Anti-LGBTQ+ Politics in Turkey: Towards a Theory of Authoritarian Appeal

• In Event: Gender and Authoritarian States

Abstract

A new cohort of authoritarian politicians are becoming more popular globally, demonstrating a shared hostility towards LGBTQ+ populations and their public struggle for equal rights. This emphasis on the “gay threat” is particularly puzzling in today’s context, considering that unlike the previous waves of politicization (such as the AIDS epidemic) the exclusion and oppression of queer people are often not a pressing demand or public concern for large sections of the populations.

This paper asks: What would it mean to take seriously the transformation of mere social dislike of non-normative performances of gender and sexuality into a political homophobia for our understanding of authoritarianism’s appeal? And more broadly, how is this exclusionary and often violent anti-LGBTQ+ politics rendered intelligible to the various publics in contexts ranging from nominally democratic nations (such as Trump in the USA, or Meloni in Italy) to emergent and consolidated authoritarianisms (as in Orban in Hungary, and Putin in Russia)? In order to answer these questions, the paper considers both the production and the consumption of these anti-LGBTQ+ politics in contemporary Turkey, using novel data gathered during an extensive fieldwork in Turkey and the qualitative analysis of over 120 in-depth interviews.

Contrary to the existing literature, the paper argues that the choice of the LGBTQ+ politics as the target of authoritarian attacks cannot be understood as haphazard scapegoating (as an instrumentalist move born out of the victim’s weakness) or populist culture wars (as an attempt to consolidate or broaden the supporter base through negative identity formation). Instead, drawing from the works of Hannah Arendt and scholars of queer theory, the paper argues that this anti-LGBTQ+ politics is an example of the broader right-wing authoritarian strategy to control who gets to appear in the public space and how. By controlling the space of appearance for queer claims—in public protests, popular media representations, or news reporting—this new cohort of nondemocratic leaders produce the affective and hermeneutical conditions in which not only their existing supporters but larger sections of the population are drawn to their arguments. Here, the choice of the LGBTQ+ politics is not random for these new authoritarians. It is the fundamental contingency of using performances of gender and sexuality as categories of identity that makes LGBTQ+ politics a unique target. Targeting a “group” rendered as such only politically (a “group” or a category of people whose “groupness” is constituted by a discursive rather than natural category of difference) allows these new authoritarian politicians to argue that the present disagreement and exclusion could be avoided, if only the victims would rescind their claim to difference. Therefore, such attacks on LGBTQ+ politics not only avoid disturbing the fantasies of pluralism and security enjoyed by the broader populations, but they actually assure and reinforce them.

Pointing towards the use of anti-LGBTQ+ politics as an authoritarian strategy, the paper reveals that the difference between nondemocratic leaders in democracies and autocracies is not a difference of kind but of degree. Specifically, the degree in which the aspiring or successful autocrats can confine, shape, or otherwise influence the public spaces of appearance without facing consequences.

Author

• Burak Tan, University of Chicago