Homonationalism: Origins, Pinkwashing, and Far-Right Politics

Homonationalism is a critical framework, coined by scholar Jasbir K. Puar in 2007, that describes how the acceptance of certain LGBTQ+ people into the national identity of Western democracies has become intertwined with nationalist, imperialist, and anti-Muslim projects. Puar calls it an “analytics of power,” not a label for particular people or a synonym for gay conservatism. The idea is that a country’s reputation as “gay-friendly” can be used as a tool for drawing borders between supposedly enlightened Western nations and populations cast as backward, threatening, or deserving of state violence.¹

Where the Term Comes From

Puar introduced the concept in her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, published by Duke University Press in 2007. She developed it in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, watching what she described as “emerging intimacies between racism, nationalism, and Islamophobia” that were “recruiting queers to further the ends of US imperialism and exceptionalism.”²

In her account, the post-9/11 United States underwent a shift. Some homosexual subjects, primarily white, middle-class, and willing to present as patriotic, were folded into the nation as “good citizens.” At the same time, Muslim, Arab, and South Asian populations were constructed as sexually deviant, dangerous, and deserving of surveillance, detention, or deportation.³

The Core Argument

Terrorist Assemblages builds on several interlocking ideas. One is “U.S. sexual exceptionalism”: the notion that America frames itself as a uniquely liberated society on matters of sexuality and uses that self-image to justify security operations and military campaigns abroad. Puar reexamines the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down anti-sodomy laws, not only as a civil rights victory but as part of a discourse that positioned the United States as a beacon of sexual freedom against the alleged homophobia of populations targeted in the War on Terror.⁴ She also examines the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, arguing that queer and feminist scholarship that focused narrowly on the “sexual” character of the abuse displaced the racialized and imperialist dimensions of state violence.³

At the heart of the theory is a biopolitical claim: for every population a state chooses to protect and invest in, another is marked for exclusion or harm. Puar puts it starkly. “For every biopolitics, a necropolitics.” The inclusion of certain queer subjects into civic and consumer life is, on this reading, structurally bound up with the targeting of others.³

How It Differs From Homonormativity

Homonationalism is related to, but distinct from, “homonormativity,” a term introduced by Lisa Duggan in a 2002 essay and elaborated in her 2003 book The Twilight of Equality?⁵ Duggan’s homonormativity describes a politics in which mainstream gay and lesbian movements mirror dominant social norms of whiteness, middle-class life, and family, asking for a place at the table rather than challenging the table itself. Gay people, in her framing, become “perfect neoliberal subjects” by pursuing private, family-based solutions like marriage instead of broader systemic change.⁶

Puar’s homonationalism takes that a step further. It examines how the domesticated, “properly homo” subject is then recruited into specifically national and imperial projects, so that tolerance of certain queer people becomes not just a neoliberal accommodation but a weapon in geopolitical and racial conflicts.

Pinkwashing and the Israel-Palestine Debate

One of the most contested applications of the theory involves the concept of “pinkwashing.” Writer Sarah Schulman, in a widely cited 2011 New York Times opinion piece, defined pinkwashing as “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”⁷ The argument is that Israel’s international promotion of its LGBTQ+ record casts the broader Middle East as backward and deflects attention from the occupation of Palestinian territories.⁸

The debate has played out in institutional conflicts. In February 2011, porn producer Michael Lucas successfully lobbied the New York City LGBT Community Center to cancel an event featuring queer anti-occupation activists. The Center then imposed a two-year moratorium on renting space to groups organizing around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, lifting it in February 2013 with new space-use guidelines.⁷ In February 2024, the collective “No Pride in Genocide” launched a campaign demanding an end to what it characterizes as pinkwashing by nonprofits, celebrities, and governments, alongside support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.⁸

