transformation of European countries towards new forms of governance of gender equality and LGBT rights includes new bio-political strategies, normation and normalisation of people. The emergence and growth of right-wing populist parties and movements is part of the transformation process of European states and democracies. At the same time, these organisations, both in their discourse and practice, draw on governmental mechanisms to push through their political agenda and to create hegemony around their central issue of selective exclusion. Right-wing populist discourse combines gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity and religion to create a ‘We’, as well as the ‘Other’ that needs to be excluded. However, neither the ‘We’ nor the ‘Other’ is clearly defined; both seem to be moving targets that are fixed in discursive processes. While it seems that it is precisely the issues of sexuality and gender that differentiate between conservative and progressive extreme right-wing populist parties and movements, we should not overlook the fact that sexuality in the populist rhetoric of these parties and movements is not being used for the politics of inclusion, but rather for the politics of exclusion, elimination, segregation and omission. Although symbolic, cultural, political and legal exclusions of subjects, whose sexuality is constructed as non-normative, is commonly understood as a sign of homophobia (and lately biphobia and transphobia), they are, in fact, part of racism, which is no longer based on biological interpretations of race, but rather in differences and hierarchisations of cultures. It is ‘the way of life’ which accounts for legitimising exclusions and discriminations. In that sense, sexuality is part of the culture, of one’s ‘way of life’ and, as such, the basis for (cultural) hierachisation. In such broader understanding of the processes of racism, non-heterosexuals are ‘racialised others’ in the same way as religious or ethnic minorities.
Our research shows that the ‘we’ is ‘purified’ from elements that are constructed as unhealthy and not fitting to the (national) community, such as gays and lesbians. This normation is part of a discursive right-wing strategy to construct common sense arguments on gender, on how women and men should be and on sexuality. Moreover, it is on the continuum between heteronationalism and homonationalism that our research identifies discursive positions of populist parties and movements in relation to sexuality. Sexuality, like gender, is both a constitutive element of proper citizens, a defining point of who belongs, as well as a pragmatic discursive tool of the politics of exclusion – i.e. a means to construct the incompatibility of the ‘real others’, the Muslim immigrants within European societies. Even in those cases where some homosexual bodies are constructed as worthy of protection, the basic aim of protection in the discourse of populist parties and movements is not the protection itself, but rather the pragmatic politics of exclusion of the others – the racialised others.
1 ‘Races’ do not exist but are being constructed, where different meanings are attributed to certain characteristics. The meanings vary, but all discourses on race have the function to construct ‘the other’ and to differentiate among people along certain – perceived as meaningful – marks. Hence, the construction of ‘races’ is a part of racism (Guillaumin 1995). Racism today intersects with ethnicity, nationality and religion.
2 La Manif Pour Tous is an umbrella organisation of numerous associations who protested against the French bill opening marriage to same-sex couples.
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