‘In Sweden,girls are allowed to kiss girls,and boys are allowed to kiss boys’: Pride Järva and the inclusion of the ‘LGBT other’ in Swedish nationalist discourses

Abstract

This article discusses Pride Järva, a ‘gay pride’ march organised by right-wing publicist Jan Sjunnesson in Stockholm’s northern suburbs. Analysing the event, and in particular a speech made by Sjunnesson during the parade in July 2016, I argue that it is indicative of the specific ways in which right-wing actors in Europe increasingly enlist LGBT rights in nationalist, xenophobic and racist projects of exclusion. As markers of tolerant and progressive ‘Europeanness’, they are used to construct and reproduce dangerous racialised and Islamic others along lines of sexuality and gender, a narrative that resonates with established notions of Swedish gender exceptionalism as well as homonationalist-orientalist narratives of threat and protection. Despite their history of actively opposing the expansion of LGBT rights, Sjunnesson and his political associates combine these narratives with a conceptualisation of LGBT issues as private and depoliticised to produce themselves as the ‘true’ protectors of LGBT rights in Sweden.

Keywords

Homonationalism LGBT nationalism othering Swedish gender exceptionalism

Introduction

The grainy YouTube video shows a middle-aged white man standing in a market square, addressing people from a makeshift stage. Over white trousers, he is wearing a bullet-proof vest and a red baseball cap reading ‘TRUMP 2016’. A small group of demonstrators becomes visible, waving rainbow flags and signs: ‘HBTQ [sic] rights everywhere’ and ‘#NoOrlando’.¹ Behind them, uniformed police are patrolling among people doing their shopping. This is Pride Järva 2016, a ‘gay pride’ march organised by right-wing publicist Jan Sjunnesson in Rinkeby, a northern suburb of Stockholm. A party member of the nationalist-populist Sweden Democrats (SD) and staff writer for far-right website Avpixlat, he tells his audience that while Sweden is inherently tolerant of gay people, this tolerance and the people to which it is extended are threatened by the increasing influx of homophobic immigrants from Muslim countries.² And since established Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) organisations are too ‘politically correct’ to take up this issue, it is up to him and likeminded people to speak up and to protect Swedish values, Swedish laws and the rights of gay people in Sweden.³ While he speaks, the police prevents a group of protesters from entering the square. The activists are shouting ‘Not in our names!’ and ‘No racists in our streets!’.

Within a fairly short time span, choice members of LGB(partially also T) communities in Europe have gone from being second-class citizens with limited or no rights to markers for sexual enlightenment and tolerance (Dhawan, 2013). ‘How well do you treat your homosexuals?’ has become a paradigmatic question through which nations and cultures are evaluated with regard to their ability to conform to a universalised notion of civilisation (Puar, 2010). As the scene above shows, it is increasingly posed by people who otherwise might be the first to condemn the unnatural and morally corrupt character of homosexuality.

This article discusses Pride Järva, and in particular the speech made by Sjunnesson in 2016. While existing studies on homonationalism in Europe have focused on ways in which LGBT rights organisations have used racialised othering to advance their issues into the political mainstream, I argue that Pride Järva is indicative of the specific ways in which right-wing political actors actively exploit LGBT issues and established homonationalist narratives to exclude racialised others.⁴ They use LGBT rights to construct and reproduce notions of tolerant and progressive ‘Europeanness’ (here in the form of ‘Swedishness’) vis-a-vis a threatening Islamic and racialised other ‘imported’ (as Sjunnesson puts it) into Western European countries. They employ and reproduce some of the same homonationalist discourses as certain LGBT organisations, activists and politicians, but they also differ from them in that these right-wing actors themselves have been (and are) actively and consistently opposing the expansion of LGBT rights, and continue to stigmatise LGBT people as internal non-heteronormative, non-cisnormative others. Instead, they attempt to enlist LGBT rights and the activists fighting for them for their own xenophobic, racist and nationalist projects of racialised othering without actual engagement in LGBT rights.

