Value Politics and the Body: Reimagining Europe’s Normative Project through Feminist and Queer Lenses

This paper examines how struggles over gender and bodily autonomy have become central to the contestation of the European Union’s self-image as a “Union of values.” While Article 2 TEU enshrines commitments to democracy, rule of law, and equality, recent developments within Member and candidate states reveal deep ideological divides over what these values mean in practice. Anti-gender mobilisations, restrictions on LGBTIQ+ rights, and debates over reproductive and bodily autonomy have exposed the fragility of the EU’s value consensus and the limits of its political and legal capacity to uphold those principles. Drawing on feminist and queer scholarship in European politics, the paper analyses how gender and sexuality function as sites where the meaning of “Europeanness” and “European values” are negotiated. It traces how references to “family,” “tradition,” and “child protection” have been used by national and transnational actors to challenge liberal-democratic understandings of equality, positioning the EU’s gender and LGBTIQ+ commitments as foreign or ideological impositions. Through a review of existing literature and EU institutional discourse, the paper explores how these contestations reshape the Union’s normative authority, both internally and in its relations with candidate countries. Rather than offering new empirical data, the paper contributes a conceptual and discursive analysis of value politics in contemporary Europe. It argues that conflicts around gender and bodily autonomy are not peripheral cultural disputes but key arenas in which the EU’s constitutional identity and legitimacy are being redefined. Recognising these struggles as central to the crisis of values allows for a more intersectional and politically grounded understanding of the Union’s future as a normative project.