Over the past couple of decades, a central element in western political discourse and politics has been the ‘othering’ of Muslim migrants in cultural terms. Their cultural difference was here accentuated and quite often exemplified through stereotypical representations of gender relations, the attire of women and their alleged seclusion in the domestic space. These representational practices duly opened up opportunities for the populist radical right to engage in the debate through the adoption of a discourse that ostensibly defends women’s rights.
This discourse marks Muslim migrant communities as inherently oppressive of women and demarcates the former from “native people”, hence allowing anti-migrant views to acquire the veneer of human rights and, therefore, become more palatable. As a result, gender has become a central category for analyzing and understanding the discursive strategies of the surging European populist radical right parties.
Gender has become a central category for analyzing and understanding the discursive strategies of the surging European populist radical right parties.
The European populist radical right’s ‘gender turn’ constitutes a key aspect of the culturalization of migration, which we will focus on here by taking a look at the cases of France and Germany. Both populist radical right parties in these two national contexts demonstrate how the populist-radical right creates “insider” and “outsider” distinctions through representations of “migrant” and “native” gendered bodies.
