Gender Equality, Gay Rights and the Danish Politics of Belonging

In recent years, dominant discourses have increasingly articulated gender equality, feminism, and lesbian and gay rights as signifiers of the cultural identity of the Danish nation, and also as primordial Western values serving to set the west hierarchically above ‘the rest’, to cover over sexism and homophobia within the body politic, and to vindicate coercive policies targeting non-western immigrants, most notably Muslims. The paper examines these problematic articulations, including their constructions of threating or undesirable (internal as well as external)‘others’, and traces some of the parallels but also differences between support for feminist and gay issues in the context of the Danish politics of belonging. Empirically, it engages with different case studies, including immigration policy, official governmental statements concerning gender equality and gay rights, and mainstream media debates around the annual gay pride parade.