This article asks whether gender and sexuality attitudes influence vote propensity for the populist radical right (PRR) and whether, reciprocally, PRR gender and sexuality discourse influences their prospective voters on these issues. Using a large data set that includes a panel section spanning two Dutch national elections with topical data on political preference, gender identity and sexuality (attitudes), we find that conservative attitudes on trans rights and nonbinarity increase PRR vote propensity. Opposition to gay rights also marginally increased PRR vote propensity in 2023, though not in 2021. Additionally, we find that PRR vote propensity increases the likelihood of becoming more conservative on gender and sexuality. Compared to the general electorate, those who preferred PRR parties in 2021 have become particularly more conservative on trans rights and non-binarity in 2023. We thus show that demand for PRR parties is not (just) exogenous and argue that while European PRR discourse is converging, the specific issues are context dependent.

This article addresses three caveats in populist radical right (PRR) voter studies focusing on gender and sexuality: omission of potential voters, representing gender and sexuality as one undifferentiated category, and issue-specific rather than comparative analysis. We use a theory-grounded latent class analysis, based on the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study (2021), to identify voter profiles in terms of how nativism, populism, and gender identity and sexuality attitudes combine differently among citizens who are inclined to vote populist radical right. Empirically, we find distinct profiles in terms of populism, nativism and gender identity and sexuality attitudes: a small minority of gender-and-sexuality-conservatives and larger classes of more modern and moderate potential populist radical right voters; but all clearly nativist. Abstracting from the specific case of the Netherlands, we provide typological descriptions of populist radical right voters that are likely also relevant in other countries.

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 chapter focuses on the development from the Global Cold War and anticolonial struggle to the global conflicts of the post–Cold War period. It first provides an overview of the complex features of a period that starts in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War with the challenges of the aftermath of the conflict and a post war reordering of economies, societies and national and international politics, and continues with the rise of the Global Cold War and the spread of the Wars of Decolonization in Asia and Africa that led to the decline of European empires. Then it explores the consequences of the collapse of communism, the end of the Global Cold War, and the proliferation of Wars of Globalization along with new forms of humanitarianism and peacekeeping. In the last section, it discusses the research by gender scholars from different disciplines on the Global Cold War and the Wars of Globalization and their attempts to rewrite mainstream narratives.

The chapter explores the interrelationship between the emergence of new ways of mass mobilization with volunteers, militias, and universal conscription; the rise of notions of gender as a universal, natural binary opposition; and the rise of men as universal male political subjects in the periods of the wars of revolution and wars of nation-building and nation-keeping from the 1770s to the 1870s. One important theme is the nexus between male military duties and citizenship rights. This nexus was introduced in the French Revolution and later used and transformed in several other contexts. Where it was rejected, it nevertheless made its presence felt in what became a conscious refusal of the French model of the modern citizen-soldier. Always controversial and never fully implemented, even in contexts where it was supposedly fully endorsed, the model of universal conscription loomed large in the background of all nineteenth-century debates over military reform and political citizenship.

This chapter provides an introduction to the intertwined histories of gender and war from the end of the Age of Revolutions in the early nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In the opening section, it offers a reconsideration of the notion of Europe's post-Napoleonic century as an of peace and of key concepts that historians have used to make sense of pursuits of war and military force during this time period, such as total war, imperialism, and militarism, and nationalism. It then offers a panoramic view of the major wars waged from the 1830s to the 1910s, paying special attention to the often porous and fluid boundaries between national, colonial, and imperial armed conflicts. Next, the chapter surveys the peacetime militarization of the Western before the era of the two world wars, analyzing it as part of the movement of politics, society, culture, and economics in what was by the mid-nineteenth century a global age. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the intersections of war and gender and a reflection on the state of scholarship.

Abstract The handbook is a reference work of thirty-two essays jointly written by specialists in the history of military and war and experts in gender and women’s history. The collection, covering four centuries from the Thirty Years’ War to the present Wars of Globalization, investigates how gender contributed to the shaping of warfare and the military and was at the same time transformed by them. The essays explore this question by focusing on themes such as the cultural representations of military and war; war mobilization of and war support by society; war experiences on the home fronts and battlefronts; gendered war violence; military service and citizenship; war demobilization, postwar societies, and memories; and attempts to regulate and tame warfare and prevent new wars. The volume covers chronologically the major periods in the development of warfare since the seventeenth century. Its content reflects the state of research on the history of gender and war. Therefore, the main geographical focus of the handbook in several chapters is on the best explored regions of eastern and western Europe, the Americas and Australia. But it also systematically covers the long-term processes of colonization and empire-building originating in early modern Europe and their aftermath in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia, which are more recent fields of research. Thus, the handbook allows for both temporal comparisons that explore continuities and changes in a long-term perspective and regional comparisons, as well as an assessment of transnational influences on the entangled relationships between and among gender, warfare, and military culture. All essays are thematic, comparative or transnational.

