Is the patch worse than the hole? ‘Failed’ and ‘attempted’ feminist responses to anti-gender and anti-migration stances in the Italian Parliament

Scholars have extensively examined the rise of anti-gender politics in Europe, but there is a notable gap in the study of institutional responses to such stances. Since the last decade, Italian anti-gender forces have formed alliances with populist right-wing parties, leading to ineffective legislation on gender equality, reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA* issues. Furthermore, anti-gender rhetoric has often been intertwined with anti-migration positions, resulting in policies aimed at denying migrants and refugees legal protection in the country. Extant literature shows that ‘feminist institutional responses’ provide an effective means to contain the diffusion of exclusionary forces and their visions. This paper aims to examine whether and how exclusionary discourses have been addressed in the Italian Parliament through the mobilization of feminist responses at the discursive level. To do so, we build on empirical evidence from two selected Parliamentary debates: one on migration (“Security Bill”, enacted in 2018), and one on LGBTQIA* rights (“Homolesbobitransphobia Bill”, rejected in 2021). We examine these two cases through a qualitative discourse analysis and show that, more often than not, institutional discursive responses do not fully characterize as ‘feminist’ insofar as they are only partially able to counter anti-gender and anti-migration stances. We further specify this inefficacy by distinguishing two main types of responses. On the one hand, there are ‘attempted feminist responses’, which are unsystematic reactions that fail to address misogynist, anti-gender, homophobic, and racist attacks at their intersectional structure. On the other hand, there are ‘failed feminist responses’ - i.e., reactions that address exclusionary attacks by leveraging on discriminatory arguments, such as femonationalist or gender-conservative claims. Overall, this distinction helps complicate extant conceptualizations of ‘feminist responses’, shedding light on the manifold lacks that often characterize reactions to exclusionary forces and arguments, as well as on their diversified outcomes they can generate - usually far from social justice and inclusion.