Revisiting the nationalism/populism distinction : a gender approach of far-right politics

The definition of far-right parties and movements has generated a fruitful debate in political science. Are modern far-right organisations populist, nationalist, or both? If these parties can be considered both populist and nationalist, what is their ultimate defining characteristic? The political science literature has explored these questions, questioning the centrality of the concept of populism in analyses of the far-right phenomenon (Mudde 2007, 26; Rydgren 2017). In particular, scholars from Discourse theory, such as Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis (2017), have sought to construct a clear conceptual distinction between populist discourses, on the one hand, and nationalist discourses, on the other (Brubaker 2020; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2020). According to these authors, the confusion between these two notions would lead to the reification of the link between populism and the far-right (Stavrakakis et al. 2017). The work of B. De Cleen and Y. Stavrakakis, which postulates the existence of an empirical and analytical distinction between these two concepts, has been reinforced by research on transnational populism (Moffitt 2017; De Cleen et al. 2020), and has been relayed by empirical studies aiming to demonstrate the accuracy of this discrimination (Breeze 2019; Katsambekis and Stavrakakis 2017; De Cleen 2016; Stavrakakis et al. 2017). This paper aims to contribute to this literature trying to identify the link between nationalism and populism by mobilising the gender politics of the far-right (Spierings et al., 2015; Köttig, Petö and Bitzan 2017; Dietze and Roth 2020). To this end, this research is structured in three stages. First, the paper revisits the aforementioned debates surrounding the distinction between populism and nationalism in far-right discourses. Secondly, it reviews the literature on the gender politics of the far-right, identifying four pillars of these politics: (1) recent anti-gender mobilisations (Graff and Korolczuk 2022; Kuhar and Paternotte 2018), (2) femonationalisms (Farris 2017) and homonationalisms (Puhar 2017), (3) family and sexual politics (Akkerman 2015), and (4) representative and organisational politics (Mudde 2007, 90-118; Campion 2020). Third, by mobilising the gender politics of the far right, this paper shows how, although fundamentally intertwined, nationalism and populism respond to two different logics of political identity construction. The paper concludes that, contrary to Niels Spiering's (2020) assertion, gender is neither trivial nor pivotal in the politics of the far right, as it is a nodal element of far-right ideology.