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Budapest W6: Nationalism, Gender, Sexuality - Looking at Pictures of Gay Men


Graff, Agnieszka. 2010. Looking at Pictures of Gay Men: Political Uses of Homophobia in Contemporary Poland. Public Culture, 22(3): 583–603. 

"Instead, I aim to examine the dynamic of what I call the politicization of homophobia, that is, to look at the interplay between revived nationalist sentiment in Poland’s public sphere following the country’s May 2004 European Union (EU) accession and the trend of gay bashing, which was indulged in or at least condoned by state authorities." p.583

"the homophobic discourse of this period was political and largely reactive, fueled by the EP’s anti-homophobia resolutions. In short, the conflict was more about cultural identity and national pride than about sexual orientation or public morality." p.584

"Europe was vilified as perverse and ridiculed as effeminate, but this derision was followed by reassurance: surely, given our healthy commitment to tradition, Poland would resist pressure to conform" p.585

"both homophobia and the charge of homophobia have come to function in the EU as instruments of boundary drawing, tools for exclusion and inclusion." p.586

Fassin - "in a common context of anti-immigration backlash ‘gender equality and sexual liberation’ provide a litmus test for the selection and integration of immigrants, in particular from the Muslim World" p.586

Poland unfairly accused - the logic of politicised homophobia - "Thanks to right-wing gay bashing, the LGBT community won the sympathy of people who would never have supported sexual rights. Their concern was for human rights and the state of democracy. However, sexuality was now at the center of these issues." p.588

"Not only were gays and lesbians being stigmatized in the name of patriotism, but national sentiment was now regularly expressed through the exclusion of the sexual (rather than the ethnic or cultural) other... homophobia was becoming the new discourse of patriotism" p.590

"the right to be a “homophobe” became a question of Poland’s sovereignty, the term always in quotation marks, now ironically appropriated as an identity by proud “patriots."" p.591

The Gay and the Jew - Jew/ish is used as a slur in Poland - from children to football fans, it is bandied around as a word meaning less than, sneaky or 'Other'.

"Some right-wing commentators have suggested that the gay-Jew analogy is a form of moral blackmail, since it unfairly casts sexual conservatives as antiSemites. Jewishness, it is argued, as an ethnic and religious identity is ethically neutral, while homosexuality, as a sin, can and should be judged in moral terms." p.594

"the “Judaization of the object of hatred,” a common rhetorical pattern in Polish public debates." p.595
"both were outsiders, accused of unmanly decadence" p.596

Politicised homophobia meets discourse of gay assimilation - 2008 speech from Polish president "The central message was that the EU seeks to violate the integrity of Poland’s traditional culture and that this must be resisted" p.597
"Woven into the speech were pictures from the wedding of a gay couple, the “perverse” union serving to sexualize the opposition between Poland and Europe, us and them. To put it briefly: we are heterosexual, traditional, and we cherish boundaries; they are demoralized, homosexual, and intent on pushing things too far" p.597

"politicized homophobia in Poland is a discourse of wounded pride characteristic of the postaccession period: the aim is to demonstrate that as an EU member state we can, indeed, afford to be homophobes" p.601

"It is important to understand the extent to which the idea of sexual freedom is instrumentalized in discourses that are, in fact, concerned with neither freedom nor sexuality— their real investments are national identity, state boundaries, money, and power" p.601

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