Jan Sjunnesson’s speech at Pride Järva is part of wider discourses constructing and reproducing ‘Swedish’ (and by extension ‘European’) selves and others along lines of gender and sexuality. He clearly draws on and reproduces existing narratives that are recurrent and widespread beyond the political right. In fact, their recurrence is to some extent what makes Pride Järva at all ‘possible’. Central among these are notions of Sweden as a particularly progressive country with regard to gender equality and LGBT rights (described as ‘Swedish gender exceptionalism’ (Keskinen et al., 2009; Martinsson et al., 2016)), descriptions of homophobic hate crimes with racialised/Muslim perpetrators (Haritaworn, 2010), as well as so-called rescue narratives (Bracke, 2012; Jungar and Peltonen, 2015), all of which can be found in statements by politicians and activists beyond the right-wing part of the political spectrum. I argue that Sjunnesson builds on and extends them by adding a ‘protector’ narrative particular to right-wing political actors, revolving around the notion of ‘leftist political correctness’ silencing LGBT concerns about immigrant homophobia. This alleged failure of LGBT organisations to protect ‘its people’ is portrayed as making it necessary for the populist right to step in and to stand up for Swedish values and laws as represented by LGBT rights. As the article shows, this position as the ‘truth-speaking protector of gays’ fits badly with Sjunnesson’s language and politics. It also demands a domesticated, depoliticised and defenceless LGBT community at ease with living private lives tolerated by a heteronormative majority, under the ‘protection’ of an otherwise homophobic and transphobic right, and with no interest in opposing the violent exclusion of other minorities. So even if Sjunnesson shares some of his rhetoric with other homonationalist actors, his (dis-)engagement with LGBT issues and activists sets him apart.

After a brief discussion of existing literature on European homonationalism, this article looks more closely at the Swedish context, particularly SD’s conceptualisation of LGBT people as docile internal others. Based on reporting around the event, I discuss the evolution of and resistance to Pride Järva, and analyse Sjunnesson’s speech in Rinkeby in 2016, focusing on the various ways in which he uses LGBT rights to construct threatening ‘non-Swedish’ others, portraying himself and his political associates as truth-telling protectors of LGBT people.

‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of others

Racialised notions of gender and sexuality have throughout history been used to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable ways of being ‘European’, demarcating the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’, the desirable and the undesirable, the insider and the outsider. While homosexuals previously have been one of the cultural others on the borders of Western European societies, they are now actively incorporated as markers against racialised non-Western (often Islamic) others. The emancipation of LGBT people is used to frame Western European countries as ‘avatar[s] of both freedom and modernity’ (Butler, 2008: 2) in a global context. This European brand of homonationalism (Puar, 2007) is frequently built on narratives around threat and protection, making it easy to integrate into the rhetoric of the populist far right.

Puar’s concept of homonationalism enables us to analyse how certain members of the LGBT community achieve symbolic entry into citizenship and nationhood. They provide living examples of the self-definition of Western European countries as sexually progressive and morally superior (Haritaworn, 2008; Puar, 2007), and their sexual liberation is used to create a temporal segregation between ‘European modernity’ and more ‘traditional’ (read: conservative, patriarchal) racialised and Muslim communities (Butler, 2008: 2). Difference becomes carefully managed; ‘the homosexual other is white, the racial other is straight’ (Puar, 2007: 32), and the homosexual other is no longer a threat, but instead the victim of a threatening racial other. Some (frequently white, able-bodied, well-earning and gender-conforming) LGBT people go from being the ‘wrong’ to being the ‘right’ kind of other.

These ‘right kind of queer[s]’, the ‘good others’ (Sabsay, 2012: 611), are part of a process of ‘inclusive othering’ (Sabsay, 2012: 611); they ‘secure their status as citizens at the expense of those deemed sexually and racially perverse’ (Puar, 2007: xii). ‘The emergence and sanctioning of queer subjecthood is a historical shift condoned only through a parallel process of demarcation from populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or death, a reintensification of racialization through queerness’ (Puar, 2007: xii). LGBT movements can therefore become complicit in the violent forms of exclusion that are caused by such boundary drawing. The more various political actors proclaim themselves protectors of LGBT rights, the easier it is for these rights (and the activists fighting for them) to be instrumentalised in campaigns that lead to the vilification, oppression and policing of externalised, ‘bad’ others. As Sabsay puts it: ‘Instead of queering the nation, nationalism re-inscribed the queer into its own narrative’ (Sabsay, 2012: 607), which requires LGBT activists to constantly analyse their own complicities in these processes.

Crucially, only certain kinds of queers are considered fit to be included in nationalist narratives. This becomes particularly clear from the way in which the populist right in Sweden conceptualises LGBT identities. They demand a demobilised, depoliticised LGBT community, not contesting heteronormative institutions, but rather upholding them by aiming for inclusion within them (see Duggan, 2002: 180); and more interested in living an undisturbed private life as part of the heteronormative nation than in furthering queer and anti-racist politics or opposing state-sanctioned violence against other minorities. The inclusion of the LGBT other into the nation is therefore always conditional, depending on their otherness not fundamentally disturbing heterosexual and cis-gender norms.

