Populism and gender: Radical right-wing brings anti-feminism to Parliament (original) (raw)
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Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment
Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment, 2021
This book charts the new phase of global struggles around gender equality and sexual democracy: the ultraconservative mobilization against "gender ideology" and feminist efforts to counteract it. It argues that anti-gender campaigns, which emerged around 2010 in Europe, are not a simple continuation of the anti-feminist backlash dating back to the 1970s, but part of a new political configuration. Opposition to "gender" has become a key element of the rise of right-wing populism, which successfully harnesses the anxiety, shame and anger caused by neoliberalism and threatens to destroy liberal democracy. Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment offers a novel conceptualization of the relationship between the ultraconservative anti-gender movement and right-wing populist parties, examining the opportunistic synergy between these actors. The authors map the anti-gender campaigns as a global movement, putting the Polish case in a comparative perspective. They show that the anti-gender rhetoric is best understood as a reactionary critique of neoliberalism as a socio-cultural formation. The book also studies the recent wave of feminist mass mobilizations, viewing the transnational revolt of women as a left populist movement. This is an important study for those doing research in politics, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies and sociology. It will also be useful for activists and policy makers.
Women's Rights and Right-Wing Populism
Women's Rights and Right-Wing Populism, 2017
In Europe, anti-European movements are gaining momentum, attracting sympathizers and supporters. The trend is extremely worrying about the future of Europe and has a particularly strong impact on the prevention and the protection of human rights, collective and individual rights and freedoms in the region. Far-right parties and parties with an inclination to extreme nationalism are gaining power in Europe and give rise to xenophobia and racism. Very often, the program of these populist parties and movements involves concrete steps against equality between women and men, against human rights. They create conditions for a strong anti-feminist bias, taking action to the detriment of already achieved rights. An analysis of the policies of the political parties and movements in Bulgaria regarding the identification of program initiatives against human rights, women‘s and minority rights and their active implementation in political and social life in our country is the first of its kind, not only in Bulgaria. Such research, involving different political parties, non-governmental organizations, academic circles and media representatives, aims to explore and analyse the role of these policies for violating human rights, creating xenophobia, racism and anti-feminism, and for creating stereotypes about women and men and about minority groups, has not been done so far in another country in Europe. The study of stereotypes and prejudices is hindered by the contrast between official discourse and everyday talk, between the novelties in life and old customs and patterns of behaviour. In modern Bulgaria there are still rudimentary ideas that are quite vital in countries with less historical experience on the road of modernization. The topics of violence against women, participation of women in decision-making processes, gender pay gap, sexist language, and stereotyping the role of women in public and private life require problematization, assessment and a vision for tackling the problem. The results of this analysis give new arguments to the democratic forces in Bulgaria to uphold Europe‘s democratic and universal values. Women‘s rights are human rights. https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/sofia/14160.pdf
Since 2012, several European countries have seen the rise of conservative and, in part, fundamentalist social movements against the perceived threat of what they call (depending on the context) 'gender ideology', 'gender theory', or 'genderism'. The movements mobilizing against 'gender ideology' are frequently understood as a conservative backlash against achieved levels of equality between women and men and/or LGBTQ rights. This perspective of 'the patriarchy/heteronormativity fighting back' seems as tempting as it is simplifying. I discuss the transnational movements against 'gender ideology' in the context of the rise of right-wing populism and on the basis of considerations seeking to explain their demand side. On one hand, I argue that the study of this phenomenon provides important clues for understanding the reasons behind the rise of populist forces in Europe and beyond. On the other hand, I propose that 'gender' is not the final target for these movements and that they should not be understood primarily as mobilizations against equality. Rather, I see the emergence of these movements as a symptom of a larger systemic crisis. 'Gender ideology' in this sense embodies numerous deficits of the so-called progressive actors, and the movements or parties that mobilize against the perceived threat of 'gender ideology' react to these deficits by re-politicizing certain issues in a polarized language. Based on Chantal Mouffe's critique of the established hegemonic idea of consensus in liberal democracy, I discuss two consensuses that are characteristic of the so-called progressive actors (including the feminist and LGBTQ actors), namely, the neoliberal consensus and the human rights consensus, and their contribution to the rise of the movements against 'gender ideology'.
Populism and Feminism: Odd Bedfellows
Society, 2017
In this era of populist insurgency breaking the mold of democratic politics, two movements clashed.They represented opposite sides of the political spectrum, one emancipatory, the other exclusionary. One may be identified as feminism, the other as populism. This essay analyzes both concepts and explores their connection.
Feminist responses to populist politics
European Journal of English Studies, 2021
Given our situatedness as political subjects of knowledge — as activists and scholars from Southern Europe — we have mapped out in this issue some feminist responses to populism. This issue discusses diverse transfeminist and feminist political groups and ideas, and talks about feminisms as a constellation of accounts of politics, practices, knowledges, and experiences. Although it is beyond the scope of this issue to discuss the idea of populism, the plurality of definitions and their political implications, this collection of essays reflects our need to analyse modes of self-determination that, within feminism, are taking place in the name of the people and for the people. This Introduction sketches the situatedness of the essays in Southern Europe, the antifeminist backlash and the feminist responses that we have been witnessing in the past few years, and the appropriation of feminism by certain conservative groups.
