Nationalist contradictions

On the Relations Between Homonationalism and its Fascist Critics

Abstract

What exactly do we mean by ‘nationalism’ when we research and critique homonationalism? The question has become important since much anti-LGBTQ activisms and politics are articulated as nationalist – being performed in the name of ‘the nation’. I argue that a more careful attention therefore ought to be given to (homo)nationalism as part of a contradictory process, by examining what the ‘nation’ in homonationalism is taken to be. The argument goes hand in hand with the necessity to trace the historical and geographically specific, changing nationalist strategies and aims, such as liberal and extreme-right nationalist reproductions of homonationalist discourse, and how they shape each other. Simultaneously, a critical approach is taken towards the tendency to research homonationalism as a pre-defined set of discursive characteristics which travel from place to place, being identified as a nationalist form in itself, rather than being placed in historical and geographical context, and in dialectic with globally and locally instituted nation-state forms. This paper is a theoretical piece, based on research from my PhD thesis in human geography on sexuality discourse in conflicting nationalist ideologies in Sweden. While it includes empirical examples, the paper’s central aim is to make a theoretical contribution to how we might theorise the contradictory articulations of gender and sexuality in nationalist ideology.