Historically, populist radical-right (PRR) parties in the Nordic region have been reluctant, or openly hostile, to extend rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people. The chapter maps and compares how the four parties – SD, DF, PS, and FrP – have positioned themselves on LGBTQ issues from the late 1990s until 2023. The analysis shows that all four parties have opposed gay partnership laws, same-sex marriage, and adoption rights for gay couples. Since the 2010s, the PRR parties have repositioned. They retain most of their positions, but they do not seek to actively repeal same-sex marriage legislation and adoption rights. Instead, they have increasingly profiled themselves in homonationalist ways – i.e., as protectors of LGBTQ rights against supposedly homophobic Others, especially immigrants from Muslim countries. The parties have been more reluctant on trans issues, as an essentialist view on gender differences has generally guided the parties’ policies.

This article maps the specific ways in which gendered and racialized boundary constructs create conditions of possibility for certain bordering practices. Connecting Critical Border Studies with feminist theories of geopolitics, it examines media reporting in Russia and Sweden about “migrants‘ sexual violence” in the wake of the 2015 New Years‘ events in Cologne. Despite contextual differences, in both countries these events were narrated as symbolic in negotiating Europe and its borders. In Russia, the events were connected to a story of a Russian girl in Berlin being raped by migrants (a story later revealed to be fabricated) and a narrative of Europe collapsing because of immigration. In Sweden, the events were connected to reports of sexual violence at festivals, sparking a debate about “Swedish values” of gender equality being endangered by immigration. The article argues, firstly, that narratives of migrants‘ sexual violence performed bordering functions in both the symbolic sense of delineating national identity and Europeanness, and the concrete sense of legitimating a stricter border regime. Secondly, it argues that the narratives performed that function only by tapping into local geopolitical narratives, in the Russian case on the country‘s ambivalent relation to Europe, and in Sweden the idea of gender exceptionalism.

Reports in April 2017 regarding a state-initiated wave of homophobic persecution in Chechnya attracted worldwide outrage. Numerous witnesses spoke of arrests, abuse, and murders of gay men in the republic. In response, a spokesman of Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, claimed that “you cannot … oppress those who simply do not exist.” In this article, with the antigay purge in Chechnya and in particular the denial of queer existence as their starting point, Brock and Edenborg examine more deeply processes of erasure and disclosure of queer populations in relation to state violence and projects of national belonging. They discuss (1) what the events in Chechnya tell us about visibility and invisibility as sites of queer liberation, in light of recent discussions in LGBT visibility politics; (2) what the episodes tell us about the epistemological value of queer visibility, given widespread media cynicism and disbelief in the authenticity of images as evidence; and (3) what role the (discursive and physical) elimination of queers plays in relation to spectacular performances of nationhood. Taken together, the authors’ findings contribute to a more multifaceted understanding of the workings of visibility and invisibility and their various, sometimes contradictory, functions in both political homophobia and queer liberation.

By examining photographic depictions of subjects labeled as ‘intellectually disabled’, this article theorizes how photography performs the ideological function of producing narratives of historical progression. Recurrent representations of, on the one hand, a dark past of state institutionalization and repression and, on the other hand, the present as a time when intellectually disabled people are active, included and happy, function to locate oppression in a bygone era, which effectively obscures how power has transformed rather than disappeared. This relates to how the narrative break between the past exclusion and present inclusion conceals an inherent paradox in the constitution of intellectually disabled subjectivity; at the same time, members of this group are both included by citizenship and classified as lacking the necessary characteristics of the ideal citizen.

Some states create geographical imaginaries that envision the homeland as coherent and good, and the spaces of Others as disordered, dangerous and therefore legitimate objects of violence. Such ‘violent cartographies’ serve not only to justify policy actions, but constitute bordering practices aiming to provide stability, integrity and continuity to the Self, sometimes referred to as ‘ontological security’. This article examines the role of creativity and artistic imagination in challenging dominant geopolitical narratives. It examines satire on the Russian-language internet, which played upon the Russian state’s geopolitical narrative about the war in Ukraine 2014–15. Three themes within this dominant narrative – (1) the imperialist idea of Russia as a modernising force, (2) the gendering of Ukraine as feminine and Europe as homosexual and (3) the idea that the current war was a re-enactment of Russia’s historical battle against fascism – all became the object of fun-making in satire. I argue that satire, by appropriating, repeating but slightly displacing official rhetoric in ways that make it appear ridiculous, may destabilise dominant narratives of ontological security and challenge their strive towards closure. Satire may expose the silences of dominant narratives and undermine the essentialism and binarism upon which they rely, opening up for estrangement and disidentification.