Lesbian resistance through fairytales. The story of a children’s book clashing with an authoritarian anti-gender regime in Hungary

Abstract

A Fairytale for Everyone (Meseország mindenkié), a collection of 17 fairy tales, featuring LGBTQ + and gender-nonconforming characters and heroes from various disadvantaged racial/ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds was published in 2020 by the Hungarian NGO Labrisz Lesbian Association. The stories address gender relations, disability, discrimination, social justice, poverty, domestic violence, child adoption, gender transition and same-sex love. After its release, the book became the target of anti-gender attacks. It was immediately labelled as “LGBT propaganda” and demonised as a tool for “spreading gender ideology” by the far right, leading to the implementation of legislation to restrict young LGBTQ + people’s rights, in the name of “protecting children”. In turn, these political acts triggered unprecedented national and international support for the book and the Hungarian LGBTQ + community. Meseország became a symbol of resistance against oppression, stigmatisation, discrimination and the increasingly autocratic regime. In this activist essay, the author tells the story of this book and reflects on lesbian resistance against anti-gender ideology, coalition-building and cultural production in present-day Hungary. She discusses the impacts of ideologically based intrusions of state control and the ongoing global media attention on Labrisz, and thinks about what ways of resistance can be imagined and effective against an authoritarian post-fascist regime.

Keywords:

• Anti-gender
• lesbian
• resistance
• fairytale
• childhood
• Hungary

Disclosure statement

The author reports that there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Dutch, Polish, Slovak, German, Swedish, Estonian, English, Finnish, Czech, French and Italian.

2 KDNP is the abbreviation for the Christian-Democrat People’s Party. It is a very small party which is an adjunct of Fidesz, i.e. they have run in coalition at the elections since 2010, otherwise KDNP would not receive enough votes to cross the 5% threshold for the Parliament. They are behind many of the anti-gender initiatives of the government, and their leader, Zsolt Semjén, is the Deputy Prime Minister to Orbán. I mention the two parties together where it is relevant.

3 A most tragic example has been the Covid-politics of Fidesz-KDNP, which resulted in Hungary having one of the highest Covid-related mortality rates in the world.

4 The Hungarian title of the book, “Meseország mindenkié”, literally translates as “Fairyland belongs to everyone.”

5 Quoted in the online daily www.hvg.hu, https://hvg.hu/elet/20201001_Meseorszag_mindenkie_mesekonyv_Labrisz_Duro_Dora. My translation. The video is not available, it was deleted by YouTube soon after . Some of the sentences in the original Hungarian quote are unclear or grammatically awkward, I have tried to translate the excerpt verbatim.

6 A comment on Labrisz’s Facebook page, 2023.

7 All these arguments could be found, for example, in comment threads of online bookshop sites. One example: https://www.lira.hu/hu/konyv/szepirodalom/gyerekirodalom/mesek/meseorszag-mindenkie

8 See the YouTube channel of Labrisz: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=labrisz+channel.

9 Listed in the 2021 Catalogue of The White Ravens, Internationale Jugendbibliothek, Munich; PEN Translates Award for Anna Bentley, translator of the English edition, 2021; shortlisted for the Award Fairytale Book of the Year in the category of The Most Innovative Book by HUBBY (Hungarian section of IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People), 2020; The Most Innovative Children’s Book Award by the Student Jury of HUBBY, 2021.

10 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the data protection and security law of the European Union, implemented in 2018. See: https://gdpr.eu/

11 Foundational Law of Hungary, Art. L/1.

12 Foundational Law of Hungary, Art. XVI.

13 https://www.acsaladazcsalad.hu/

14 See the questions and results of the referendum here: https://www.electionguide.org/elections/id/3871/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Emma Goldman Snowball Award, Flax Foundation, 2020.

Notes on contributors

Dorottya Rédai

Dorottya Rédai is an independent scholar, affiliated with the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests include gender equality in education, sex education, the intersectional reproduction of social inequalities in education, and anti-gender education politics in Central Eastern Europe. Her monograph Exploring Sexuality in Schools. The Intersectional Reproduction of Inequality was published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan. Besides her academic work, she works as an activist in Labrisz Lesbian Association in Hungary; she is the coordinator of the internationally renowned A Fairytale for Everyone book project. She received the Emma Goldman Snowball Award for her feminist academic and activist work in 2020 and she was honoured as one of the 100 most influential people of 2021 by TIME Magazine for her pioneering work with the fairytale book.