Right-wing misuse of intersectionality for contesting women’s and gender rights

Anne-Marie Fortier coined the term “affective citizenship” to distinguish between those who have citizenship rights and those who have to earn citizenship by transforming their belonging into attachment to the local community. Hence, affects and emotions build modes of inclusion and exclusion. This paper aims at theorizing anti-gender mobilizations of the radical populist right in Germany and Austria as forms of governing people and implementing new forms of exclusionary citizenship practices. Right-wing populist parties and organizations across the globe use anti-gender mobilizations – against the concepts of “gender” and “gender mainstreaming” – and misuse intersections of e.g., gender and religion or gender and class, in order to channel affect into opposition against women’s and gender rights and to restrict citizenship rights – not only of women, but of LGBTIQ people and of migrants and Muslims. In the right-wing discourse (and in some countries in policies) emotions (such as fear or anger but also love, hope and solidarity) are used to categorize people in those who belong and those who do not. Affect and emotions are thus, means to make people “governable” (in the Foucauldian sense), that they e.g., agree to right-wing populist exclusive and (gender) unequal political project. In the right-wing populist discourse, being or becoming a citizen is based on affective assumptions at the intersections of gender – as for instance the patriarchal aggressiveness of Muslim men which therefore are seen as not fitting to Western societies. Granting or denying rights is then based on this affectivity. Based on empirical evidence the paper wants to identify common patterns of anti-gender mobilization, intersectional structures of feelings or affect and gendered citizenship.