From the Street to the Booth: Street Art as a Form of Queer Mobilization in the Context of the 2024 French Legislative Elections and anti-gender politics

This paper explores the role of street art as a medium of political mobilization during the 2024 French elections, focusing on how visual interventions in urban spaces articulated overlapping leftist, feminist, and queer demands. The 2024 French parliamentary elections marked a pivotal moment in the country’s political landscape, as the Rassemblement National (RN) gained substantial support, accompanied by the instrumentalization of “women’s issues” for xenophobic purposes and the promotion of anti-gender politics as well as homo- and transphobic narratives. This paper sheds light on the innovative ways queer and feminist activism and electoral politics intersect in moments of political crisis. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of street art in Paris, the study examines how activists used street art and public space to reframe electoral participation as part of broader struggles for social justice and equality. Findings reveal that street art has been dominated by queer and feminist themes, underscoring a cultural resistance to the surge of right-wing politics. Rather than treating the electoral arena as separate from grassroots activism, these visual campaigns fused calls to “go voting” with critiques of neoliberalism, patriarchy, and homo- and transphobia. Drawing on empirical data collected through ethnographic field-walks in Paris between the two election rounds, the research analyzes street art as tools for political expression and mobilization. Feminist and queer claims appear central in bridging spaces between actors and groups situated in the institutionalized sphere like unions and those situated in the non-institutional sphere like autonomous feminist groups. This alignment becomes evident in the shared promotion of the New Popular Front, created as counter-power to the far-right and uniting parties and civil society actors from across the liberal-left, environmentalist, and left-populist spectrum. The paper argues that this intersection of aesthetic expression and political engagement reveals a reconfiguration of left-wing imaginaries in contemporary France, as street art becomes both a vehicle for civic participation and a form of resistance against the normalization of far-right anti-gender discourse. The article contributes to understanding how non-conventional participation enriches democratic processes, particularly in mobilizing resistance in the form of feminist and queer claims against the normalization of extreme-right ideologies.