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The development of sexual populism in Hungary in the context of the refugee crisis

Srdečne Vás pozývame na Ústavný seminár Sociologického ústavu SAV, v. v. i.

V stredu 20. 11. 2024 o 13.30 prednesie Petra Andits (Sociologický ústav SAV, v. v. i.) prednášku

The development of sexual populism in Hungary in the context of the refugee crisis.

Seminár v anglickom jazyku sa uskutoční v miestnosti 94 na Klemensovej 19 v Bratislave.

We warmly invite you for the Seminar of the Institute for Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences on Wednesday 20th November 2024 at 13.30. Petra Andits (Institute for Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences) will present the lecture The development of sexual populism in Hungary in the context of the refugee crisis.

The language of the lecture will be English. Seminar will take a place in the room 94.

Abstract: SEPO is a systematic project that merges the fields of sexual nationalism, populism, and Islamophobia. Research on sexual nationalism produced significant works on homonationalism and femonationalism during the last decade, however, the link to populism remained under-explored. In this project, I examine the ways in which gender-and-sexual normativities are incorporated into politics within the populistic narrative. I specifically look at right-wing populism and chose Hungary as my case study, due to its leading populist tendencies in the Euro-Atlantic world. In order to clarify the boundaries of the project, I trace the development of sexual populism in Hungary in the context of the refugee crisis starting in 2015. The choice of this context is significant: Normative discourses about sexual behavior have been subject to intensified debate since the start of the refugee influx in 2015. Research shows that anti-immigrant voices in several places are adapting sexual and gender equality discourses for use against the (Muslim) refugees, making these prominent parts of the anti-immigrant narrative. In this way, sexual nationalism is transnational in scope. Here I aim to understand how these transnational processes are adapted and transformed in specific and unique ways to the Hungarian populistic narrative. Through this lens, I try to create theoretical frameworks that are non-totalizing or universalist. The project utilizes a cutting-edge methodology, netnography combined with ethnographic fieldwork and target user-created content on social media, more precisely Facebook.