A Intersectional Approach to Studying Far-Right Activism

Growing yet still limited scholarship exists which focuses on far-right mobilizations based on ethnographic methods, but only some of it adopts a gender perspective. Existing studies in the field tend to reproduce a ‘gender bias’ in conceptualizing far-right support/activism. Research on women in these movements has emphasized their supposedly ‘private’ motives (attachment to traditional family values, their own status as spouses/mothers and followers of male partners) while studies of men/masculinities have emphasized the enactment of hypermasculinities as compensatory for their socio-economic marginalization. The debate is underpinned by a public/private dichotomy associating men’s participation with structural public motives, and women’s participation with private concerns. This paper engages with this persisting ‘gender bias’ in the field, drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research (observations and life histories of and semi-structured interviews with over 100 party members of far-right parties in France and Italy). Based on an intersectional approach, it analyses how gender-specific relationships to paid work as well as to unpaid reproductive labour, differentiated by class as well as age/generational divisions, shape women’s engagement and the ways in which they negotiate sexism, gender equality and (anti)feminism. Unlike professional women who may end up achieving public (albeit marginal) political roles, working-class activists support their husbands’ political careers; working-class women tend to be appealed by far-right familistic/anti-gender rhetoric while middle-class educated women are more attracted by messages on ‘modern’ and emancipated native femininity. Further, older married women are vocal in criticizing sexism, including in their own parties, and claim gender differences/femininity as a value in politics, while younger single women deny that sexism constitute an issue and regard feminism as outdated. Showing how the activists’ experiences are inscribed within contexts structured by multiple and interlocking social relations (gender, class, ethnicity, age/generation), the paper sheds light on the gendered complexity of the narratives, motives and experiences of women in far-right movements. In so doing, the paper problematizes persisting views of far-right women as driven by ‘sexual alienation’ and merely appealed by traditional family values.