In this hugely influential book, Laclau and Mouffe examine the workings of hegemony and contemporary social struggles, and their significance for democratic theory. With the emergence of new social and political identities, and the frequent attacks on Left theory for its essentialist underpinnings, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy remains as relevant as ever, positing a much-needed antidote against ‘Third Way’ attempts to overcome the antagonism between Left and Right.

Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, (...) offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how "political articulation" has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline. (shrink)

The article traces the framing of Muslim Europeans as the continent’s Other by focusing on the silencing of queer Muslims within public debates around ‘Islam and homosexuality’. Ignoring class as a factor in the violence produced by the gentrification of urban spaces, the pitting of the gay community against the Muslim community posits the latter as a threat to the continent’s foundations that needs to be contained through forms of spatial governance in line with the neoliberal restructuring of the city. (...) Maintaining that this is a Europe-wide phenomenon, the article looks at Amsterdam as exemplifying the European metropole as a site of pseudo-homophile Islamophobia. Simultaneously, with activist groups like the queer of color collective Strange Fruit, it is also representative of the strategies of resistance developed by groups whose presence is virtually erased through culture clash discourses, namely queer Muslims. The article argues that an intersectional queer of color activism, as practiced by Strange Fruit, and a queer of color critique building on it, allows to undermine binaries from the Muslim/european dichotomy to the normative coming out narrative, invariably positioning queers of color as ‘not properly gay’. (shrink)

In Western Europe, debates surrounding the integration of ‘Muslim’ women over the last decade signify the ways in which racialized notions of gender and sexuality have come to define acceptable and unacceptable ways of being European. Discourses concerning the wearing of the headscarf and ‘honour crimes’ are particular ways in which ‘Muslim’ genders are produced, condemned and held responsible for posing a threat to supposedly stable European values of gender equality and sexual emancipation. This article examines some of the interventions (...) by feminist and gay activists Germany regarding the veil and so-called honour crimes, which reflect an increasing acceptance of the state’s escalating racialization processes on the part of activists. The article concludes that the very racialization of the category ‘Muslim’ needs to be examined not only in a postcolonial context but also how this process has emerged after 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’. (shrink)