Right-Wing Populism and Gender: A Preliminary Cartography of an Emergent Field of Research

Abstract

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).

Post-feminist German heartland: On the women’s rights narrative of the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the Bundestag

“…Several scholars have argued that inserting such an essentializing narrative into the public discourse is capable of establishing hegemony in a Gramscian sense (Dietze and Roth, 2020;Kováts, 2018;Yılmaz, 2012Yılmaz, , 2015. Hegemony does not mean that the RRP narrative presents a dominant and inescapable idea.…”

“…In the Bundestag, the AfD strives to evoke the social and cultural imaginary of a German heartland that has to be protected from Muslim 'outsiders' as well as a 'radical feminist elite'. In their narratives, gender serves as the 'meta-language', the 'symbolic glue' that homogenizes the heartland around a fundamental cultural anxiety (Dietze and Roth, 2020). In the struggle over (a Gramscian) hegemony, the AfD strategically and selectively co-opts liberal and feminist discourses, subverting their intent to re-politicize gender issues in a way that reshapes the people's perceptions of themselves and of society.…”

Masculinity and Sexuality in Populist Radical Right Leadership

“…There is an increasing body of research on gender and sexuality in populist radical right (PRR) parties (Dietze and Roth 2020;Engeli 2020), showing that gender and sexuality have an important role in their ideologies (De Lange and Mügge 2015;Dudink 2017;Spierings 2020). Ideologically, PRR parties are often classified as (neo)conservative, although many of them support some sexual liberties (De Lange and Mügge 2015;Spierings and Zaslove 2015).…”

Per aspera ad astra – Eine politikwissenschaftliche Analyse der Akzeptanz des Gendersterns in der deutschen Bevölkerung auf Basis einer Online-Umfrage

“…Es gehe entsprechend weniger um die materiellen Fragen als um Fragen der Würde und Anerkennung. Während Evans (1993) die Politisierung von Geschlechterungleichheiten noch primär entlang der klassischen Links-rechts-Unterscheidung verortet hat, zeigen neuere Analysen, dass Genderthemen in vielen Ländern selbst zu zentralen ideologischen Unterscheidungsmerkmalen für Parteien werden und hierbei insbesondere Parteien aus dem rechten/rechtspopulistischen, aber auch konservativen Parteienspektrum Gender als Thema erkannt haben, mit dem sich gut Wähler*innen mobilisieren lassen (Abou-Chadi et al 2021;Dietze und Roth 2020). Doch auch eher linke bzw.…”