Far from the Space of Tolerance”

Hungary and the Biopolitical Geotemporality of Postsocialist Homophobia

Bibliographic Data

ID9744712
AuthorsHadley Z Renkin (0000-0001-9407-4438, Central European University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume27
Issue6
Pages2084-2104
Publication date2023-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSexuality & Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1095-5143 • E-ISSN: 1936-4822
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s12119-023-10155-2
OpenAlexW4387518873
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited44

Sexuality has long been central to ethnographic constructions of exotic difference, an index critically demarcating the borders of European Modernity and its negative and positive Others, and underpinning both extra-European colonial domination and modern biopolitical regimes of subjectivity, citizenship, and society. Representations of Eastern European sexuality, however, were also crucial to both Western and Eastern imaginings of modern “European” selves, politics, and societies, and their boundaries of belonging. Yet while recent scholarship has drawn attention to reemerging European orientalisms and sexuality’s salience in postsocialist politics, particularly in relation to recent postsocialist homophobias, little scholarly attention has been paid to the significance of these histories of European sexual difference for the biopolitical character of current borders of postsocialist difference. In this article I combine postcolonial theories of sexuality, geographies of European belonging, and postsocialist studies of sexual politics to analyze popular, political, and scholarly discourses surrounding sexual politics and homophobia in Hungary. Melding historical debates about Hungarian belonging, discursive analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that dominant interpretations of these events constitute postsocialist homophobia as a particularly consequential “problem” reinscribing deeply rooted, and profoundly biopolitical, borders between Europe’s East and West. These readings not only naturalize an imagined West as a space of proper sexual citizenship and tolerance, masking its persistent heteronormativity; they also render Hungary a time–space of complex, ambiguous sexual-political resistance, essentializing its inhabitants as inevitable sexual others of Western Modernity: for some failures of proper sexual citizenship; for others avatars of alternative, sexually-traditional Europeanness

Citizenship · Epistemology · Heteronormativity · Human sexuality · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law

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