Eastern dangers, Western victims: Homonationalist narratives of threat and protection

Notions of threat and protection are central to processes of inclusive othering. The folding of LGBT people into the ‘us’ in this ‘us-them’ rhetoric (Puar, 2006: 70) enables Western European countries to project themselves as safe for LGBT people in comparison to e.g. countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa, including communities within European societies who are assumed to live by the ‘values’ of those countries due to their ‘migrant roots’. This ‘rescue narrative’ is one practice of othering, famously analysed by feminist post-colonial thinker Gayatri Spivak (1988: 297) as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’. It ties in closely with the temporal segregation of ‘European modernity’ from ‘traditionalist’ societies (Haritaworn et al., 2008: 78). Discourses around ‘migrants’ cultural values’ and sexual rights in Europe frame Muslim women and increasingly Muslim and racialised LGBT people as ‘faceless victims’ (Bracke, 2012; Haritaworn et al., 2008). They have to be ‘liberated’ from the oppressive patriarchal structures said to exist in migrant ‘ghettos’ in Western Europe’s larger cities (El-Tayeb, 2012: 80). Increasingly, ‘white queers [are thus] saving brown queers from brown straights’ (Ahmed, 2011: 126). LGBT and women’s rights organisations have perpetuated these dominant themes around racialised and Muslim communities and sexual rights in the European context (El-Tayeb, 2012; Haritaworn, 2008; Haritaworn et al., 2008; Jungar and Peltonen, 2015; Petzen, 2012). They have been criticised by queer-of-colour organisations for speaking about migrants and racialised Europeans, rather than with them (Haritaworn et al., 2008: 88), and for cashing in on growing anti-Muslim sentiments in the process of moving LGBT rights into the focus of a wider public (Petzen, 2012: 107). Haritaworn’s analysis of hate crime discourses in Germany shows how LGBT organisations have perpetuated notions of ‘homophobic migrants’ (Haritaworn, 2010: 71) by concentrating on racialised male youth as the perpetrators of homophobic hate crimes, while ‘the face of the victim […] is that of a white, gender-conforming man’ (Haritaworn, 2010: 73). They are, Haritaworn argues, actively scripting ‘the drama of the hateful Other, who must be educated into the cosmopolitan community’ (Haritaworn, 2010: 73).

Puar reminded us that, ‘[l]ike modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it’ (Puar, 2013: 336). And it is against this discursive omnipresence of homonationalist language that right-wing political actors in Sweden can take up, build upon and employ their own version of the above narratives, despite standing in open opposition to the expansion of LGBT rights, and despite their continued internal othering of LGBT people. In contrast to rescue narratives concerned with the emancipation of racialised LGBT, these actors focus on ‘native’, white LGBT people who are threatened by the homophobic attitudes racialised communities are assumed to have. In their narratives, homophobia and transphobia are no longer part of oppressive power structures of Western societies; instead they become cultural problems, connected to specific minority groups that live within, yet separate from these societies. As cultural attributes, homophobia and transphobia are considered ‘intrinsic’ to Islam, whereas in the West they are attributed to individual attitudes and are therefore extrinsic to Western culture (Ahmed, 2011: 126; Mepschen et al., 2010). This dichotomy pitches homosexual, liberated, Western, secular modernity versus traditional, heterosexual, repressed, Islamic backwardness (see Butler, 2008; Puar, 2007; Petzen, 2012; Haritaworn et al., 2008), a narrative familiar from orientalist-colonialist accounts of ‘the West and the rest’, and extensively critiqued by postcolonial scholars (Said, 1995; Spivak, 2004). Western Europe, Dhawan argues, shows a surprising degree of ‘historical amnesia’ (Dhawan, 2013: 202) when constructing itself as enlightened vis-a-vis its non-Western other, considering that ‘the construction of the West as a normative power has left a trail of violent and exploitative systems in the name of modernity, progress, rationality, emancipation, rights, justice, and peace’ (Dhawan, 2013: 201) – a trail clearly visible also in the populist right’s current attempts to separate harmless others from dangerous ones.

Swedish gender exceptionalism and the populist right’s view on LGBT

Sweden, as the location of Pride Järva, is particularly interesting with regard to this characterisation of homophobic threats because of widespread notions regarding Swedish ‘exceptionalism’ when it comes to gender equality (see Martinsson et al., 2016). Narratives of Scandinavian countries being particularly progressive with regard to gender equality and sexual liberties have a long tradition, based on claims around state feminism connected to a thriving queer movement and strong legislation protecting partnership and reproductive rights (see Dahl, 2011). Gender equality and LGBT rights are important parts of discourses on nationhood in Sweden, central to defining who belongs and who does not (Hübinette and Lundström, 2011). They are accompanied by ideas of ‘bad patriarchies’ located in distant places and racialised bodies (Keskinen et al., 2009: 5), and thus closely connected to notions of ‘Swedishness’ as whiteness (Hübinette and Lundström, 2011). While this picture has been sharply criticised (e.g. Keskinen et al. (2009) on Scandinavian ‘colonial complicity’ and Dahl (2011) on territorialist tendencies in Scandinavian gender studies), it nevertheless serves to effectively marginalise, regulate and exclude ‘bad others’. These notions of ‘Swedish gender exceptionalism’ predate, but also strongly overlap with and reinforce the homonationalist narratives described above.

