230538 Great Again? Right-wing Populism and Gender: Concepts, Contexts, Counter-Movements (S) (WiSe 2018/2019)

This seminar will critically discuss the ambivalences of right-wing actors appropriations of gender and feminist agendas for racist aims and the simultaneous degradation of what they term "genderist" ideology. Moreover, we will think about possible counter-strategies as expressed in increasing intersectional feminist movements worldwide. The current rise of Right Wing Populism in Europe, in the US, Brazil, and other parts of the Americas has reached center stage of political debates. Its ongoing success on the ballot box is generally viewed as a menace for representative democracy, civil society and transnational problems such as climate change, migration and peace keeping.
The seminar explores the ways in which gender relations and the heterosexual design of the nuclear family, but also seemingly feminist aims such as the sexual freedom of (certain) women play an important role in populist parties’ self-conception and for pitchforking issues like anti-immigration, demography and education into the public arena. Populist ‘sexual nationalisms’ highlights the sexual freedom of the enlightened ‘native’ population thereby feeding on anti-Muslim resentment via the alleged ‘backwardness’ of immigrants and refugees. Another paradox combines the persistent gender-gap in voting with a coexisting tendency to support female leadership. Academic attention is just starting to pay attention to the nexus between populism research through a gender perspective and to the relevance and sexual politics for populist claims (see e.g. Sauer 2017).

The seminar elaborates on current populism research and critically discusses and combines them in relation with recent critical gender perspectives pointing at the "sexual exceptionalism" and "ethnosexism" negotiated in right-wing populist discourses (Dietze 2017, 2018).

The seminar builds on the course "Great Again? Right-wing Populism and Gender: Concepts, Contexts, Counter-Movements" from last semester, but students are not required to have completed this course, if they are willing to read some introductory texts.

In the end of the seminar, students are required to give a little presentation in the framework of a closing workshop/mini conference based on case studies.

Requirements for participation, required level

– regular attendance
– active participation in class
– reading and preparation of texts
– write 3 reflection papers on chosen texts
– one in-class presentation during a joint workshop

Bibliography

Preparatory texts:
– C. Mudde/C.R. Kaltwasser (2017): “What is populism?” in (ibd.): Populism. A very short Introduction, 1-20.

– E. Ajanaciv/S. Mayer/B. Sauer (2018): “Constructing ‘the people’
An intersectional analysis of right-wing concepts of democracy and citizenship in Austria“, in: Journal of Language and Politics, 1-15.

– G. Dietze (2018): “Ethnosexism. Phantasms of Muslim Migrants and Refugees in Germany“
– G. Dietze (2017): “Right-wing Populism and Gender: Paradox and Leitmotif”