Abstract: Transphobic messaging plays an increasingly prominent role across large parts of the political spectrum globally. Though it originated in right-wing and religious fundamentalist movements, so-called anti-gender discourse has spread to mainstream politics, making it a fulcrum in current debates about national identity and belonging in numerous sites.

In this talk, I discuss the broader discursive effects that the political normalization of anti-gender discourse has. Using the example of a recent social media campaign by the far-right nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP), I show how anti-gender messaging is used as a resource to elaborate a new definition of belonging in Switzerland, one that relies on and enacts a contrast between “freedom” and “oppression”. I then show how this axis of differentiation (Gal & Irvine 2019) is taken up and banalized, even by people who disagree with the SVP’s anti-gender content. I discuss how this pattern of uptake helps to forge a new fascist consensus, a meta-framing of politics that enables and legitimates fascist ideology.

About the presenter

Erez Levon (he/him) is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Society at the University of Bern. His work uses quantitative, qualitative, and experimental methods to examine how people produce and perceive socially meaningful patterns of variation in language. He is particularly interested in how variation signals group membership and in the relationship between language and broader structures of social inequality. He examines these issues primarily as they relate to gender, sexuality, social class and national belonging, and he has conducted field research on these topics in Israel/Palestine, South Africa, the US, & the UK.