Homotolerant versus Homophobic? Swedish Sexual Exceptionalism and the Russian Other

Abstract This article explores how discourses of LGBTQI rights, homophobia, and homotolerance intersect in specific nation-state contexts. Focusing on Sweden’s self-image of homotolerance, the author shows how this image has depended on the construction of non-tolerant and sexually backward Russia since 1991. This article suggests sexual exceptionalism as a more precise term to understand the relationship between Sweden and Russia in terms of geopolitics of sexuality. To do so, it examines the construction of Russia in the Swedish media discourse, with a focus on the position of LGBTQI people, and analyzes how this discourse, in turn, constructs the Swedish Self as exceptional and tolerant. My conclusions are based on a material consisting of around 500 articles from the five largest Swedish newspapers, published from 1991 to 2019. I show how the Swedish newspapers’ portrayals of attitudes towards the LGBTQI subjects in Russia have relied on constructions of temporal difference and geographical closeness between the two nations and exhibited little change throughout the period. The article contributes to scholarship on global sexualities by demonstrating how the constructions of the homophobic Other become embedded in existing historical discourses on othering by helping produce notions of the sexual-politically exceptional Self.