Gender, Militarized Masculinity, and Hungarian Illiberalism

Abstract

The article explores how gendered relations of power and masculinity are articulated in the Hungarian illiberal government’s rhetorical, legal, and spatial marking of borders and surrounding right-wing discourses in relation to categories of “East”/“West.” After the Hungarian government declared and gradually normalized its illiberal regime, particularly in response to the European refugee crisis in 2015, it passed various anti-migration, anti-gender, and anti-minority laws and policies in the name of defending Hungarians against both the influence of the “feminine” West and the “hyper-masculine” Eastern Other seeking refuge in Hungary. This article examines how the Hungarian government constructs the illiberal state, negotiates its geopolitical position, and propagates illiberal values as “masculine” to articulate and assert its sovereignty against spheres of the “feminized” international, particularly against the West. In parallel with these processes, subnational competing discourses of masculinized sovereignty emerged between the Hungarian government and the mayor of Ásotthalom. By utilizing an intersectional analytical framework, this article maps how these competing discourses of masculinized sovereignty operate at the national and local levels, against the unfolding of the 2015 humanitarian crisis and its aftermath.