Duration: 1.9.2024 - 31.8.2026
Programme: Štipendiá pre excelentných výskumníkov a výskumníčky, R2-R4 09I03-03-V04-00738
Principal Investigator: Petra Andits, PhD.

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 choose 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 combines ethnographic fieldwork with nethnography that is user-created content on social media, more precisely Facebook.