From Sinners to Terrorists: Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric in Turkey and the United States

• In Event: The Role of Public Discourse in Democratic Retrenchment and Reinvigoration

Abstract

Despite the advances in LGBTQ+ rights in recent decades, institutionalized homophobia/transphobia has been on the rise globally (cf. Bayer 2019, Reed 2021). In tandem with the anti-gender ideology, this institutional stance has been a central tenet of democratic backsliding, threatening to set back the achievements of LGBTQ+ movements around the world. This paper focuses on one aspect of this trend, the anti-LGBTQ+ political rhetoric that mobilizes religious discourse, in Turkey and the US. Through a critical discourse analysis of conservative politicians’ and other political actors’ statements, we demonstrate that the deployment of the religious discourse positions the LGBTQ+ community and Muslims and Christians as mutually exclusive categories, justifying power hierarchies between them. Establishing the LGBTQ+ community’s status not only as sinners but also as threats to the core Turkish and American values, it helps legitimize individual and institutional encroachments on LGBTQ+ persons’ lives and rights. However, we argue that the history and the present of LGBTQ+phobia in these contexts cannot simply be explained with religious hatred towards LGBTQ+ persons. Culturalist arguments that prioritize religion as an explanatory variable fall short of offering a full picture of the discursive and institutional dynamics that maximize the LGBTQ+ community’s precarity. Religion is instrumental to conservative and discriminatory political agendas. However, it is not the only, perhaps even the major, way homophobia and transphobia are reproduced today. A different holy trinity, family/society/humanity, comes to the fore as a major discursive strategy that legitimize anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes and policies. Religion plays a rather complex role in this discursive milieu. It serves as an underlying factor that connects different discourses of institutionalized homophobia/transphobia, as well as building affinity between conservative politicians and their constituents. By revealing both the similarities and differences in the recent history of political homophobia/transphobia in two countries, which are often not juxtaposed in this context, this essay contributes to the literature that contests pinkwashing and culturalist explanations that establish a “developmental hierarchy” between “the West and the rest” (cf. Puar 2007, Butler 2009).

Author

• Sumru Atuk, Ithaca College