'She has Extraordinary Legs!': Marine Le Pen and the Gendered Political Field

Drawing from ethnographic observation and interviews with supporters of the Front National (FN), France’s radical right party, this paper explores how gendered political symbolism answers socio-economic grievances. While scholarship on populism largely assumes that heightened tropes of masculinity (or femininity) widen populist appeal, few attempt to explain how and why gendered political symbolism can be translated into a politically efficacious method of critiquing established elites. I therefore analyze how Marine Le Pen, the party’s leader since 2012, presents herself within her party; and, on the other hand, how party activists see her as a corrective to France’s political establishment. I argue that she has deftly presented herself as personally incarnating an answer to France’s socio-economic problems, a “modern woman” born and destined to lead, in contrast to the shadowy-bureaucratic, largely masculinized career politicians destroying French sovereignty. FN supporters, in turn, describe her as a femme moderne, as the beloved political daughter, and as a woman of French blood and terroir. Her corporality, and maternalist and filial imagery, structure her as a woman living “for” - rather than “off” - politics.