Convenors
Ghita Bordieri, Università di Milano Bicocca
ghita.bordieri@unimib.it (corresponding scholar)
Elisa Virgili, Università di Milano Bicocca
elisa.virgili@unimib.it (corresponding scholar)
In recent years, the electoral rise and mainstreaming of far-right movements across Europe and North America have reshaped the political landscape. Gender is crucial to this transformation, not only because of women’s growing visibility within far-right organizations, but also because gender and sexuality are central terrains of political mobilization. This panel examines how gender identities, roles, and conflicts are articulated, negotiated, and performed across institutional, activist, and digital
spheres. The panel addresses the gendered dynamics of far-right politics through qualitative research, including ethnography, in-depth interviews, and discourse analysis. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions on this topic. Examples include:
- Women’s activism in the far right, including the tension between political agency, organizational constraints, and participation in male-dominated movements. Research has challenged representations of female activists as merely passive or instrumentalized, showing how women actively contribute to the reproduction and transformation of racist, conservative, and far-right organizations, cultures, and practices (Blee 2002; Avanza 2020; Scrinzi 2023).
- Far-right discourses on gender combine the defence of allegedly natural gender hierarchy with the selective appropriation of progressive language. Sara Farris’s concept of femonationalism, for example, illustrates how feminist and gender-equality claims can be mobilized to justify anti-immigration and Islamophobic agendas (Farris 2017), and shows how human rights rhetoric can be repurposed for nativist politics.
- Mobilizations against “gender ideology” and trans people. A growing body of research has examined how far-right parties, religious organizations, and conservative movements construct feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender-sensitive education as threats to children, the family, and the social order (Bellè and Poggio 2018; Gusmeroli and Trappolin 2021; Lavizzari 2025;).
- Conservative femininities and gender. Traditionalist understandings of
femininity and gender roles have gained renewed visibility. Research on the “tradwife” phenomenon shows how the language of individual choice and female empowerment can legitimize heteropatriarchal family models, while curated representations of domesticity may intersect with conservative, nationalist, and far-right politics ( Sykes and Hopner 2024; Leidig 2023). - The rightward repositioning of parts of contemporary feminism, particularly trans-exclusionary and “gender-critical” feminist currents. Contributions may investigate how actors identifying as feminists come to share concepts, political targets, discursive spaces, and forms of mobilization with conservative and far-right movements, and how appeals to women’s rights or sex-based protection contribute to the mainstreaming of anti-trans and exclusionary politics ( Bassi and LaFleur 2022).
Open questions
- Domestic spaces: How do domesticity, motherhood, and daily routines serve as spaces for informal far-right politicization, and how can field research capture these private spheres?
- Emotions and affects: What role do specific affects (e.g., fear of decline, pride, moral panic) play in shaping gendered identities, and how are they performed in everyday interactions?
- Unlikely alignments: Through what micro-social and discursive mechanisms do unexpected convergences happen between “gender-critical” feminist spaces and conservative or far-right actors?
- Digital-offline continuum: How can researchers methodologically bridge online gender performances with offline social practices and relationships?
- Ethics and positionality: How do researchers navigate access, rapport, reflexivity, and ethical boundaries when conducting ethnography in hostile or anti-feminist political environments?
Keywords
Far-right; Gender; Femonationalism; Anti-gender mobilizations; Tradwives
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
cultural and political sociology, gender studies, anthropology, media studies, and the sociology of social movements
References
Avanza, M. (2020) ‘Using a Feminist Paradigm (Intersectionality) to Study
Conservative Women: The Case of Pro-life Activists in Italy’, Politics & Gender, 16(2), pp. 552–580.
Bassi, S. and LaFleur, G. (2022) ‘Introduction: TERFs, Gender-Critical Movements, and Postfascist Feminisms’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 9(3), pp. 311–333.
Bellè, E. and Poggio, B. (2018) ‘New Faces of Populism: The Italian “Anti-Gender” Mobilization’, in U. Kovala, E. Palonen, M. Ruotsalainen and T. Saresma (eds), Populism on the Loose. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, pp. 119–142.
Blee, K.M. (2002) Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Farris, S.R. (2017) In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gusmeroli, P. and Trappolin, L. (2021) ‘Narratives of Catholic Women against “Gender Ideology” in Italian Schools: Defending Childhood, Struggling with Pluralism’, European Societies, 23(4), pp. 513–536.
Lavizzari, A. (2025) ‘The Anti-Gender Movement and the Populist Radical Right in Italy: A Symbiotic Relationship’, European Journal of Politics and Gender, 8(1), pp. 207–233.
Leidig, E. (2023) The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization. New York: Columbia University Press.
Scrinzi, F. (2023) The Racialization of Sexism: Men, Women and Gender in the Populist Radical Right. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Sykes, S. and Hopner, V. (2024) ‘Tradwives: Right-Wing Social Media Influencers’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 53(4), pp. 453–487.
Convenors’ bio
Ghita Bordieri works at the intersection of cultural and political sociology. Her research focuses on political cultures and rituals, far-right parties, political interaction, organizational change, and food politics. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Genova and has conducted multi-sited ethnographic research on the transformation of the Italian Lega. She is editor of e-Extreme, the newsletter of the ECPR Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy.
Elisa Virgili is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research focuses on the construction of gendered and queer subjectivities, language, body politics, and public discourses. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Social Sciences and has been a visiting scholar at Uppsala University and Malmö University. She is the author of Pugili. Storie di rabbia, classe e genere (Armillaria, 2025) and has translated key feminist works, including Jack Halberstam’s Gaga Feminism. Her current work explores discourse analysis, social movements, and youth representations in educational and sporting contexts.