Understanding populist far-right anti-immigration and anti-gender stances beyond the paradigm of gender as ‘a symbolic glue’: Giorgia Meloni’s modern motherhood, neo-Catholicism, and reproductive racism

Abstract

Building on theoretical framings in critical race and queer studies, this article focuses on the first female prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, as an entry point to examining the current alignment between far-right populism, anti-gender movements, and White supremacist conspiracy theories in Europe. First, considering the contradictions that female leaders of far-right populist parties seem to negotiate, this article compares Meloni’s communication strategies and political interventions to those of her counterparts in Europe. Second, employing the concept of ‘productive racism’, the article examines Meloni’s birth rate agenda and related ambivalent stance towards ‘migrant’ women. In so doing, this article first demonstrates how existing theoretical frames, developed to examine current entanglements between feminist, anti-gender, and anti-immigration discourses, fall short of explaining why ‘gender’ can be used to ‘stick’ ‘migrant’ and queer subjects together, characterising both as threats to the sexual order of Europe. Even when ‘migrant’ women are depicted as hopeless victims, populist far-right leaders appraise them as either aberrant or otherwise deficient mothers. The article concludes by urging scholars of far-right populism, migration, and religion and their intersections with gender, to adopt race as a primary category of analysis and, therefore, consider that it is race that makes gender ‘stick’ as the common enemy of disparate political actors.