Russell's book is a timely disentanglement of the ways in which homophobic speech—broadly defined as prejudicial language targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals—is being enacted by newly empowered far right movements in Western Europe. Russell's principal aim is to expose the complex and insidious practices that constitute anti-LGBTQ animus beyond its most obvious (and most easily objected to) manifestations. In surveying the existing literature on hate speech within and beyond linguistics (chapter 1), Russell criticizes analysts’ tendency to focus primarily on the surface forms of language. He elaborates an alternative analytical model—informed by systemic functional linguistics, critical and multimodal discourse analysis, and cultural linguistics—that further attends to the structural, sociocognitive, and historico-cultural levels of hate speech production (chapter 2). Considered holistically, these three levels constitute a ‘discursive ecology’ of homophobia.
The remaining chapters offer case studies of homophobic texts produced by right-wing populists in three European speech communities, using corpora derived from social media. Russell teases out the ideologies embedded in the texts through a detailed examination of referential taxonomies, deixis, participant roles and relations, and (in the case of chapter 3) visual imagery, before situating the ideologies in the broader historical and political contexts of the populists’ respective communities.
The first study (chapter 3) centres on the Hommen, a grass-roots collective of young white men that emerged in France in response to the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption in 2013. Russell charts how the collective, in an effort to shore up traditional male hegemony, masks homophobia and misogyny behind discourses that position the Hommen both as the defenders of children and the family, and as martyrs under a tyrannical administration that is in league with militant feminists and LGBTQ activists.
Russell then turns to the Sentinelle in Piedi (chapter 4), an Italian organization that promotes a set of family values founded on an essentialist gender binary; as such, it opposes advances in parental, partner, and gender recognition rights for LGBTQ citizens. Like the Hommen, the Sentinelle cast LGBTQ activists as saboteurs of society (as well as free speech); however, they disguise their animus as a moral concern for LGBTQ people themselves, whom they portray as suffering from psychological damage and ideological deception.
The final study (chapter 5) focusses on Filip Dewinter, a Flemish politician whose discourse initially appears oppositional to the other populists’: rather than stigmatizing LGBTQ people, Dewinter expresses a desire to protect them from the supposed homophobia of (Muslim) immigrants. However, Russell shows that Dewinter's rhetoric is itself homophobic insofar as it tokenizes LGBTQ people as powerless victims of religious aggression, never as civic participants in their own right: they are reduced to a tool with which to ‘pinkwash’ xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Russell takes great care to demonstrate that homophobia is a hydra-headed foe. There is no singular way through which anti-LGBTQ animus manifests across languages any more than there is a politically monolithic European far right. Opponents of hate speech and populist rhetoric must hone their counterarguments accordingly.
