Homosociality, Femmephobia and Homonationalism: Gender Regimes of Valuation in LGBTQ+ Organizations

This article examines how homosociality, femmephobia, and homonationalism intersect to shape power, legitimacy, and exclusion in LGBTQ+ organizations. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LBT) women in leadership positions in LGBTQ+ organizations in Tel Aviv, we ask how professionalization and formal inclusion coexist with persistent gay men’s informal power. The findings show that gay men’s homosocial relations function as a key organizational mechanism through which visibility, trust, influence, and symbolic authority circulate. These relations are sustained not only through networks and leadership styles, but also through embodied and aesthetic forms of intimacy, including bodily display, sexual familiarity, and gay men’s beauty norms. The article argues that femmephobia is crucial to understanding how these homosocial formations are stabilized, as femininity is cast as less legitimate, excessive, or professionally incompatible. These dynamics are intensified within a homonational context in which masculinized repertoires of intimacy, leadership, and public respectability align with broader nationalist norms. By integrating homosociality, femmephobia, and homonationalism, the article shows how gendered regimes of valuation operate within LGBTQ+ organizations, normalizing specific masculinities as credible and institutionally legitimate, while also tracing the collective strategies through which LBT women contest and disrupt these hierarchies.