Borrowing Liberation for the Nation - Feminist and Decolonial Rhetoric in Quebec and Catalan Nationalist Movements

In Quebec, the Front de libération des femmes du Québec famously declared in the 1970s: “No liberation of Quebec without liberation for women; no liberation for women without liberation for Quebec”. In Catalonia, contemporary feminist nationalists similarly promote an intersectional approach that links national liberation with struggles against patriarchy, framing “feminist nationalism” as a transformative political tool. In both cases, feminist claims are not merely allied with nationalist projects but become constitutive elements of how national liberation itself is discursively imagined. At the same time, both nationalist movements have also adopted decolonial rhetoric, presenting their political demands as struggles against colonial structures. They describe their situation as rooted in inequality and injustice and portray their political projects as emancipatory struggles aimed at liberation from oppression. This rhetorical shift is particularly striking given their own historical complicities within the broader trajectory of colonization and, in the case of Quebec, the marginalization of Indigenous peoples, whose role is often obscured by the narrative of a binational Canada. These tensions reveal how decolonial rhetoric is strategically mobilized by minority nationalist movements to reframe political conflicts with the state as struggles against colonial domination, thereby strengthening the moral legitimacy of their claims to self-determination. Their receptiveness to feminist and LGBTQI movements, as well as their engagement with postcolonial critiques of power (Lamoureux 2018: 187; Vickers 2002: 260; West & Leclerc 1997) are presented by movement actors as evidence of a civic, inclusive nationalism. However, this framing also functions as a boundary-making device, distinguishing “progressive” minority nations from allegedly backward or oppressive state nationalisms. By drawing rhetorical parallels between the oppression of women, colonial domination, and national subordination, actors foster cross-movement solidarities, they also risk flattening distinct forms of oppression by subsuming gendered and colonial injustices under the national frame. I argue that in Western minority nationalisms such as Quebec and Catalonia, feminist and decolonial discourses are not only adopted but selectively rearticulated to stabilize nationalist projects at moments of political contestation. Rather than assessing whether these claims of domination are justified, this paper asks how such narratives are constructed, circulated, and linked to feminist and decolonial frames. Drawing on discourse analysis of party documents, movement texts and feminist interventions, I will examine in this paper how the nationalist movements in Quebec and Catalonia have constructed their national projects as forms of liberation and emancipation. By analyzing these dynamics, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how contemporary nationalist movements negotiate identity, justice, and emancipation in multinational states. The paper argues that feminist and decolonial discourses do not merely broaden nationalist imaginaries but also risk re-centering the nation as the primary subject of emancipation – thereby reproducing exclusions they claim to overcome. The paper contributes to debates on nationalism, feminism, and decolonial theory by critically examining how emancipatory vocabularies are redeployed within minority nationalist projects, and by questioning who is included – and excluded – when the nation becomes the primary horizon of liberation.