Political homophobia

Abstract

This article comparatively analyses the rise of anti-LGBT rhetoric in Indonesia and Turkey in the 2010s and early 2020s. In both countries, periods of greater public visibility of LGBTQ+ people in the early 2000s were followed by waves of severe anti-LGBT rhetoric, violence, and legal measures. This analysis focusses on the rhetoric that conservative state and non-state actors use to other non-heteronormative people and to exclude them from the nation or “the people”. My main argument is that state and non-state actors conduct othering of LGBTQ+ people and construct them as dangerous threats to the nation and to the structure of the family. The anti-LGBT narratives are integrated into larger conspiracy narratives of foreign powers undermining the nation.