This article examines the interplay between homophobia and nationalism by analyzing online comments on the ruling of legalizing same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Drawing on methods from critical discourse analysis, I focus on the framing of this ruling by members from a Chinese antigay community online. I show that they frame this ruling as (1) in opposition to public opinion, (2) promoting ‘Westernization’ and ‘Independence’, (3) seeking immorality and self-destruction. I find that within these frames, they evoke nationalist discourses that represent (...) supporters of this ruling as the ‘Other’ who attempt to split with China, thereby associating LGBT equality movements in China with this political threat. I argue that these nationalist discourses are used in a way that reinforces and legitimizes discourses of homophobia. (shrink)

This article begins with a theoretical tension. Radical democracy, in the joint work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, can be understood as a joint articulation of a post-foundational ontology of contingency and a politics of autonomy of ‘democratic struggles’ within a hegemonic bloc as loci of antagonisms in their own right, while Laclau’s theory of populism marks a shift from the autonomy of struggles to the representative function of the empty signifier as a constitutive dimension. This tension between a (...) horizontal logic of autonomy and a vertical logic of representation comes to the fore not least in the manifold attempts to combine radical-democratic and populist practices in the wake of the ‘movements of the squares.’ This argument is illustrated empirically in the cases of two party projects situating themselves in contexts of social protest—‘Social Movement’ in Ukraine and Podemos in Spain—both of which seek to combine a left-populist discursive strategy with some form of radical-democratic politics of autonomy, either by supporting local alliances independent from the party or by integrating trade union representatives into the organizational center, which in turn finds expression in a representative logic. (shrink)

It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric “populist” in fact belong together? Or is “populism” just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? In the first part of the article, I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the last few years as a “populist moment,” and I propose an account of populism as a (...) discursive and stylistic repertoire. In the second part, I specify the structural trends and the conjunctural convergence of a series of crises that jointly explain the clustering in space and time that constitutes the populist moment. The question in my title is thus twofold: it is a question about populism as a term or concept and a question about populism as a phenomenon in the world. The article addresses both the conceptual and the explanatory question, limiting the scope of the explanatory argument to the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhenever people use language, they participate in valuation practices, i.e. they give value to themselves as well as to others. To account for the construction of social inequality through discursive valuation practices, discourse theorists need Marxist theory and Marxists need discourse theory. By going from the early Marx to the late Foucault, I will revisit Marx’s value theory in light of practice-oriented approaches to social inequality. I will discuss examples from two distinct arenas, the monopolization of attention by populist leaders (...) and the academic star system, both of which are accounted for in terms of the accumulation of discursive capital. This perspective asks how the value of subject positions is constructed and hierarchies between them are established in discursive practices. Investigating the construction of valuable subject positions in discourse communities, this perspective attempts to overcome the traditional division between language, the economic and the social. Discourse n... (shrink)

This paper advances the thesis that democratic populism and the commons can and should complement each other in counter-hegemonic interventions promoting egalitarian and ecological democracy in our times. After elucidating its key terms, the article makes, first, a theoretical case for the combination of egalitarian, inclusionary populism and the commons by debunking arguments which highlight the conflicts between them and by explaining the political significance of their conjugation. Subsequently, discussion builds an empirical argument for the real possibility and the democratic (...) promises of such a convergence by considering three ways in which populist politics and the commons merge and recompose each other in contemporary social movements, from the Spanish 15M and new municipalism to Occupy and other collective contestation in the Americas over the last two decades. These cases will illustrate how late social activism has effectively blended populist mobilization with the spirit of the commons, engendering a hybrid figure of ‘common populism’ that fosters grassroots processes of democratization. (shrink)

The recent rise of the far-right ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AfD) in Germany has puzzled researchers. How did demands around cultural homogeneity and the need to be protected from ‘dangerous’ immigrants become acceptable in the mainstream when previously they were not? Crucially, understanding political change is paramount for discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau, who considers ‘demands’ as pivotal for the construction of political identities. Yet, the notion is underdeveloped in his writings. I discuss the aporias in Laclau’s understanding of demands and probe (...) how far we can take Laclau in theoretically accounting for the emergence of demands. The concepts of horizon and dislocation are most helpful in this regard. I then utilise those concepts to analyse demand emergence in the ‘Leitkultur’ (leading culture) debate. I show how the horizon on which these demands are inscripted changed over the years, with a culturalistic discourse becoming dominant. There, following a dislocatory public debate of a non-fiction bestseller by career bureaucrat Thilo Sarrazin, integration was increasingly framed as problematic and foreigners needing to shed unintegratable parts of their own culture to assimilate to a German Leitkultur. I argue that acts of mainstreaming like these allowed the AfD to make their formerly radical demands seem credible. (shrink)