In line with Dahl and Keskinen et al.’s critiques, I argue that wider notions of ‘Europeanness’ or ‘Swedishness’ constructed along lines of progress, secularism, enlightenment and rationality ignore ‘a criminalizing, pathologizing, and deeply oppressive past’ (Haritaworn, 2012: 76) when it comes to LGBT experiences. This is certainly true with regard to SD. With roots in the Swedish neo-Nazi movement, they first entered the Swedish parliament in 2010, establishing themselves as the third-largest party in 2014. Promoting what they call ‘immigration-critical’ politics, they are characterised as racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic (Hellström et al., 2012; Loxbo, 2015). They have consistently been against the expansion of LGBT rights. Publications from the party’s earlier years (the 1980s to the early 2000s) refer to (male) homosexuality as an illness and a threat to society (Westerlund, 2016: 10–15). More recent statements see LGBT as sexual deviants, not necessarily to be persecuted, but neither to be allowed to marry or have children (Westerlund, 2015: 30–35). Since the mid-2000s, LGBT issues have almost exclusively been discussed with reference to violent homophobia and sexism as an integral part of Islam (Westerlund, 2015: 36). During the 2010 election campaign, party leader Jimmie Åkesson even tried to publicly frame SD as ‘LGBT-friendly’, explicitly referencing ‘increasing mass immigration and Islamisation’ (Åkesson and Herrstedt, 2010).⁵

The party’s LGBT organisation (SD-HBT; founded in 2014) mirrors this language. Apart from alerting to the dangers of ‘Islamisation’, SD-HBT argue that pride parades are showcasing LGBT people like circus animals (Thunell et al., 2014a) and that sex education at pride events only reinforces prejudices about LGBT people being promiscuous and obsessed with their sexuality (Thunell et al., 2014b). In their eyes, LGBT people being overly affectionate (or even sexual) in public are begging for trouble. They consider sexual orientation and gender identity private issues to be kept outside the political sphere and refuse using the term queer – rather than challenging norms, society should try to live in symbiosis (Thunell et al., 2014b). They promote a notion of LGBT people as sexual deviants, to be tolerated if they behave, and argue at most for a privatised and depoliticised LGBT other, looking for inclusion and integration into the norm. While Jan Sjunnesson is not a direct spokesperson for SD, and Pride Järva is not officially a party event, Sjunnesson is an active party member and previous editor-in-chief for the party’s newspaper. SD’s rhetoric underlies many of his statements related to Pride Järva.

The making of Pride Järva

The event took place for the first time in July 2015, the same week as Stockholm Pride. On social media, Sjunnesson announced he was planning a march from Tensta to Husby, two of Stockholm’s suburbs where many immigrants and racialised Swedes live. A heated media discussion followed. Among other critical commentators, anti-racist think tank Inte rasist men … pointed out that Sjunnesson had close connections to SD, and that this parade was probably created to reproduce notions of the racialised suburbs as inherently homophobic, intolerant and in need of ‘enlightenment’ (Inte Rasist men…, 2015). Sweden’s main LGBT organisation, the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Rights (RFSL), and the organisers of Stockholm Pride, distanced themselves in a public statement from Pride Järva, stressing that anti-racism was an important part of their work, while Sjunnesson had ‘made himself known as a person who spreads hate against Muslims […] and does not back up LGBT rights’ (RFSL, 2015). Queer and anti-racist activists from Stockholm’s suburbs rallied to organise a protest on Järva field, stating that ‘[w]hen racists and islamophobes want to use LBGT-peoples’ struggle as a battering ram against Muslims we need to say NO and put our foot down’. ‘This is a common strategy’, said organiser Emelie Mårtensson:

putting two oppressed groups up against each other and saying that we only can take care of one. It shifts the focus from the fight between oppressed and oppressor to conflicts between oppressed groups. […] They paint a caricature image of the suburbs regarding women’s and queer lives. Their image of the suburbs is wrong. (Irani, 2015)

Sjunnesson replied by accusing RFSL and the ‘political left’ of being cowards who ignore the fate of LGBT people in the suburbs. Avpixlat’s editor-in-chief Mats Dagerlind came to his support, writing under the pseudonym ‘Matilda Dagerlind’ (an ill-conceived joke about transgender identities, accompanied by a picture of himself wrapped in a rainbow flag). He called RFSL and Stockholm Pride politically correct hypocrites who rather than standing up for their rights on the ‘barricades’ in the suburbs spend their time in the city centre, dancing, drinking ‘pink champagne’ and ranting against ‘honourable attempts’ to make the suburbs safer for LGBT people (Dagerlind, 2015). The word ‘barricades’ and their placement in the suburbs marks clearly where Dagerlind situates the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces for LGBT people in Sweden (and that such clear boundaries exist, along lines of cultural difference). Sjunnesson later echoed this in his speech at Pride Järva 2016. Pride Järva 2015 consisted of Sjunnesson and about 20 participants marching from Tensta to Husby, where they were met by between 100 and 200 queer and anti-racist protesters. A sizeable police force and numerous national and international journalists accompanied the march.

