Gender and sexuality as intrinsic to the far right : the cases of Poland and Czechia


Adrien Beauduin, Central European University

Recent scholarship on the far right considers cultural aspects, like anti-migration sentiments, distrust towards supranational institutions and authoritarian tendencies, as the key to understand the far right, displacing other factors like socio-economics (Inglehart and Norris, 2016; Mudde, 2007). According to such scholarship, the transformation of politics in ‘culture wars’ has challenged traditional Left-Right divisions and led to a greater polarisation between fixed groups defined by their identity, and not their socio-economic class. Despite the unquestionable rise of cultural questions in political debates, I argue in this paper that the analytical division between identity and class, between recognition and redistribution, obscures more than explains the dynamics of the far right. Indeed, Instead, I propose a more dynamic use of intersectionality as an analytical approach taking into account multiple facets in their complementarity and interaction (Anthias, 2013), with race, class, gender and sexuality as some key categories coming together in far right ideology and practice. Drawing from my research on the Polish and Czech parliamentary far right, including interview with members, I show how closely imbricated cultural questions – such as the gender and sexual order – and political and socio-economical ones are. While the Polish Konfederacja proposes a strict heterosexist order as part of its paleolibertarian socio-economic and political system, the Czech SPD champions a less strictly defined understanding of the family to be favoured by welfare chauvinism and protected from the alleged excesses of liberalism. In particular, I analyse the two parties’ relationships of resistance to – and complicity with – the neoliberal order. While the Polish case shows the example of an ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative response to neoliberalism, coupling an acceleration of the ethos of commodification, exploitation and competition in economics with the economical, political and cultural empowerment and protection of the ‘traditional family’, the Czech case exhibits a national arrangement with the system, with welfare chauvinism directed against supranational institutions, migrants and the local racialised Roma minority. Drawing from my research’s comparative insights, I claim that both cases show that, while gender and sexuality are subordinated to the central issues of nationalism and xenophobia in the party’s ideologies and communication, they nevertheless occupy a central place in their visions of society. Moreover, going beyond the focus on ideology and policy-making, I look into the ways in which political activism itself taps into the gender and sexual order, among others with the centrality of the figure of the masculinist strongman as embodying a particular heterosexist order (Geva, 2018). As I show in my research, issues of gender and sexuality are not mere instruments, but rather intrinsic aspects of a particular ‘normal’ social order to be defended against outside assaults by the European Union, leftist-liberals, feminists and LGBT+ activists. Shifting the academic focus from the ideological positions of the far right on gender and sexuality, or the importance of these topics compared to other aspects, I adopt a holistic approach to examine the ways a particular gender and sexual order underpins and constructs hierarchies built around other categories, such as race and class. In this endeavour, I pay a particular attention to the ways these axes of difference interact with each other, treating each of them as co-constructed by the others.

This paper will be presented at the following session: