Beyond Femonationalism: The Far-Right Gender Project

Far-right actors in Europe are increasingly engaging with gender issues not only as opponents of feminism but as its moral reformers, articulating a renewed normative order of gender relations (Cabezas, 2022; De Giorgi et al., 2023; Korolczuk, 2020; Köttig et al., 2017; Lombardo, 2024; Meret & Siim, 2013; Scrinzi, 2023). Building on the concepts of femonationalism (Farris, 2017) and feminist appropriation (Calderaro, 2025), this paper introduces the notion of a far-right gender project to capture how gender becomes a field of affirmative but depoliticized governance. For instance, through the production of counterintuitive welfare policies (Bonu Rosenkranz 2025): protective measures that, under the guise of protection, produce discriminatory outcomes by using legislation and polarized consensus to restrict social rights in the name of safeguarding other vulnerable groups. Drawing on three Italian policy cases – the “Femicide Decree”, the universal criminalization of surrogacy, and the draft bill on mandatory consent form for sexual education – the analysis shows how the far right rearticulates feminist narratives of protection and dignity into tools of punitive and moral governance. Using Critical Discourse and Frame Analysis across parliamentary debates, legislative texts, and feminist responses, the paper identifies three mechanisms structuring this transformation: depoliticization, symbolic protectionism, and procedural closure. Depoliticization implies transforming structural problems into individual issues; symbolic protectionism invokes women’s or children’s rights as reasons for repression or exclusion through the use of criminal law; procedural closure marginalizes feminist participation and expertise under the guise of transversal consensus. The paper argues that this depoliticized reappropriation of feminist discourse constitutes a key feature through which the far right seeks the neutralization of gender as a site of contestation, and its conversion into a moral terrain of consensus and control.