Populist and Right-Wing Responses to the Gendered Imaginary in Democracy

The paper focusses on two entangled key elements of populism: the construction of the people and the presentation of the leader. It proposes a more complex approach of populism by depicting the historical imagination of the people in democracy and by taking gender and intersectionality into consideration in order to highlight the activation and generation of passions. The paper shows how entangled democratic imagination of the citizen on the one hand and a specific male, white, and educated subject on the other are and how they activate and generate emotions. It first examines the gender aspect of the modern political imaginary by considering the imagination of the masses as feminine and of the leaders as masculine and by taking emotions like fear, hate, empowerment and love into account. Second, it deals with the specific relationship between the construction of the people and the presentation of the leader. In populism, the leader must be able to mirror the people and at the same time to impose him/herself as one above the people, in order to guide them. I take on Freud's concepts of identification and "following in love" to examine this relationship. However, another vein of the modern political imaginary intervenes: the association of the elite with femininity during the French revolution. The populist rhetoric comes back to this tradition and builds another binary opposition: the feminine against the masculine common man, just reactivating ressentiments and passions already known from the French revolution. The leader legitimize himself by making the claim that he is one of the people and , at the same time, the one who can guide the people. Differently to their male counterparts, female populist leaders seem not to mix the low-class male codes in their performances. The last part of the paper will focus on right-wing populism and examine the performance of male and female leaders from this spectrum. In contrast to other ideological variations of populism, the right-wing extremist ideology added to populism in this case provides a clear structure concerning the gender question. Right-wing extremist ideologies have a binary imagination of the sexes and reactionary family ideals. Mirroring the low-class “common man” can be connected to these ideals and can include masculinist elements in order to symbolically reinforce the right-wing gender conception. A good example is Björn Höcke (AfD). He expresses the “need” for taking back the masculinity of the people. Taking back masculinity can be read as both reacting to the crisis of the binary gender approach on the one hand and becoming an active political subject in opposition to the feminine mass (as described by Le Bon and Freud). The paper concludes with the problems of this masculinist approach for female right-wing populists and the complex passions generated by that.