Preaching the “Traditional Family” in the Romanian Parliament: The Political Stakes and Meanings of a Hegemonic Narrative

Abstract

In this article, we examine a decade of parliamentary debates related to the topic of family to understand the reasons and the rhetorical strategies that drive the support of Romanian MPs for the traditional family. Starting from four themes identified in the literature as relevant for the topic of family—national identity, religion, heteronormativity, and children—we identify the dominant definition of the “traditional family” as that of the Christian Romanian family founded and defended by ancestors—that is, union between a man and a woman for the purpose of reproduction—as the only place that can guarantee that children will grow up in a healthy and moral environment. This hegemonic narrative is enhanced by the anti-gender campaign repertoire and strengthened by populist logic, aiming to restore true Romanian values—Christian, ancestral, and national—in opposition to contemporary Western relativism and the alleged colonial cultural project of gender equality+ politics. The decadent present, threatening national identity, the continuity of the people, Christian values, the natural gender order, or the safety of children, can be saved only by returning to the traditional family, which functions as a hegemonic signifier re-imposing, in the logic of the narrative of return, a nationalist, conservative, and religious definition of the family, based on biological and natural foundations and necessarily heteronormative and chauvinist.