Racialised, gendered, and sexualised notions of threat and protection play a central role in current homo- and heteronationalist formations across the globe, as well as in ongoing attempts to secure and defend these formations. In the last decade alone, iterations of this in Sweden have included populist claims about “threatening Muslim Others” as well as military PR campaigns promising to protect LGBTQ+ people both at home and abroad. If anything, these discursive struggles over racialised, gendered, and sexualised notions of (in)security have been intensified in the face of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in the name of “traditional values”, and the ongoing rearmament and reterritorialization of Sweden's defence in response to this. This paper examines the various ways in which queer struggles and queer lives are invoked in racialised and securitised narratives about who is considered a threat, who is portrayed to need protection, and who is assumed to be the provider of that protection. By investigating dynamics of protection in the context of Sweden, a country often considered to be particularly inclusive of LGBTQ+ people, it critically engages with binary notions of protector/protected in relation to queer subjectivities. It combines queer and feminist approaches to conflict and (in)security with postcolonial and critical race studies, expanding existing analyses of security discourses and contributing to a nuanced understanding of how race, sexuality, and gender are mobilised in the formation of securitised national identities as well as ongoing processes of European militarisation and re-armament.
