Social Death in the Name of Women's Rights: Authoritarian Femonationalism in China

In an era of democratic backsliding, the rhetoric of women’s rights has become an unexpected tool in the arsenal of repressive regimes. Scholarship on femonationalism—a term developed by Farris (2017) to describe the instrumentalization of feminist rhetoric by far-right actors to justify exclusionary and Islamophobic policies—has largely concentrated on liberal democracies. However, there is still an important gap in how similar dynamics unfold in non-Western and non-democratic contexts. To address this lacuna, this paper develops the concept of "authoritarian femonationalism" to theorize how non-democratic regimes adopt feminist rhetoric to legitimize their repressive governance of ethnic minority Muslim women. Building on Farris’s (2017) framework, we argue that similar gendered "rescue" logics are deployed in non-democratic contexts, but with distinct functional goals. Unlike Western variants that use feminist discourse primarily to mobilize votes or manage migrant labor within a neoliberal economy, authoritarian regimes incorporate femonationalist narratives to legitimize state securitization, violent assimilation, and cultural erasure. To operationalize this, we reconfigure Farris’s (2017) three dimensions for the authoritarian context: (1) political convergence is imposed by the state through a top-down alignment, rather than negotiated; (2) ideological formation reproduces colonial tropes of the "backward Other", but targets internal minorities of the nation's territory rather than migrant outsiders; and (3) economic dimension proposes women’s "liberation through labor" into the public sphere, instead of care work in the private sphere, to serve state social control. We demonstrate this framework through a case study of China's governance of Uyghur women in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) since the 2009 Urumqi riots and the subsequent "People’s War on Terror" in 2014. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of a corpus (n=38) of state policy documents, official media reports, and propaganda materials, we show how the state mobilizes specific discourses to pathologize Islamic dress as "extremism", depict domestic work as "potential extremist behavior" to justify forced transfer to state-sanctioned factory labor as a way of empowerment, and frame high birth rates as "religious fanaticism" to legitimize sterilization. Furthermore, the analysis reveals how the state positions itself as a "civilizing masculine force," leading "innocent" and "brainwashed" Uyghur Muslim women towards modernity by promoting state-sanctioned Han values. Ultimately, we argue that authoritarian femonationalism potentially enables non-democratic regimes to perform feminist progress while promoting policies that contribute to social death: the destruction of the essential foundations of a group’s collective life, targeting their ability to reproduce culture, kinship, and identity over time.