This contribution offers a critical analysis of how Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Prime Minister and a central figure within the contemporary radical right, mobilizes themes and idioms associated with neoliberal feminism in her public discourse. The aim is to examine how this rhetorical incorporation contributes to the construction of a worldview in which women’s emancipation, social order, and communal belonging coexist within an ideologically coherent synthesis. Neoliberal feminism reframes the principles of autonomy and equality in terms of individual responsibility, resilience, and talent cultivation, aligning with the self-entrepreneurial logic of the neoliberal subject theorized by Foucault (1978, 1979). From this perspective, feminist claims are translated into a discourse that promotes the individual’s adaptation to existing structures rather than their transformation. Social reproduction—traditionally excluded from the sphere of economic action—is thus recast within neoliberal rationality through a “gendering” of the self enterprise (Rottenberg 2013; Prügl 2015; Fraser 2013–2015; Cooper 2017; Gill 2017; Banet-Weiser 2015–2020; Eisenstein 2017).
The corpus comprises 45 texts—official speeches, television and national newspaper interviews, parliamentary interventions, and statements to women’s magazines—delivered or published between July 2022 and January 2025. These materials were examined using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and a bespoke analytical grid, crafted to identify the strategies through which gender themes are incorporated into a discursive horizon that sutures together economic liberalism, cultural conservatism, and political identitarianism.
The analysis shows that Meloni adopts a language centered on merit, individual choice, and motherhood as vocation—an idiom that serves to neutralize the transformative thrust of feminist demands. The explicit rejection of “feminism” as a label is thereby offset by a narrative that valorizes personal success as a woman, mother, and leader, projecting an exemplary model of femininity compatible with traditional roles and hierarchies. Far from functioning as a merely communicative instrument, this rhetoric contributes to the production of a normative imaginary in which women’s autonomy is recognized only insofar as it confirms the existing order.