Scholars have pushed back on simple deployments of both “pinkwashing” and “pinkwatching.” Jason Ritchie has argued that these frameworks often function as tools for local power struggles in cities like New York, London, and Berlin, rather than engaging with daily queer life in Israel and Palestine. Puar, together with Maya Mikdashi, has noted that both pinkwashing and pinkwatching discourses can reproduce homonationalist logics themselves.⁷

European Far-Right Politics

Homonationalism found some of its most visible political expression in the Netherlands. The openly gay politician Pim Fortuyn, a former sociology professor, campaigned on the argument that Dutch liberal culture, including acceptance of homosexuality, was under threat from “backward” Islamic immigration. “In Holland, homosexuality is treated the same way as heterosexuality,” he told interviewers. “In what Islamic country does that happen?”⁹ He ran on a platform of “zero immigration,” described Islam as lacking “humanism and enlightenment,” and his party won over a third of the vote in Rotterdam’s local elections in March 2002. Fortuyn was assassinated on May 6, 2002, nine days before the scheduled general election.¹⁰

The model proved durable. Geert Wilders, who founded the Party for Freedom (PVV) in 2005, has used similar rhetoric, advocating for the repatriation of Moroccans and the prohibition of the Quran. A 2010 poll by the Dutch magazine GayKrant showed the PVV as the favored party among its readers.¹¹ In the 2017 expanded edition of Terrorist Assemblages, Puar observed that figures like Fortuyn and Wilders, once considered exceptional, had become “the norm” in European politics.¹²

Whether the strategy actually delivers votes is another matter. A study published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research found that Dutch voters who are anti-immigrant but pro-LGBTQ+ rights tended to prefer the mainstream Conservative-Liberal party (VVD) over populist radical-right parties. Only voters who scored highest on populist attitudes, meaning a belief in a fundamental conflict between “good people” and “evil politicians,” were likely to choose the radical-right party instead.¹³

The Psychology Behind Strategic Tolerance

A 2024 study in the American Political Science Review by Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte and Alberto López Ortega investigated whether rising LGBTQ+ support among people with anti-immigrant views reflects a genuine shift in values or a strategic posture. The researchers coined the term “instrumental liberalism” for the phenomenon: nativist individuals expressing greater tolerance toward LGBTQ+ people not out of sincere conviction, but as a way to differentiate themselves from ethnic out-groups they perceive as homophobic.¹⁴

In experiments run in Britain and Spain, nativist respondents became significantly more supportive of LGBTQ+ policies, including inclusive education, when they were exposed to opposition to those policies coming from a Muslim out-group, compared to opposition from a white in-group. The mechanism the researchers named was “disidentification”: defining one’s identity by what one is not. Supporting gay rights became a way to signal “we are not like them.”¹⁵ The study cited Donald Trump’s rhetoric after the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting as an example, pointing to his pledge at the Republican National Convention to “protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”¹⁴

The Pulse Shooting as a Case Study

The June 12, 2016, killing of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando became a flashpoint for homonationalism analysis. The shooter, Omar Mateen, was a U.S.-born citizen, but political and media discourse rapidly framed the attack through the War on Terror and “foreign” Islamic extremism. Scholar Maya Mikdashi observed that while the attack targeted predominantly Latinx queer youth, mainstream commentary “deracinated” the victims and “de-queered” the club to produce a simplified “attack on America” narrative.¹⁶

A study analyzing 377 reports from the five most-trafficked LGBTQ websites found that those outlets generally decontextualized Mateen from his status as an American citizen, positioning him implicitly as a foreign threat and associating him with terrorism while excluding anti-Latinx prejudice as a possible motivation. The study concluded that even outlets that styled themselves as anti-Republican and opposed to Islamophobia simultaneously reinforced “homonationalist, and relatively conservative, positions.”¹⁷

Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Critiques

Scholars working in indigenous and decolonial frameworks have extended homonationalism in a distinct direction. In a 2010 article in GLQ, anthropologist Scott Lauria Morgensen proposed “settler homonationalism” to describe how modern queer politics in the United States are themselves products of settler colonialism. Queer Americans seeking rights from the settler state, in his account, inevitably participate in its colonial logic, which historically constructed indigenous gender and sexual practices as “savage” to justify dispossession.¹⁸