Pride Järva 2016 followed similar patterns. When the march was announced to once again coincide with Stockholm’s annual pride week, RFSL and Stockholm Pride immediately released a statement, saying that ‘you cannot work against any discrimination with any form of credibility if you at the same time endorse or reproduce other kinds of discrimination’ (Stockholm Pride, 2016). They also pointed out that ‘many LGBTQ individuals have themselves experienced threats and violence by the groups that the organisers behind Pride Järva belong to’ (Stockholm Pride, 2016). A group called ‘Queers against Fascism and Racism’ organised a demonstration to follow the march, stating that Pride Järva was not going to ‘spread their racism, hate speech and Islamophobia’ without being challenged by activists: ‘We are here to show that they cannot use us as a battering ram for their fascist propaganda’ (Göteborgs Posten, 2016). However, the public debate prior to the march lacked some of the previous year’s urgency, with mainstream media responses dominated by reporting on the event itself, rather than opinion articles.

Sjunnesson tried to put Pride Järva 2016 into an international context by connecting it to similar events. He claimed that the march was inspired by Ahmed Marcouch, a Moroccan-born Dutch social democrat. As the head of the district council for Slotervaart, an Amsterdam borough with a large immigrant population, Marcouch had succeeded in moving the start of the 2009 Amsterdam Pride to Slotervaart in an attempt to introduce ‘Dutch values’ to migrant-dominated parts of Amsterdam (Buruma, 2009). Sjunnesson also invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at Pride Järva 2016. Openly gay and at the time employed by alternative-right online media Breitbart News, Yiannopoulos had been drawing large crowds (and violent protests) as the face of the ‘Gays for Trump’ campaign (Expo, 2016). Yiannopoulos initially said he was ‘going to lead a pride march through a Muslim ghetto in Sweden’ (Breitbart News, 2016a) but eventually took back his commitment, allegedly after a Breitbart News security team had considered the ‘Muslim ghetto’ too dangerous (Breitbart News, 2016b). Despite Yiannopoulos’ failure to turn up, the event and the ‘situation’ in Sweden were discussed in several English-language online media outlets marketing themselves as ‘alternative’ news sources (Infowars, 2016; Ruptly TV, 2016; The Rebel, 2016). Pride Järva should therefore be seen in the wider context of right-wing homonationalist projects beyond the Swedish context, with Sjunnesson actively attempting to establish himself internationally as the ‘immigration-critical’ interpreter of Swedish LGBT concerns.

Looking at the actors behind and resistance to Pride Järva makes clear that this event goes beyond the scope of instances of homonationalist rhetoric analysed in the existing literature. The organiser is unattached to LGBT causes, and instead is closely aligned with a political party known for its resistance to LGBT rights and the homophobic and transphobic attitudes of its members and supporters. In this he differs from LGBT activists using very similar rhetoric, e.g. Peter Thatchell in the UK (Haritaworn et al., 2008). Pride Järva is met not only with protests from anti-racist, queer-of-colour coalitions (as has been the case with mainstream LGBT organisations using homonationalist language) but also from the predominantly white Swedish LGBT ‘establishment’ (RFSL and Stockholm Pride). Sjunnesson himself makes no attempt to integrate his event into existing LGBT/Pride structures, possibly because he knows his reputation prevents his access to these spaces. Instead he revels in and uses the resistance from LGBT activists as proof that his position as ‘truth-speaking protector of LGBT people’ is justified. Pride Järva therefore gives us the oppportunity to analyse how right-wing actors look at and try to use LGBT rights and LGBT activists as tools for their own agenda of racialised exclusion, despite their obvious disassociation from the LGBT community – the way in which this is made possible by the prevalence of homonationalist narratives in Western European contexts, but also the way in which it fails due to the resistance of queer and anti-racist activists.

Pride Järva 2016 consisted of around 30 marchers, followed by roughly the same number of vocal protesters, and police. At Rinkeby square they stopped to listen to a short speech by Sjunnesson. This speech calls for a closer analysis because it draws on and connects many of the existing narratives in which LGBT rights are used to mark the boundaries of what are considered ‘Swedish’ (and therefore acceptable) values and behaviour, and what are not.

