In the context of the rise and growing popularity of far-right authoritarian political parties, female politicians representing these parties play an increasingly important role. Within their public presentation, they occupy a contradictory place, presenting themselves at the same time as adherents of traditional gender roles of women as mothers and wives submitting to men as well as professional career women with a strong voice in the public space. This contradiction has been noted before with the so-called “tradwife movement” in the US and elsewhere (Stern 2018, Devries 2023). Simultaneously, authors such as Kay (2024) and Bannet-Weiser (2025) identify similar contradictory tendencies in popular culture, analysing ‘reactionary feminism’ as a narrative that presents female submission as empowerment.
Against this wider backdrop, the proposed paper presents a case study of social media presentation of two female politicians, one Czech and one Slovak, and asks the question: how do female politicians construct and perform their femininity and build their audiences online while simultaneously promoting the rigid gender politics of their respective political parties? What visual and communicative tools are used to overcome the contradictions outlined above? What type of femininity emerges as a result? Empirically, the paper is based on non-participant observation on Instagram and qualitative content analysis of content posted on Instagram in the period preceding the most recent Czech parliamentary elections (September 2025) by Gabriela Sedlackova, Czech activist turned politician from the far-right populist party Motorists and Livia Pavlikova, member of the Slovak far-right political movement Republika.
