Abstract
This chapter focuses on how the Italian party of the Northern League mobilizes the issue of gender equality to legitimize its anti-immigration claims. By drawing on two qualitative studies of this populist radical right party, we shed light on the ‘double standard’ which the party applies to migrant men and women within its discourse and politics. We also show how this ‘double standard’ is negotiated by female activists. We argue that this is linked to the familistic system that the party supports. Within such a system migrant women play a key role as paid providers of social reproductive work. Combining ethnographic and documentary data, the chapter thus connects the issue of the gendered anti-immigration politics with recent debates on gendered migration and on the international division of care work.
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Notes
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Francesca Scrinzi, ‘Gendering activism in populist radical right parties. A comparative study of women’s and men’s participation in the Northern League (Italy) and the National Front (France)’, funded by the European Research Council (2012–2014), and Sara R. Farris, ‘The Political Economy of Femonationalism. On the instrumentalisation of gender equality in anti-immigration campaigns in France, Italy and the Netherlands’, funded by the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2012–2013).
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This section of the chapter draws mainly on an analysis of the official LN positions that were found on the LN’s official website between 2009 and 2013. The analysis was conducted by means of ‘critical discourse analysis’ methodology—CDA (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). Documents analysed also included political posters, relevant parliamentary discussions and interviews with party leaders that appeared in national newspapers. The concept of ‘discourse’ within CDA refers to a ‘social practice’ that produces meanings by linking the linguistic and the societal level (institutions and social structures) (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, 258). In particular, critical discourse analysis is interested in identifying the linkages between (political) discourse and the ways in which such discourse produces and reproduces power hierarchies, ideologies and forms of domination.
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This section of the chapter draws on biographical interviews with 12 male and 12 female LN activists based in Lombardy: most of these belonged to the middle classes, reflecting the class composition of the LN electorate. Traditionally, LN voters are business owners and artisans, but there has been a recent increase in working-class manual workers among them (Passarelli and Tuorto 2012). The biographical approach is often used in ethnographic studies of rightist activism to overcome attitudes of suspicion vis-à-vis the researcher: in life histories, which focus on the respondent’s own individual trajectory rather than on issues of belief or political commitment, informants will be less likely to present their organization’s ideology as personal sentiment (Blee 1996).
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The image can be seen by searching images on the internet using the following search criteria—‘Siete disposti a rischiare? No alla Turchia in Europe’.
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Farris, S.R., Scrinzi, F. (2018). ‘Subaltern Victims’ or ‘Useful Resources’? Migrant Women in the Lega Nord Ideology and Politics. In: Mulholland, J., Montagna, N., Sanders-McDonagh, E. (eds) Gendering Nationalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76699-7_13
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