“Femonationalism” as a Violation of Identity Categories: The Renewed Face of the European Far-Right

Abstract

Positing a certain tendency to treat right-wing women as anomalies (Downing 2018), this article analyses the recent reappropriation of feminist discourse by the far-right in Europe, with the prominence of female political leaders such as Marine Le Pen from the Le Rassemblement National, Anne Marie Waters, leader of anti-Muslim party, For Britain, and Alice Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). It is claimed that this “femonationalist” (Farris 2017) discourse destabilises the intersectional dilution of frontiers among “oppressed” categories (cf. Crenshaw 1989), combining anti-immigrant and anti-misogynistic rhetoric, generally framed according to an anti-Islam organising principle. By violating the categories of political identity, according to which an individual’s identity – be it gendered, sexual, racial or class-based –, determines his or her ideological preference, female far-right leaders are strategically contributing to reinscribe the genealogy of feminist mobilisation, traditionally connoted with an intellectual and activist leftist tradition. A selection of Facebook comments published by Marine Le Pen, Anne Marie Waters and Alice Weidel on the events in Cologne will constitute the analytic corpus which will allow us to explore the ways that misogyny is used to justify a discriminatory politics that, more than openly racist, is above all anti-Muslim.