This chapter offers an introduction to the entangled histories of gender and war from the Thirty Years' War to the Wars of Revolution and Independence, against the background of a wider history of war and warfare in the early modern period. It starts with a critical discussion of some of the concepts historians have used to capture the nature and development of early modern war and warfare, such as military revolution, limited war, and total war. An important aspect of this discussion is the relations between transformations in early modern warfare and processes of state formation, which are central to various arguments made by historians about gender and war in the early modern period. Against this conceptual background, the chapter then presents an overview of the major wars from this period, with a focus on the Thirty Years' War, the Seven Years' War, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which points, among other things, to the increasing entwinement of European and colonial war in this era. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the state of research and central themes in the history of gender and war.

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.

A crucial feature of the political culture of the two decades of democratic revolution (1780–1800) in the Dutch Republic was the call on citizens to take up arms in order to defend old liberties and obtain new political rights. The militia movement, firmly grounded in local political communities, played a central role in the revolutionary attack on the Dutch 'ancien régime,' and in the invention of and experiments with democratic politics that was to replace it. Thus the taking up of arms in the Dutch democratic revolution can be understood, in the terms of Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen, as an 'act of citizenship,' in which 'subjects constitute themselves as citizens.' 2

In recent debates over multiculturalism and Islam, homosexuality has played a remarkable role, in several European countries and elsewhere, in attempts to redefine the nation and to re-establish its boundaries. This essayeeks to explain why this is the case by concentrating on the signifying power of homosexuality in modern political culture. It argues that homosexuality's signifying power derives from its cultural status as a fundamental and natural truth about the person. The combined elements of truth and nature make homosexuality a cultural category that can effectively be deployed to establish truths in fields other than those that pertain to same-sex sexuality strictly speaking. Of particular relevance to debates about the nation and its identity is the fact that the notion of homosexuality as natural partly rests on nineteenth-century discourses of racial difference. The racial elements in the construction of modern homosexuality re-appear in contemporary attempts to redefine the nation and to re-establish its boundaries, but with an important difference. Homosexuality is no longer, as in the past, associated with blackness and Jewishness; it has become white.

Résumé Dans les récents débats relatifs au multiculturalisme et à l'islam, l'homosexualité a eu un rôle remarquable dans les tentatives de redéfinir la nation et de ré-établir ses frontières dans de nombreux pays européens et ailleurs. Cet article cherche à éclairer cette situation en déplaçant le regard vers le pouvoir de signification de l'homosexualité dans la culture politique moderne. Il défend l'idée que le pouvoir de signification de l'homosexualité dérive de son statut culturel qui en fait une vérité naturelle et fondamentale de la personne. Les éléments combinés de vérité et de nature font de l'homosexualité une catégorie culturelle qui peut être efficacement déployée pour établir des vérités dans des champs autres que ceux qui relèvent strictement de la sexualité entre personnes du même sexe. Que la notion d'homosexualité comme étant en partie naturelle trouve son origine dans les discours de différence raciale du 19 su e rn ?siècle est d'une pertinence particulière dans les débats ayant trait à la nation et à son identité. Les éléments raciaux de la construction de l'homosexualité moderne réapparaissent dans les tentatives contemporaines de redéfinir la nation et de ré-établir ses frontières, mais avec une différence importante?: l'homosexualité n'est plus, comme elle l'était dans le passé, associée à la noirceur ou à la judaïté. Elle est désormais blanche.

This article introduces the contributions to a BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review special issue on Low Countries masculinities. It outlines a shared theoretical framework that focuses on what historian Mrinalini Sinha has called, 'the rhetorical and ideological efficacy' of notions of masculinity 'in underwriting various arrangements of power'. The article's central argument is that the history of masculinity should move 'beyond masculinity' by analysing the deployment of masculinity in the making, legitimisation and contestation of not just power relations of gender, but also other power relations. It points to the origins of this framework in post-structuralist strands of women's and gender history and evaluates critically the usefulness of the notion of 'hegemonic masculinity' for such an approach. This article is part of the special issue 'Low Countries Histories of Masculinity'.

This article explores visual strategies of legitimisation deployed in the establishment of the Dutch Restoration monarchy. It asks how these visual strategies were shaped by historically specific notions of masculinity and simultaneously helped shape such notions. Concentrating on the first state portrait of William I as King by Joseph Paelinck painted in 1818, it argues that this portrait was part of a ‘staging’ of the Dutch Restoration monarchy. In the absence of ancien régime claims to legitimacy, Restoration monarchies needed to have recourse to theatrical means of legitimisation, but also had to make sure not to provoke associations with the theatrical elements inherent in old regime monarchies. The representation of the King’s body in the state portrait, drawing strongly on neoclassical and revolutionary conventions, invoked notions of masculinity centring around political virtue and naturalness. As such, the King’s body, and the masculinity it represented, helped undo the artificiality associated with monarchy and lent a sense of reality to the staging of the Dutch Restoration monarchy. This article is part of the special issue 'Low Countries Histories of Masculinity'.