This talk will address how the rather unlikely solidarities among anti-LGBTQ/anti-gender actors based in Europe, U.S., and Russia both reflect and inform structural shifts in contemporary geopolitics by cutting across the West/East divide inherited from the Cold War period. It will show that the clue for these puzzling alliances lies in the role of Christianity and whiteness as shared features of the actors, but also as underlying concepts that, together with the idea of heteronormativity and the naturalized gender binary, underpin the new civilizational imaginary emerging in the context of globalizing sexual “culture wars.”  For this purpose, the talk will draw on the ethnographic observation of the 2017&2019 World Congress of Families (WCF) and the discourse analysis of relevant digital media sources produced by and/or about the actors within the WCF network. It will show how the discourses of heterosexism produced in this context contest the constructions of civilizational superiority of the “West,” based, among others, on the homonationalist discourses of gay rights and tolerance as markers of alleged civility and progress (Kulpa, 2013; Puar, 2007; Scott, 2018). However, although the particular meanings of the West have been contested, the talk will further show how the racialized Islamophobia remained in the centre of this competing geopolitical imaginary based on the idea of the white European Christian civilization that cuts across the old Cold War East/West divide.

Katja Kahlina works at the University of Helsinki, Department of Cultures, where she leads a Kone Foundation funded project Sexuality and Democracy (SEXDEM). Within SEXDEM, she explores the interplay of sexuality, populism, and nationalism in two contexts: she analyzes contemporary anti-gender mobilization in Europe and explores the possibilities of feminist re-appropriations of populism. Katja’s research commitments are to the study of sexual politics and political discourse, and the ways in which these two are culturally and geopolitically produced and entangled. In addition to her engagements in SEXDEM project, she serves as a Managing Editor of the journal Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory published by Helsinki University Press.