Paradoxes of the Right-Wing Sexual/Gender Politics in Hungary: Right-Wing Populism and the Ban of Gender Studies

In this chapter, I study gender and sexual politics in right-wing populism applied in Hungarian state propaganda during the 2010s with a focus on the intersection of misogyny and transphobia. I address the paradoxes of sexual politics within the dominant discourses of hate-speech mobilized routinely around the discreditation of gender as ideology at the intersection of anti-intellectualism, Islamophobic anti-immigration, and antisemitic anti-liberalism. I also examine the stance by feminists self-identifying as actors of progressive criticism and show that their rhetoric ends up articulating an opening for the right-wing ideologies of transphobia within feminism. I show that this conservative stance is the result of prioritizing the political economy as if a purely material cause of the regime’s hostile gender politics vis-a-vis a merely cultural and as such allegedly depoliticizing activism of transgender people. I propose their relative distinction that is necessary for building an effective coalition against the regime.