Gendering the Far-Right: A Comparative Perspective

• In Event: Gender in Comparative Politics

Abstract

Although the year 2021 started with some refreshing news on women’s human rights front, with the German cabinet set to force publicly listed companies to include more women on their executive boards and Argentine legalizing the abortion rights nationwide after the decades-long struggle of their women’s movements, the global rise of far-right politics and the backlash on gender-equality movements is still, unfortunately, an issue to be tackled. This paper will develop a comparative framework which places gender at the center of an analytics for understanding variation among contemporary Right-wing movements while utilizing controlled case comparisons (Brazil, Turkey, and Poland). Amidst the terminological cacophony of contemporary politics, this paper seeks for some analytical coherence and clarity and asks “How do we perceive Right-Wing politics and its global rise in the last two decades if we look at them through the gender lens? How could we conceptualize repeating and varying patterns amongst them?” I focus on the role that women’s movements play in resisting their government’s oppression through restrictive social and economic policies, changing legal codes, as well as the state elite’s hostile discourse towards women in these geographies. I suggest that the first salient aspect of right-wing politics is that they allow limited or no room for gender pluralism in social life. By collapsing the public and private separation, they first handpick a single set of choices regarding sex, gender and sexuality and elevate it to the preferred gender currency for all components of the society. With this act, the “proper” or “preferred” citizenry body is painted with patriarchal, atavistic, heteronormative and nativist tones. This in return applies to who is welcomed as proper citizens and who is to be excluded as traitors to family, patria, and the nation: a very exploitable source for right-wing mobilizations. Therefore, right-wing movements are no longer solely nationalist, but they are also equally gendered. I conclude my paper with accounting for my choice not to include other similar cases (India, Philippine, Netherlands, France, and Italy) and devote a separate section to indicate further lessons to shed light on the American case. In so doing, I not only anchor the elusive characteristics of contemporary right-wing movements, but I also invite a long-neglected vein, gender politics and women’s human rights, to the theory and comparison of contemporary right-wing ideology.

Author

• Elif Savas, UMass Amherst