Women’s mobilization and antifeminist discursive framings in Portugal’s far right

Abstract

Antifeminist and antigender rhetoric and campaigns have grown over the last decade, especially, but not exclusively, voiced by ultraconservative and far-right parties, movements and actors, and have prompted political and societal repercussions, with an increasingly visible participation of women in these attacks on feminism. These mobilizations are frequently articulated also through racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic discourses, in which feminism and gender equality are framed as external threats to the nation, the family, or “Western values.” From an intersectional perspective, such narratives reinforce and reproduce multiple overlapping systems of domination, simultaneously targeting gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality, while legitimizing exclusionary and hierarchical social orders. These features are globally shared and have proliferated across a wide range of contexts with some degree of similarities and coordination; however, conceptualizing them only as a singular transnational movement is unwarranted. Understanding how these campaigns are articulated differently in specific contexts and mobilized toward a range of goals is key to grasp both the similarities and the uniqueness of these narratives, agendas and campaigns in specific contexts. Portugal remains an under-researched case study primarily due to the slightly later emergence of far-right movements and parties with political significance. Based on the analysis of published materials and online content produced by the far-right party CHEGA (CH) from 2022 to the 2024 national legislative election, namely news, op-eds and interviews with women from CH, and their social networks content, this article reflects on how the success of CH in mobilizing women to antifeminist agendas has been key to normalizing undemocratic antifeminist, antigender agendas in the public sphere. Through the critical analysis of CH’s discursive positions on feminism and gender, it will also examine the instrumentalization of “women’s rights” in order to put forward homophobic, transphobic, anti-immigration, racist and xenophobic agendas, namely through the participation of women in leading roles in the antifeminist campaigns.