Politicians’ authenticity: exploring the interplay between populist and gendered performances

In recent years, the scholarship on populism has displayed a growing interest in understanding the gendered aspects of (especially right-wing) populism. Scholars unpacked the types of femininity/masculinity propagated by extreme-right populism and how right-wing populism revers a hegemonic and uniform account of femininity/masculinity that obfuscates intersectional differences among women and men. Analyses have revealed how populism propagates a toxic masculinity (and a reactionary conception of femininity) and articulates its proper conceptualisation of sex, gender, and sexuality. Increasingly, scholars agree that gender performances are central to right-wing populist discourses and success. They under-gird extreme-right populism, making it central to its various articulations and successes (Eksi & Wood 2019). Clearly, the scholarship has made great strides in analysing the gender performances of extreme-right populists, understood as performances through which gender roles, norms, values, relations are constituted. What has received less scholarly attention, in contrast, is the gendered nature of these very performances; or the insight that the repertoires of performing available to politicians are, themselves, restrained by gender: prevailing gender norms greatly affect (facilitate and/or restrain) the type of instruments, styles and repertoires politicians have at their disposal. In our paper, we investigate the relationship between populists’ claims to authenticity (i.e. being one of the people) and their gendered performances (i.e. how the nature of their performances is itself gendered). Our aim is to come to a more fine-grained understanding of when and how gendered performances give purchase to politicians’ claims to authenticity. To this end, we attribute closer attention to politicians’ body or corporeal performances, and the ways in which their body is simultaneously an asset and a limit to their performances of authenticity.