Paradoxes in the Far Right’s gender and sexuality politics: Nationalism, Islamophobia and multiple positionings on gender

Over the last decades, issues related to gender and sexuality came to the center of public and political debates in Europe. Right-wing parties and actors across Europe are gaining popularity while increasingly drawing on gender and sexuality in their anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric (e.g. Mayer, Ajanovic and Sauer 2014, Meret and Siim 2013). This Special Issue results from an international workshop organised by the Network for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality (NAGS), part of the European Association of SocialAnthropologists (EASA), and held at VU University Amsterdam in December 2019. The workshop interrogated entanglements of anti-migration and gender discourses, including anti-gender movements across Europe. Its overall aim was to discuss different ‘uses and abuses of gender’ in relation to migration and Islamophobia as deployed by right-wing discourse (Scott 2013).