‘Swedishness’, ‘Islamic culture’ and the boundaries of being gay in public

Sjunnesson starts by explaining why he is organising Pride Järva in Rinkeby. Even if it sometimes might appear otherwise, he says, Rinkeby is part of Sweden, and Pride Järva demonstrates for the same laws and legal rights to apply everywhere in Sweden.⁶

In Sweden, you respect people regardless of their sexual identity. In Sweden, women and girls should be able to walk safely at night. In Sweden, girls and boys are allowed to drink coffee with whomever they want during the day, and maybe even during the evening. In Sweden, girls are allowed to kiss [pussa] girls, and boys are allowed to kiss boys.

[Rinkeby] is a part of Sweden, that’s why we are here. Swedish law applies everywhere. Swedish law on discrimination, Swedish law on hate crimes, Swedish law on homophobia applies everywhere, even here. That’s why we are here, and that’s why we will continue to come here until this, what we have understood to be an intolerant part of Sweden, has understood that they are in Sweden.

Sjunnesson manages to say ‘Sweden’ or ‘Swedish’ more than 10 times within the first two minutes of the speech, and directly introduces its central conflict: the LGBT- friendly culture that defines Sweden and ‘Swedishness’ (it is even enshrined in law) against a diffuse intolerant and homophobic ‘they’ disrespecting both Swedish culture and Swedish law.⁷ As discussed above, Sjunnesson’s description of ‘Swedishness’ and its gender exceptionalism is not unique or original. It is a well-established narrative both within and outside of Sweden, making it easy to recognise and easy to identify with, even for people who would not consider themselves supporters of the political right. The kissing reference is reminiscent of ‘kiss-ins’ staged in front of mosques in Germany, where the gay kiss is portrayed as a revolutionary act of emancipation and protest (while, as Haritaworn (2010) writes, always staying within the safe, recognisable boundaries of monogamous long-term relationships). He is, however, also in line with the SD view of (homo)sexuality as something happening in the privacy of your own bedroom. The word ‘pussa’ in Swedish refers to a chaste kiss on the cheek, at most a peck on the lips – a way of showing a parent’s affection for their child, rather than something between lovers.

Sjunnesson specifies the characteristics of the ‘intolerant other’ he is referring to by explaining that the majority of people in Rinkeby, Tensta and around Järva do not have their ‘roots’ in Sweden. They come instead from ‘the Middle East, Africa and South Asia’ where, he claims, homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death according to Islamic Sharia law. The inhabitants of Rinkeby/Tensta are thus more intolerant than people living in other parts of Sweden, since they bring their values with them:

[N]aturally, if you dislike homosexuals, and you come from Mogadishu or Baghdad, and move here, then you continue to do so. And if somebody moves from Stockholm, and is a native [infödd] Swede and moves to Riad, or Addis Ababa, then you continue to be tolerant of homosexuals. […] People who have decided to live in Sweden need to understand that we do not tolerate intolerance here!

Sjunnesson’s ‘intolerant other’ becomes increasingly more visible: immigrants (and their descendants), born and raised in homophobic cultures, coming to Sweden with cultural baggage that makes them inevitably intolerant of homosexuality. On the other hand, somebody who is a ‘native’ or ‘ethnic’ Swede unquestionably is, and always will be, tolerant of homosexuals. Values such as respect and tolerance are presented as static and unchangeable, determined by the society in which you have your ‘roots’. They thus take on almost biological, innate qualities, mirroring historical narratives of race biology where racialised, sexualised others were ascribed certain innate drives and intellectual capacities (see e.g. Laskar, 2007, 2015). At the same time, this still resonates with the more widely accepted contemporary discourses on Sweden as a country of tolerance and gender equality.

The problematic language of tolerance

Sjunnesson’s repeated use of tolerance as central to the relationship between LGBT people and the rest of society indicates clearly how he conceptualises LGBT identities, echoing SD’s view on (homo)sexuality as non-political. The concept of tolerance does not equal acceptance or affirmation. Rather, it is about a majority conditionally allowing what actually is considered deviant or even unwanted. It ‘iterates the normalcy of the powerful and the deviance of the marginal’ (Brown, 2009: 8). Tolerance is therefore both productive and regulative; it requires and produces a subject who tolerates, and somebody else to be tolerated, reinforcing the distinction as well as the power relation between the two. When Sjunnesson speaks of the need for immigrants to tolerate homosexuality, he employs ‘a civilizational discourse that identifies both tolerance and the tolerable with the West’ (Brown, 2009: 6) This is not at all the same as considering LGBT identities as equal to (and equally valid as) the heterosexual, cis-binary norm. Later on, he describes LGBT identities as anything not heterosexual, ‘everything else, whichever labels we can put on them’, reinforcing the notion that homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality (without even considering identities beyond these categories) are a deviation from the norm. Clearly, there exists a heterosexual, cisgender ‘we’ putting labels on a non-heterosexual, non-cisgender ‘them’. The continuous internal othering of LGBT people (racialised or not) within Sweden is barely concealed in this statement.

