Beyond the Secular–Muslim Divide: Gendered Symbolic Repertoires and Anti-LGBTI Politics in Turkey

This paper asks: in periods of intensified anti-LGBTI politics in Turkey under religious-conservative AKP rule, how does the AKP read and learn from the symbolic repertoires of the secular opposition—which formally maintains a liberal, rights-based politics—to recalibrate its own anti-LGBTI agenda? Rather than taking the secular–Muslim divide as the main axis of conflict, I show that both government and opposition draw from a shared stock of gendered symbols, such as family honor and virile masculinity, which becomes decisive precisely when LGBTI issues are framed through intimacy and proximity rather than law and rights. Conceptually, the paper brings into dialogue scholarship on symbolic repertoires (Boussaguet & Faucher; Tilly) and feminist analyses of nation and gender in Turkey (Göle; Kandiyoti; Korkman; Müftüler-Baç) with contemporary debates on anti-gender politics. I map how Turkish opposition parties have developed relatively robust pro-LGBTI stances anchored in formal liberal politics, and these stances embed LGBTI rights in widely legible symbols—equal citizenship, the social state, contemporary civilization, social peace—making them harder to attack as “anti-national politics.” The core of the paper, however, shows that these liberal registers have difficulty travelling into intimate and affective registers. I develop this argument through a qualitative case study of a homophobic campaign by a veteran ruling-party politician targeting a cisheterosexual male/father and pro-LGBTI main opposition MP on X (Twitter). Using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, I examine a mini-sequence of tweets in which the AKP politician first asks whether this opposition MP would want his children to “be LGBT,” and later insinuates that the opposition MP has attended “gay parties” abroad. Each intervention generated millions of views and prompted unusually dense and coordinated rebuttals and rage from opposition MPs. Treating these moments as a lens on symbolic politics, I show that they function as “tests” that relocate the debate from abstract rights to kinship and spatial proximity: would a politically pro-LGBTI liberal opposition figure want queer children? At precisely these points, opposition actors largely abandon their earlier rights-based statements about LGBTI citizens as “honourable” and instead foreground the MP’s status as a father of daughters, his distance from queer spaces, and their outrage at the implication that a “man with a family” could frequent a gay bar, drawing on long-standing gendered symbolic repertoires of Turkish politics. The paper explains this shift through two linked claims. First, there is a structural gap: opposition parties possess rich formal political tools for LGBTI rights as law, citizenship, and social policy, but far fewer symbolic repertoires for queer kinship or ordinary coexistence with queer spaces. Second, there is an asymmetry of authoritarian learning: AKP elites actively probe and refine anti-LGBTI politics by reading opposition symbolic repertoires as feedback, whereas the opposition cannot easily learn its way out of these traps because the actors that historically sustained its pro-LGBTI stance—the LGBTI movement and its coalitions—are precisely those most repressed in the current conjuncture, while conservative heteronormativity remains deeply embedded in institutions and everyday common sense.