The Fantasmatic Stranger in Polish Nationalism:
Critical Discourse Analysis of LPR’s Homophobic Discourse
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Polish Academy od Sciences
Publication date: 2009-06-30
Polish Sociological Review 2009;166(2):251-272
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ABSTRACT
The article presents how the discursive discrimination of homosexuals serves nationalism in the
contemporary Polish society. Following a brief conceptual location of homophobia within the ideological
movement of nationalism, the exemplar homophobic discourse of the Polish nationalists, i.e. that of the
League of Polish Families (LPR), is examined through the interdisciplinary method of critical discourse
analysis (CDA). In the theoretical part, the sexual minority is applied the status of the “stranger” discussed
in cultural sociology; the nationalist is in turn conceptualized as a social-phenomenological actor, who
perceives and categorizes the sexual “stranger” by using the knowledge circulating at the Schützean
lifeworld. The CDA of the discriminatory discourse of LPR politicians, who represent such homophobic
nationalists, attests that homosexuals are mobilized as the “fantasmatic” stranger in today’s Poland.