Neoliberal Feminism and Political Leadership. An Analysis of Giorgia Meloni's Agenda and Rhetoric on Gender Issues.

This contribution seeks to critically examine the incorporation of a neoliberal feminist sensibility into the discursive strategies, agenda and political communication of political leaders. Specifically, it will focus on Giorgia Meloni, Italy's prime minister and prominent figure in the conservative political landscape. Neoliberal feminism can be described as a reinterpretation of liberal feminism from an individual and market-oriented perspective. At the same time, it can also be read as a hegemonic discourse, capable of 'genderizing' the self-entrepreneurial logic of the Foucauldian neoliberal subject (1978, 1979) and extending it to the private domain of social reproduction. Issues such as merit, equality, individual will, and the harnessing of one's talents thus become central in the context of a reshaping of classic feminist themes from an individual perspective and in the reaffirmation of traditional social structures (Rottenberg 2013, Prugl 2015, Fraser 2013-2015,Eisenstein 2017,Banet-Weiser 2015-2020, Gill 2017, Cooper 2017). The proposed analysis delves into official speeches, conference speeches, television interviews, national newspapers and women's magazines, for a total of 35 texts selected from July 2022 to January 2025. The meaning of analyzing the rhetoric used by Meloni is, on the one hand, to highlight the strategic use of neoliberal feminist language and its macro-themes within the evolution of a politically conservative framework of leadership construction. On the other, to find out whether the proclaimed commitment to certain gender issues translates into substantive initiatives, concrete actions, or rather functions as a mere rhetorical device. Indeed, while Giorgia Meloni made it clear right from the start that she did not want to be a spokesperson for strong feminist demands in her institutional role, she could not help but build an agenda on gender issues. How this agenda is structured, how these issues are declined, what vocabulary is used, how they are put into discursive practice, and, above all, what ideology informs them, is the founding question of this contribution. Bibliography Banet-Weiser, S. (2015) ‘Confidence you can carry!’: girls in crisis and the market for girls' empowerment organizations, Continuum, 29:2, 182-193, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1022938. Banet-Weiser, S., Gill, R. and Rottenberg, C. (2020) ‘Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cooper M., Family Values. Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, New York, Zone Books, 2017. Eisenstein H. (2017) Hegemonic feminism, neoliberalism and womenomics: ‘empowerment’ instead of liberation? New Formations, 2017(91). Farris, S., & Rottenberg, C. (2017). Introduction: Righting Feminism. new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 91, 5-15. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/671947. Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, New York, Palgrave MacMillan. Fraser, N. (2013) Fortunes of Feminism. From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, Brooklyn, NY, Verso Books. Gill, R. (2017) The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20, 6, pp. 606-26. Harvey, D. (2005), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Prügl, E. (2015) Neoliberalising Feminism, New Political Economy, 20:4, 614-631, DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2014.951614.