2021
Given our situatedness as political subjects of knowledge —as activists and scholars from Southern Europe — we have mapped out in this issue some feminist responses to populism. This issue discusses diverse transfeminist and feminist political groups and ideas, and talks about feminisms as a constellation of accounts of politics, practices, knowledges, and experiences. Although it is beyond the scope of this issue to discuss the idea of populism, the plurality of definitions and their political implications, this collection of essays reflects our need to analyse modes of self-determination that, within feminism, are taking place in the name of the people and for the people. This Introduction sketches the situatedness of the essays in Southern Europe, the antifeminist backlash and the feminist responses that we have been witnessing in the past few years, and the appropriation of feminism by certain conservative groups.
A relational approach to the study of gender in radical right populism
IN S. Magaraggia and G. Vingelli (eds.), Genere e partecipazione politica (Gender and Political Participation), Milano: Franco Angeli, 2015
This chapter reviews and discusses existing studies of gender and radical right populist 1 (RRP) parties and of rightist movements more broadly, on the one hand, and of gender and social movements on the other. It begins by addressing the issue of defining the RRP party family and the relevance of gender to this end. It then moves on to discuss two sets of literature based both in sociology and politicsstudies of the European RRP support and membership, and studies of social movements and activism -to show how the sociology of gender has contributed to expand and challenge this scholarship. The discussion points to the limitations of existing scholarly literature in these fields. It is suggested that a more relational analysis of gender in the RRP as well as a focus on the activists -more specifically on issues of the gendered division of work -is important in order to widen our understanding of the gendered dimension of RRP parties and to arrive at a more complex definition of this party family across Europe. In so doing the chapter presents the theoretical framework of a comparative ethnographic study of gender and activism in two European RRP parties: the Northern League (NL) in Italy and the National Front (NF) in France 2 .
Right-Wing Populism and Gender: A Preliminary Cartography of an Emergent Field of Research
Right-Wing Populism and Gender, 2020
Borrowing from Marx, we start our introductory remarks with the first words of the Communist Manifesto, ' A specter is haunting Europe': the specter of right-wing populism. This specter looks different everywhere, and it is also at home in other parts of the world, for example in the Americas, in India, in the Philippines. Some features appear in almost all places that are haunted by it: nativist ethnonationalism (Betz 2001), hostility towards elites (Canovan 1999), anti-pluralism (Müller 2017), or the opposition to immigration (Rydgren 2008). Other spectral attributes are context-specific: in Hungary, the government has closed down universities and abolished gender studies programs to impede 'foreign' influences; in Brazil, indigenous communities are expelled from their reclaimed land and excluded from political power; and the current US president wants to build a wall at the country's southern border as a protection against 'Mexican rapists.' Due to this oscillation of content and the lack of a consistent program, populism has been conceptualized as a 'thin centered ideology' (Mudde/Kaltwasser 2017: 6), to which diverse projects, convictions, and attitudes can cling and connect. In any case, a common feature can be observed in all current versions of rightwing populism: an 'obsession with gender' and sexuality in different arenas. Populist actors conjure up the heteronormative nuclear family as the model of social organization, attack reproductive rights, question sex education, criticize a socalled 'gender ideology,' reject same-sex marriage and seek to re-install biologically understood binary gender differences. Although this 'obsession with gender' has become an omnipresent mark in right-wing discourse, canonical research has rarely addressed this aspect, nor has gender been considered as one of the major attributes for the attractiveness of populism. Rather, the success of right-wing populism is usually attributed and reduced to economic, nationalistic, or culturalist reasons and motivations (Brubaker 2017; Gidron/Hall 2017; Norris/Inglehart 2019) and seen as unrelated to gender. The Oxford Handbook of Populism's entry on Gender still argues that gender is not central to right-wing populism; however, the connection between the two is described as, admittedly, 'largely understudied' (Abi-Hassan 2017: 1).
Editor’s Introduction: How do Right-Wing Populists come to Terms with Gender Today
Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements, Vol. 65 (2021): Right-Wing Populist Movements and Gender, 2021
The 65 th volume of the journal Moving the Social is a special edition dedicated to exploring gender stereotypes used by the far-right in public debates against migration and gender equality. More specifically, it gathers comparative insights into the relationships between gender perspectives, particularly gender equality and stereotyped gender images, and antimigration discourses of populist radical right parties in Europe and the Americas. It gives specific reference to the expressions of masculinity in discourses against (often Muslim) migrants and to the strategies of argumentation through which populist radical right camps justify masculist views. As such, the volume collects four articles written at the intersection of contemporary history, politics, populism studies and gender studies. This thematically focused main part of the issue is supplemented by two further articles. One on "Framing in a Multicultural Social Movement: The Defence of the San Pedro Mezquital River", the other titled "Beyond Egalitarianism: Statistical Knowledge and Social Inequality in the German Democratic Republic". This is followed by an obituary on Alf Lüdtke. A review article of "Recent Publications on the History of Environmentalism" concludes the issue.
The Female Face of the Populist & Far Right in Europe Triumph ——— of the ——— women
Our studies consider six countries in Europe with different baseline situations that have right-wing populist parties and movements of different strengths anchored in a variety of institutions. In Poland and Hungary, rightwing populist parties are in government. In Germany the AfD determines public discourse, while in Greece such parties play a lesser role. Despite these differences, our analyses form the basis for deriving action recommendations for progressive, civil society players. These recommendations for action are not universally applicable in all countries that find themselves confronted with the problem of right-wing populism, nor should they be seen as final. In order to develop effective counter-strategies it is always essential to take account of the situation in a particular country, the country's history, its political discourses, majorities and its support networks, along with the relevance and sphere of influence of progressive and feminist players locally.