The central problem in the meeting between ‘Swedish culture’ and the ‘intolerant other’, according to Sjunnesson, is Islam, a religion inherently hostile towards homosexuality. It forces homosexual Muslims in Islamic countries to hide from family and friends:

They live a double life. We did this in Sweden for a long time – I would argue up until the 1970s – and we do not want to go back to that time. We do not want to go back to a time where homosexuals, lesbians and everything else, whichever labels we can put on them, or us, for that matter […] live a double life. That’s why we have Stockholm Pride in the city centre, that’s why we are here. At some point, you should be able to come out as homosexual or bisexual, or transsexual.

Sjunnesson supports his claim of Islam being a homophobic religion by arguing that yes, Sweden did have homophobia once, and ‘we’ do not want to have it back. He creates a temporal segregation between progressive Swedish society and countries with Islamic traditions. Homophobia is thus externalised from Sweden – it is a ghost from the past, reinvigorated only by Muslim communities’ traditionalism. This also means that ‘Swedish culture’ seems to be able to change over time (for the better), while Islam and the morals and values related to it are resistant to or incapable of change. Sjunnesson plays to and repeats classical colonialist-orientalist descriptions of the Middle East and Northern Africa as lagging ‘behind’ Europe, as having stalled in their development (Butler, 2008; Said, 1995; Spivak, 2004).

Sjunnesson’s mentioning of this reinforces his narrative of progress, as it presupposes an LGBT subject liberating itself from the violently oppressive structures of collective, non-Swedish identities (see Dhawan, 2013). He completely ignores the fact that homophobia, transphobia, hate crimes and violence against LGBT are not a thing of the past in Sweden.⁸ LGBT people living a double life did not stop ‘in the 1970s’, and much of the legislation he praises was introduced fairly recently, against the vehement resistance of SD, the party he is a member of.

The suburb as a homophobic space

Sjunnesson claims that ‘there is an import of people who are homophobic [from Islamic countries]’. Again, homophobia is something that is externalised, coming to Sweden from the outside. ‘Swedishness’ is thus distanced from homophobia, both in time and in space. Dagerlind’s (2015) comment on Stockholm Pride avoiding the ‘barricades’ in the suburbs in favour of the safety of the inner city shows how much homophobia is portrayed as something spatially and culturally situated (and thus limited), rather than a social structure that continues to be pervasive in Swedish society. When Sjunnesson identifies homophobic spaces in Sweden, these are not ‘Swedish’ spaces: the homophobia that has come (back) to Sweden with migrant communities coexists with spheres controlled by religiously motivated honour-based violence. According to him, this applies particularly strongly to homosexuals in the suburbs:

It is haram if the son chooses to fall in love with another boy, it is haram if a girlfriend falls in love with another girlfriend [sic]. It is haram to at all show that you have that kind of openness, that [sexual] orientation here in Rinkeby/Tensta.

He takes up the example of Nalin Pekgul, Kurdish-Swedish social democrat and former minister for integration, who publicly said she was worried about radical Islamist ideologies gaining influence in Swedish suburbs (Dagens Samhälle, 2014):

It is even so bad that there are parts of Tensta […] she [Nalin Pekgul] can’t go to, and she is Kurdish. She can’t go into certain shops here in Tensta and do her shopping, without a headscarf. Can you imagine being gay here, and maybe Swedish? Imagine being blond, Swedish and gay. Gives the word ‘faggot Swede’ [svennebög] a whole new meaning, doesn’t it? We’re all faggot Swedes now.

Based on his claims about Islam’s inherent homophobia, Sjunnesson creates a picture of the suburbs as unsafe spaces. More specifically, unsafe along lines of gender, sexuality and race. While being an immigrant woman without a headscarf can make you unsafe, being gay will make you unsafe. Being gay, blond and (white, ‘ethnically’) Swedish, Sjunnesson implies, is the most unsafe position that exists in this area of Stockholm. To back up his claim, he mentions that ‘a transsexual called Jack’ was attacked in Rinkeby about six months before Pride Järva 2016. No further information on Jack, the attack itself or the attacker(s) is provided. Listeners are left to make their own connections between the incident and Sjunnesson’s description of homophobic migrants. His construction of homophobic violence perpetrated by hateful others is completely in line with Haritaworn’s analysis of German hate crime discourses (Haritaworn, 2010), while not a word is uttered about the violence and threats that LGBT people in Sweden are exposed to by the very groups on the political far right he is a part of. By saying ‘We’re all faggot Swedes now’, he even extends the threatened community to encompass all white, blond Swedes, no matter their gender or sexual orientation. ‘Swedishness’ in general is what is at stake in Rinkeby and Tensta. He thus combines old and new narratives of what it means to be Swedish – the acceptable, recognisable Swede is still blond and white, but apparently can now also be gay or transsexual.

