Radicalizing Homonormativity, promoting Authoritarian Metapolitics: How LGBT(IQ+)-led Anti-Gender Campaigns modernize and normalize Anti-Democratic Sexual Politics

A growing body of research indicates that, over the last decade, LGBTIQ+ rights and communities have become the primary targets of anti-gender mobilizations and right-wing populist attacks in Europe. Thus, and as a result of their predominantly heteronormative and LGBTIQ+ hostile politics, authoritarian right-wing populism and anti-gender mobilizations are typically positioned in opposition to LGBTIQ+ communities, and those who identify as LGBTIQ+ are often assumed to be politically aligned with ‘the Left’. However, research has shown that a rather ambivalent and “paradoxical” relationship exists between authoritarian right-wing populism and pro-LGBTIQ+ rights politics (Möser et al. 2022). For instance, the figure of the ‘homophobic migrant’ is regularly mobilized by far-right parties, and respective racialized rhetoric has also been identified within LGBTIQ+ movements. Additionally, the boundaries between anti-gender mobilizations and LGBTIQ+ movements have also been analyzed as “blurred” (Beck et al. 2023), particularly in relation to so-called TERFs. In our paper we want to take existing research on the “blurred boundaries” and the “paradoxical relationship” between LGBTIQ+ communities, authoritarian right-wing populism and anti-gender mobilizations a step further, particularly by highlighting LGBT(IQ+) activists and politicians as active promoters (and not only accomplices!) of anti-gender campaigns and authoritarian sexual politics: First we are shedding light on ‘older’ perspectives and theoretical concepts from Queer Studies (such as “gay respectability” and “the new homonormativity”) which demonstrate, that violent and racialized forms of homonormativity paired with transhostility are an integral part of LGBTIQ+ histories. Against this backdrop, we are arguing that these genealogies are powerful dipositifs on which contemporary LGBT(IQ+)-led anti-gender campaigns are built. And second, by focusing on LGBT(IQ+) led anti-gender campaigns in Germany and the US, we are demonstrating that LGBTIQ+ communities are not only complicit in anti-gender or authoritarian right-wing politics, but are actively modernizing and normalizing respective narratives, for instance by creating ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ or ‘trans’, thus (allegedly) ‘liberal’, versions of anti-gender narratives. Hence, our aim is to illustrate that parts of the LGBTIQ+ communities and LGBTIQ+ movements are also active agents in shaping and promoting authoritarian metapolitics and thus contributing to a de-democratization of society via an authoritarianization of sexual politics.