Indigenous scholars have built on that critique. Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Morgensen have called out what they describe as “systemic misrepresentation and exploitation” of queer indigenous histories by white settlers seeking to validate their own experiences. Indigenous historian Deborah Miranda has used the term “gendercide” for the deliberate colonial targeting of indigenous people who did not conform to European gender norms. These writers argue that LGBTQ+ liberation cannot be separated from decolonization, pointing to events like the Two-Spirit Nation Camp at Standing Rock in 2016 as queer indigenous activism tied to land defense.¹⁹

Western Responses to Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws Abroad

Homonationalism also surfaces in how Western governments respond to anti-LGBTQ+ legislation elsewhere. Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, signed into law on May 26, 2023, criminalizes same-sex conduct with penalties up to the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”²⁰ The World Bank suspended new public financing for Uganda in August 2023, citing the law’s contradiction of its values of “inclusion and non-discrimination.”²¹

Scholars have noted a paradox in these responses. The Ugandan government justified the law as a rejection of “western imperialism” and a defense of “traditional African family values,” then treated Western sanctions as further evidence that LGBTQ+ rights are a colonial imposition. At the same time, U.S. evangelical organizations had been directly influencing Ugandan anti-LGBTQ+ legislation since the 2000s. American anti-LGBTQ+ activist Scott Lively addressed the Ugandan Parliament in April 2009, and members of the U.S.-based Family Watch International reportedly helped edit drafts of the 2023 law. One analyst described Uganda as “being pushed in two different directions by western actors; for the AHA and against it, both of which are problematic.”²²

Similar dynamics appeared in Western coverage of Russia’s 2013 law banning the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors.” A scholarly analysis of Anglophone media from 2012 to 2017 argued that Western outlets used the bodies of Russian LGBTQ+ individuals to construct a narrative of Western moral superiority and Russian backwardness. Images of beaten activists circulated as evidence of state-sanctioned homophobia, and figures like activist Kirill Fedorov were turned into “queer martyrs” fitting a “New Cold War” narrative. The analysis noted that this coverage focused almost exclusively on white, young, cisgender gay men, ignoring the experiences of lesbians, transgender people, and people of color in Russia.²³

Media, Symbols, and Everyday Nationalism

Research on media has examined how coverage can reinforce homonationalism even when criticizing anti-LGBTQ+ violence. A study analyzing 320 Swedish newspaper articles published between 2016 and 2020 found that coverage of attacks on LGBTQ+ people and venues frequently abstracted the concrete harm into a symbolic struggle over “national unity.” News outlets used stock photos of rainbow flags in contexts normally reserved for the Swedish flag, creating what the researcher called a “banal” homonationalism in which the rainbow flag came to represent Swedish values like “peace, everyone’s equal value, freedom, and diversity.”²⁴

The study noted a wrinkle. While traditional homonationalism theory focuses on the vilification of immigrants as homophobic outsiders, Swedish media also framed internal threats like the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement and the Sweden Democrats party as antagonists to “Swedishness.” In 2019, the municipality of Sölvesborg, governed by a coalition including the Sweden Democrats, banned rainbow flags on public poles, triggering national debates that centered the flag as a symbol of national pride. The researcher argued that both the far-right movements and their media critics were reinforcing nationalism by fighting over its definition.²⁴

Critiques, Refinements, and Puar’s Pushback

Puar has consistently resisted uses of the term as a personal accusation, a way of calling someone a “bad gay” for being nationalist or racist. In a widely cited 2013 essay, she restated that homonationalism is an “analytic for apprehending the consequences of the successes of the LGBT movement,” not a label for individuals.¹

Other scholars have tested and refined the framework:

A study applying Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy to Denmark’s 2018 LGBTI Action Plan argued that when a government’s pro-LGBTQ+ stance hardens into an exclusionary “hegemonic consensus,” it can provoke anti-gender backlash. The Danish government under PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen promoted the country as a global “frontrunner” on LGBTQ+ rights and explicitly linked national belonging to a “liberal-minded” worldview, which the researcher argued fueled antagonism from Evangelical Christian organizations rather than productive democratic disagreement.²⁵
A 2026 study in British Politics proposed the narrower term “homonativism” for party-level electoral strategies that fuse sexual-liberal and nativist appeals. Looking at UK party politics from 2001 to 2024, the researcher found explicit “homonativist mobilization” was rare in Britain, appearing briefly in UKIP’s 2017 campaign before being abandoned. Reform UK has instead politicized transgender rights as a separate exclusionary issue.²⁶
Kimberlé Crenshaw has been cited for pointing out how celebratory narratives around the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges same-sex marriage ruling could displace attention from ongoing state violence against Black Americans, including the Charleston church shooting that occurred in the same period.²

Why the Concept Keeps Coming Back

A tenth-anniversary expanded edition of Terrorist Assemblages was published in December 2017, with a foreword by Tavia Nyong’o and a new postscript by Puar titled “Homonationalism in Trump Times.” The publisher described homonationalism as “here to stay” as both a “concept and tool of biopolitical management.”¹²

A 2025 analysis from the European Student Think Tank characterized the framework as a “contemporary reincarnation of Orientalism,” applying it to the Netherlands, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the framing of Central and Eastern Europe as “homophobic” relative to the West.²⁷ The concept has also been applied to India, where scholars argue that the 2018 Navtej Johar judgment decriminalizing sodomy was used to portray the Indian state as progressive, even as it practiced violence against Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis and maintained military control over Kashmir.²

The core tension the concept identifies, that the expansion of rights for some can coincide with and enable the exclusion or targeting of others, has become more visible in a period of intensifying culture wars, rising far-right movements, and ongoing military conflicts. Whether used as a scholarly tool or misused as shorthand insult, homonationalism remains one of the most influential and contested ideas in contemporary queer theory and critical politics.

1
Bristol University. Rethinking Homonationalism
2
Humanity Journal. A Deep and Ongoing Dive Into the Brutal Humanism That Undergirds Liberalism
3
Hemispheric Institute. Review of Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages
4
Duke University Press. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
5
Rutgers University Queer Newark. The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism
6
Barnard Center for Research on Women. Cripping Queer Politics, or the Dangers of Neoliberalism
7
Wiley Online Library. Pinkwashing and Pinkwatching
8
Prism Reports. No Pride in Genocide
9
The Guardian. Dutch Right-Winger Pim Fortuyn Profile
10
CNN. Pim Fortuyn Profile
11
Taylor & Francis Online. Homonationalism and the Dutch Context
12
Duke University Press. Terrorist Assemblages Tenth Anniversary Edition
13
Oxford Academic. Homonationalism and Radical Right Voting
14
Cambridge University Press. Instrumentally Inclusive: The Political Psychology of Homonationalism
15
Cambridge University Press. Instrumentally Inclusive – PDF
16
Middle East Research and Information Project. After Orlando
17
SAGE Journals. Omar Mateen as US Citizen, Not Foreign Threat
18
Duke University Press. Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism Within Queer Modernities
19
USC Spectator. Settler Trans Nationalism
20
Human Rights Watch. They’re Putting Our Lives at Risk
21
Taylor & Francis Online. Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis
22
International IDEA. Colonial Legacy of Homophobia in Modern-Day Uganda
23
PubMed Central. Western Media Discourse on Russian LGBTIQ Issues
24
Wiley Online Library. Homonationalism and Swedish Media
25
Redescriptions. Homonationalism and Agonistic Democracy
26
Springer. Inclusive Rhetoric, Exclusive Boundaries: Strategic Homonativism on the British Right
27
European Student Think Tank. LGBTQ Rights as a Geopolitical Weapon