Populism Is Always Gendered and Dangerous (original) (raw)
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Gender, Populism and Anti-Immigrations
Moving the Social
In current struggles over cultural hegemony, conservative and right-wing populist dis- course is marked by an omni-presence of topics related to gender and sexuality. This article examines the ways in which diverse actors of what will be called the ‘right-wing populist complex’ use gender in order to catapult a variety of arguments into the public sphere with particular focus on actors in the Americas and Germany. Suggest- ing a first set of Right-Wing Populist Patterns of Gendering1, the article pursues the question how seemingly emancipatory arguments function in right-wing discourse, especially in performing a modernisation paradigm, while simultaneously, and in of- ten paradoxical ways, promoting a program of re-traditionalisation. Therefore, often, gender arguments—like the sexual freedom of ‘autochtonous’ women—are used to justify anti-immigration and racist politics. One’s own society can thus be depicted as supposedly already fully emancipated in contrast to the alleged ‘bac...
Populism and Gendered Stories of Victimhood
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This article makes the case for seeing hypermasculine posturing and appealing to male anxieties as integral to the wider purchase of nationalist populist narratives that fuel anti-democratic sentiments and demand a radical transformation of politics and society. It focuses on how populist rhetoric from—and to—the right of the political spectrum relies on highly gendered scripts to build and mobilize political support by making abstract notions of insecurity feelable as a crisis and betrayal of manhood. Speaking to a growing body of literature discussing gender and populism, the article demonstrates that populist masculine rhetoric is more than simply a brawny display of "bad manners." Alongside ethnicity and nationality, it forms the core of the radicalizing playbook that helps turning individual grievances over frustrated desires and unmet expectations into a call to arms for political agents who promise alleviation and transformative change.
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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 Politics
In the Islamist version of civilizational populism, the emotional backlash against the rise of secularism, multiculturalism, progressive ideas, and ‘wokeness,’ has been skillfully employed. While for the populists, populist far right and civilizational populists in the West, usually the Muslims are the civilizational other, we argue in this article, in the Islamist civilizational populism, the list of civilizational enemies of the Muslim way of life also includes feminists and LGBTQ+ rights advocates. Gender populism is a relatively new concept that refers to the use of gender symbolism, language, policy measures, and contestation of gender issues by populist actors. It involves the manipulation of gender roles, stereotypes, and traditional values to appeal to the masses and create divisions between “the people” and “the others.” This paper looks at the case study of gender populism in Turkey, where the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been in power for over two decades. The AKP has used gender populism to redefine Turkish identity, promote conservative Islamism, and marginalize women and the LGBTQ+ community. The paper also discusses how gender populism has been used by the AKP to marginalize political opponents.
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.
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.
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).
Resisting the ‘populist hype’: a feminist critique of a globalising concept
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The purpose of this article is to offer a feminist critique of populism, not as a distinct mode of politics, but as an analytical and political concept. As such, it seeks to redirect our attention away from populism, understood as a politics ‘out there’, towards the academic theoretical debates that have given this analytical term a new lease of life and propelled it beyond academic circles into the wider public discourse. In this context, the article develops two broad arguments. The first is that the two prevailing conceptions of populism are marred by anaemic conceptions of power, collective agency and subjectivity and, as such, are unable to present us with a convincing account of why this form of radical politics emerges in the first place, who its protagonists are, and how they come together in collective struggle. The second is that our current frenetic deployment of the term as a blanket descriptor for radical politics of all persuasions does not bode well for feminism polit...