When Feminism Becomes ‘Radical’: Discursive Thresholds and European Legitimacy

What if rather than approaching “radical feminism” as a stable ideological category, we viewed radicalisation as a discursive and conceptual threshold through which political claims are repositioned (from legitimate expressions of equality to forms of contestation perceived as excessive, disruptive, or difficult to accommodate within existing democratic frameworks)? This paper explores how feminist claims come to be described as “radical” within contemporary European political discourse, and what this classificatory practice reveals about the normative boundaries of Europeanness and democratic legitimacy. The purpose of the paper is not to assess the validity of feminist claims, but to examine the conceptual work performed by labels of radicality in liberal democratic contexts. Drawing on selected European Parliament debates, resolutions, and European Commission communications on gender equality, democracy, and fundamental rights, the paper analyses how feminism is invoked as a component of the European values while simultaneously being circumscribed through appeals to moderation, consensus, and institutional balance. Attention is paid to moments in which feminist claims are implicitly differentiated from “ideology,” “extremes,” or polarisation, suggesting a shift from inclusion to conceptual containment. The documents are chosen not because they represent feminist mobilisation, but because EU institutions explicitly claim the authority to define the normative meaning of “Europe” and to set the parameters of legitimate political disagreement. To situate this European framing, the paper introduces Argentina as a limited analytical counterpoint rather than as a fully comparable case. Drawing on selected feminist movement statements, the Argentine material is used to reflect on alternative modes of articulating feminist claims and political legitimacy. Movement texts are employed here because feminist politics in Argentina have largely developed through popular mobilisation rather than through supranational institutional norm-setting. The counterpoint serves to underscore the historically and institutionally specific character of European civilisational vocabularies in shaping the meaning of political radicality. The paper deliberately distinguishes between institutional discourse and social movement practices and therefore does not analyse EU-level feminist advocacy campaigns. This analytical separation allows the paper to focus on radicalisation as a regulatory concept, rather than as a property of feminist activism itself. By examining how labels of radicality operate within EU articulations of Europeanness, the paper contributes to broader theoretical debates on contested political concepts, democratic legitimacy, and the tensions between inclusion and constraint in contemporary liberal democracy.