Gendering 'the people'

The chapter explores right-wing populist online-discourses in a country comparative perspective with regards to the construction and strategic use of notions of gender, gender equality, sexuality and the family. These topics are of high importance for right-wing politics as they are directly connected to bio-politics, i.e. to the reproduction of ‘the people’ in a biological sense as well as in terms of social order. Drawing on frame-analyses undertaken by all partners in the e-EAV project and covering discourses in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Slovenia and UK, we show how meanings attributed to gender relations, sexuality and family change depending on the addressees of the communication as well as on the intersections with other constructions of difference, most notably race, culture, and religion. Gender is used in combination with other structures of difference in multiple ways. On the one hand it is used in order to delegitimize gender equality policies and on the other hand in order to use the gender equality frame to exclude specific groups from European societies. The latter is visible for instance in intersections with Islam, which forms an argument to exclude Muslims form an imagined community of “Western” values. Overall the chapter seeks to elaborate on the concept of intersectionality from above in analysing in comparative perspective how gender is used in different ways depending on how it interlinks with ethnicisation or racism.

Our analysis shows how gender and sexuality are differently naturalized in discourses around the (native, heterosexual) family as well as in the creation of an “anti-ideological”, anti-feminist position and in racist and anti-Islam agitation. The chapter draws special attention to the necessity of an intersectional approach in discourse analysis.