Finally, Sjunnesson argues that the problems created by Islam’s inherent hostility towards homosexuality are not something which established LGTB organisations want to talk about:

They don’t dare to come here. And then they have the stomach to stand over there and shout ‘not in our name!’, that we have taken this demonstration and pretend to be Pride-people […], but that’s not what this is about. Some of us have a sexual orientation that isn’t heterosexual, others maybe are heterosexual, I myself am somewhere in between. But we simply want Swedish law to apply in Sweden, and we think [the people organising] Stockholm Pride are too cowardly to tackle this, so we did it ourselves.

This is where Sjunnesson’s narrative of threat and protection comes to its climax, and its conclusion. After constructing a threatening external other (Islam’s homophobia and intolerance, personified in the figure of the homophobic Muslim) and a threatened internal other (white LGBT people, and by extension white ‘Swedishness’), he turns towards those whose responsibility he thinks it is to defend LGBT rights in Sweden. RFSL and Stockholm Pride, he says, fail in their mission as state-funded protectors of LGBT rights, because of their ‘political correctness’. Instead of coming to the suburbs themselves (what about the queer protesters outside the square, one wonders?), they criticise Pride Järva, calling them ‘Islamophobes and fascists and racists’ while actually they are ‘just normal people who have decided to get involved in this’. This alleged failure to protect and care provides Sjunnesson and his political associates with the opportunity to cast themselves in the role of the concerned speakers of truth, the ‘true’ protectors of LGBT people, despite their track record of anti-LGBT policymaking. They return once more to established notions of Swedish gender exceptionalism, writing themselves into that narrative as its alleged protector. This is thus the final component in their attempt to enlist LGBT rights and activists in Sweden in nationalist projects of racialised othering by using them to construct, reproduce and reinforce us-them dichotomies along lines of race, gender and sexuality.

Conclusion

‘For queer politics, it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times’ (Dhawan, 2013: 191). As progress regarding sexual and reproductive rights has been made for some LGBT people, others seem to have been left behind (queer asylum seekers and queer undocumented people among them), and LGBT issues have increasingly become entangled in violent practices of exclusion. While existing literature on homonationalism in European contexts shows that LGBT organisations have been guilty of using racialised othering to gain support in the political mainstream, this article has looked at how right-wing political actors in turn openly exploit LGBT rights for nationalist projects of excluding racialised and Muslim others. Discussing Pride Järva, a ‘gay pride’ march organised by right-wing publicist Jan Sjunnesson in the northern suburbs of Stockholm, I argue that this event is not an instance of LGBT emancipation, but an attempt to construct and reproduce certain exclusionary notions of ‘Swedishness’. Looking at how LGBT identities are conceptualised in both SD and Sjunnesson’s rhetoric around Pride Järva shows that these identities present an attractive tool for the populist right when trying to construct a threatening, externalised other along lines of race, sexuality and gender, due to the fact that they resonate well with existing mainstream narratives around Swedish gender exceptionalism, as well as established homonationalist notions of tolerance and progress.

In his speech, Sjunnesson weaves together older colonialist-orientalist discourses about the backwardness of the ‘East’ with these more contemporary notions of Swedish gender exceptionalism and homonationalist rhetoric. Using a language of threat and protection, he constructs and reproduces notions of enlightened, tolerant and progressive ‘Swedishness’ opposed to a patriarchal, traditional and oppressive Islamic other. White LGBT people play a central role in this narrative as the foremost markers of ‘Swedishness’ – as the ‘right’ kind of other, they are a minority included with the purpose of excluding racialised others. This inclusion into the nationalist fold, however, requires a defenceless, depoliticised and docile LGBT community, aiming for a private life tolerated by a cis-binary, heterosexist majoritarian society rather than challenging and opposing the violent exclusion of minorities. The alleged failure of established LGBT organisations to tackle homophobia among migrants creates an opportunity for the populist right in Sweden to construct themselves as protectors of LGBT issues, and thus ‘Swedish values’. This narrative is maintained despite the fact that these actors have themselves consistently opposed LGBT rights, continue with the internal othering of LGBT people in Sweden and are met with resistance and protest from local LGBT activists. Pride Järva should therefore be understood as an attempt by the populist right to enlist LGBT rights and the activists fighting for them in nationalist, xenophobic and racist projects of exclusive othering, made possible to a large extent by the established nature of narratives of Swedish gender exceptionalism and homonationalist rhetoric.

Footnotes

Notes

Katharina Kehl is a doctoral student at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research focuses on the ways in which gender and sexuality are being used in European migration debates to selectively include and exclude minorities, and the implication this has for LGBTQIA* people, those who are racialised and queer-feminist movements. Her interests are in queer theory and methodology, sexualities, subjectivities, borders and the inclusion and exclusion of bodies.

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