The Fantasmatic Stranger in Polish Nationalism: Critical Discourse Analysis of LPR’s Homophobic Discourse

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