Across Europe, far-right groups balance between contradictory positions on gender equality, invoking women’s rights to claim European cultural superiority over imagined patriarchal Muslim immigrants while rejecting gender rights as threatening the nation. Using discourse analysis of online party media and parliamentary speeches, we explore intersections of gender and race in Greek neo-Nazi women’s public positioning towards gender equality, showing how these seemingly contradictory positions align well with the party’s political vision. At a moment of pervasive racist uses of feminist discourse (Farris 2017; Hark & Villa 2017), Golden Dawn women supported an antifeminist position that re-signifies ‘women’s rights’ as a racial issue, in order to construct political enemies and dismantle equality projects.  By representing gender violence  –  as in debates on the Istanbul Convention  –  as exclusively committed by the ‘non-white’‘Muslim’male, and by rejecting ‘artificially constructed’ equality rights in favor of ‘natural’ rights, they claimed Golden Dawn as the only political actor genuinely promoting women’s welfare.

Over the last decades, issues related to gender and sexuality came to the center of public and political debates in Europe. Right-wing parties and actors across Europe are gaining popularity while increasingly drawing on gender and sexuality in their anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric (e.g. Mayer, Ajanovic and Sauer 2014, Meret and Siim 2013). This Special Issue results from an international workshop organised by the Network for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality (NAGS), part of the European Association of SocialAnthropologists (EASA), and held at VU University Amsterdam in December 2019. The workshop interrogated entanglements of anti-migration and gender discourses, including anti-gender movements across Europe. Its overall aim was to discuss different ‘uses and abuses of gender’ in relation to migration and Islamophobia as deployed by right-wing discourse (Scott 2013). 

The narrative of Danish director Nicolo Donato’s 2009 film, Brotherhood, demonstrates how both the coming out and outing of a gay Neo-Nazi creates dramatic moments of transformation within the film’s storyline. As a result, the audience has to confront the representation of unstable and asymmetrical acts of sexual, social, and political identification. These moments of identification involve acts of violence and betrayal that lead to the creation of a fluid sexual identity on screen. This article examines the choices of the characters within the film and the homosocial world that those characters purposely construct. In order to carry out that examination, key aspects of contemporary Danish political culture are assessed with a view to better understand the ascendency of the far right, anti-migration rhetoric, and the centrality of that political culture within the stories that are told in Brotherhood. The collisions within the Neo-Nazi group over what defines hyper-masculinity, family, violence against migrants, and same-sex desire are best observed through an interdisciplinary analysis that combines film, queer, and sociological research. In the film, a violent, hyper-masculine Neo-Nazi authors a coming-out moment that is both unique and tragic. This assessment of the collisions between homosociality and homoeroticism in the lives of these men creates space for the important and productive analytical deconstruction of hyper-masculinity in a fictionalized Danish far-right political movement.

Entanglements of gender, nationalism, and (anti-)migration in contemporary Europe

This article aims to explain the role of women involved in right-wing political parties and explore how women themselves legitimise the politics of exclusion through their political involvement. Its main assumption is that, on the one hand, Polish women in politics eagerly benefit from the feminist legacy in their own political careers, and, on the other, as representatives of right-wing political parties with traditionally antifeminist agenda, they significantly contribute to the radicalisation of politics.To show the discursive intersections of gender and nationalism and their impact on the public discourse, I analyse narrative strategies applied by Polish right-wing female politicians in their public, media, and parliamentary appearances. I claim that, having access to and control over public discourse, Polish right-wing female politicians play a prominent role in social mobilisation and, thereby, make an important contribution to the nationalist surge that sweeps Poland.

Set in Brescia, an Italian city with a sizeable Indo-Pakistani minority, this article considers the media panic that honor killings raised and echoed nationwide since 2006. Based on extensive ethnographic work, the article draws from participant observation and personal narratives shared with Panjabi locals to investigate such ‘cultural crimes’, pondering which status of victim is (self-)ascribed to ‘Brown immigrant’ women. While the remnants of a Mediterranean culture of ‘honor-and-shame’ is almost forgotten today in the country, the repressive control that South Asian women seem to endure within their domestic environments saw the simultaneous condemnation from different social actors. As racialized Islamophobia escalates, the protection of migrant/ethnic women from honour-related violence (HRV) becomes more complex: who is entitled to ‘defend’ them? When and where can these women raise their own voices? The intersectional resistance that Panjabi women in Italy oppose against the objectification inflicted on them by family, community and public discourses (liberal feminist, multicultural or chauvinist) can barely be heard. Concurring with critical literature on HRV, this article argues to critically interrogate the idea of culture as a motivation for violence against minority women but also recognizes the pervasiveness of such narrative in the strenuous efforts waged by the same subjects in voicing their distress.