Populism, Gender Equality and Feminist Politics Intersectional Challenges

Populism, neo-nationalism and politics of exclusion has challenged gender equality and feminist politics across Europe. Feminist scholars find that a focus on gender can expose how notions of ‘the people’ embody highly gendered expectations of the roles women and men hold (Kantola and Lombardo 2019) and that a focus on diversity discloses the one-dimensional notion of who belongs to ‘the people’ (Siim and Fiig, 2021). Comparative studies of gender and populism demonstrate that national, cultural and historical contexts leads to different gender ideologies and style of leadership for populist parties in Eastern and Western Europe (Krizsan and Siim 2018) and to diverse gender ideologies in Europe and Latin America (Abi-Hassan 2017). In Western Europe and Scandinavia, femo-nationalist parties supporting gender equality and sexual rights tend to replace preference for authoritarian male leadership and for women’s roles as ‘mother’ of the nation (Farris 2017; Meret and Siim 2017). The paper aims to examine the conceptual and contextual links between populism, gender, and diversity reframing intersections of populism and gender with insights from diverse approaches, such as intersectionality, citizenship, femo-nationalism and critical discourse and masculinity studies. It is crucial to explore various aspects of populism, gender and feminist politics, such as its gendered and nativist discourse, its symbolic and performative elements, and the exclusionary body and border politics embedded in diverse socio-political contexts (Wodak 2014). These approaches are analytical tools for scrutinizing the multiple dynamic between feminist politics and the anti-feminist opposition. The paper briefly illustrates the dynamic links between populism and femo-nationalism from the Danish context. Here the discourse of the Danish Peoples’ Party was a ‘femo-nationalist’ support of gender equality and sexual rights articulated as part of our ‘Danish values’ (Siim and Meret 2016; 2017). However, the second wave of the feminist #Me Too movement in fall of 2020 sparkled a new (female led) populist alliance between anti-feminism and anti-migration led by Pernille Vermund from the New Bourgeois Party challenging the Danish version of femo-nationalism. Arguably, understanding the new dynamic between feminist activism and anti-feminism is an important tool for advancing feminist politics and creating alternative frames and agendas in the pursuit of inclusive intersectional solidarities.