In the context of conflicts over Islam and multiculturalism, the acceptance and equal treatment of homosexuality have come to have an unprecedented centrality to Dutch politics. This article explains homosexuality's prominence in these debates as the effect of its ability to serve as a centrepiece of a critique of Dutch 'consociational democracy'. It demonstrates how in the course of the 1990s a Dutch political culture of consensus, compromise and mutual accommodation became a frame for conflicts over multicultural society. Critics of multiculturalism blamed consociational democracy for both hampering the integration of immigrants into Dutch society and for preventing a debate about this putative failure to integrate. They argued for the introduction into a political culture, presumed to revolve around accommodation, of non-negotiable moral principles that were to unite the nation in its confrontation with cultures thought to be hostile to it. Secondly, the article examines how homosexuality increasingly became pivotal to such arguments through an analysis of a series of episodes in a continuous, similarly structured media narrative on homosexuality, Islam and consociational democracy. The article argues that homosexuality's central place in these narratives needs to be understood as resulting from its ability to represent the non-negotiable moral principles consociational democracy was thought to lack. Conceptualized as a given, unchanging truth about identity that open homosexuals unflinchingly presented to the world, homosexuality functioned as a metonym for the moral steadfastness and transparency that, in the eyes of its critics, a consociational political culture failed to produce.

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Research shows that masculinity and sexuality are pivotal to the leadership and success of the populist radical right (PRR). In particular, normative conceptions of masculinity, as seen in gendered nationalism, have been argued to be important to the appeal of PRR parties. However, the supply side of this dynamic remains understudied. To fill this gap, this article uses critical discourse analysis to analyze the role of masculinity and sexuality in the self-positioning and envisioned hegemonies of the most successful Dutch PRR leaders: Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders, and Thierry Baudet. The Dutch case is particularly insightful as it presents a diverse array of PRR parties in one country context. We found crucial similarities and differences between the discourses of these leaders. Our findings suggest that masculinity and sexuality, while constitutive at the party level, are largely negotiable or nondefining for the larger party family. These findings problematize often-made identifications of PRR politics with a one-of-a-kind conservative ideology of gender and sexuality.

The neo-classical model of the male body held a special place in late 18th-century political culture. Its impermeability, resulting from neoclassicism’s focus on line and contour, was especially invested with political meanings. It symbolized political and moral regeneration and helped create a ‘stoic’ male political subjectivity that validated the seizure of power by revolutionary citizens. This article discusses the meanings of visual representations of mutilated, violently opened male bodies against the backdrop of the importance of the impermeable, neo-classical male body. The author argues for understanding these bodies as testifying to the indeterminacy that came with modern democratic political life. Following French political philosopher Claude Lefort, he describes democratic society as a society that cannot be represented through the organic totality of the body. Society and politics under democracy are of an open-ended nature: opened bodies testify to this and unsettle the appearance of political stability and ‘closure’ that representations of the ideal body attempt to create.