University of Birmingham the Body Politic
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University of Birmingham The body politic Downing, Lisa DOI: 10.1177/0957155818791075 License: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Downing, L 2018, 'The body politic: gender, the right wing and 'identity category violations'', French Cultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 367-377. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155818791075 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 The Body Politic: Gender, The Right Wing, and “Identity Category Violations” Lisa Downing, University of Birmingham, UK. Abstract The post-Brexit, post-Trump climate in the EU has seen a series of challenges from the right wing of politics to the liberal consensus of recent years (e.g. the rise of Gert Wilders in the Netherlands and the increased support for Alternativ für Deutschland in the 2017 German election). This article examines the gendering and embodiment of the new far right in France and the UK. It offers a comparative focus on two recent political challengers from the right who are female: Marine Le Pen (born 1968), the leader of the Front national in France since 2011, and Anne Marie Waters (born 1977), the Islam-critical candidate who was runner-up for the UKIP (UK Independence Party) leadership in the UK in 2017, and who has since started her own political party, “For Britain”. It focuses on media coverage of, and self-representation by, these two figures. It argues that the discourse of the “Right” and “Left” wings has, historically, been gendered on the basis of assumptions that women are naturally more inclined towards consensus-building, collectivity, and compassion (and therefore left- wing politics), by dint of their biological function as child-bearers and traditional gender role as care-givers. Right-leaning women have been treated as anomalies, both by feminist political analysts and the mainstream media. Feminist concerns over the very existence of right-wing women is suggested by books such as second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women (1983), the more recent edited collection by Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, also called Right Wing Women (2013), and, in the French context, Claudie Lesselier and Fiametta Venner’s L’extrême droite et les femmes (1997). Le Pen and Waters appear as doubly aberrant, doubly exceptional figures – firstly as (far) right-wing women and secondly as (far) right-wing female leaders. The article considers the stakes of our categorical understandings of (gendered and political) identity more broadly. Specifically, by introducing the original critical concept of “identity category violation”, it analyses the ways in which the recent trend for identity politics on the left in the West, often under the banner of “intersectionality”, leads to over-simplified understandings of 1 how categories of gendered, sexual, class, and race-based identities are assumed to determine political affiliation. Keywords: The right wing, feminism, identity politics, Marine Le Pen, Front national Introduction Right-wing women in modern Western culture have been treated as anomalies or as categorical problems, both by mainstream commentators and by feminism. Mainstream coverage of right-wing women often seeks to understand their politics by measuring the distance between their femininity and corporeality on the one hand, and their politics on the other. The obsessive media focus on Margaret Thatcher’s ultra- feminine hair and dress and the contrast they presented with her bellicose policies throughout the 1980s offers ample illustrations of this (See: Rose, 1988; Downing, 2014).1 Simultaneously, feminist concerns over the very existence of right-wing women is suggested by books such as second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin’s Right- Wing Women (1983), the more recent edited collection by Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, also called Right-Wing Women (2013), and, in the French context, Claudie Lesselier and Fiametta Venner’s L’extrême droite et les femmes (1997). Right-wing women may appear as a problem or puzzle to be solved precisely because “The Right” and “The Left”, broadly understood, tend to be thought of as gendered on the basis of assumptions that women are “naturally” more inclined towards consensus-building, collectivity, and compassion (and therefore left-wing politics) by dint of their biological function as child-bearers and traditional gender role as care-givers. Women tend to be viewed as a class; men as individuals. This explains why exceptional women more generally – where exceptionality could signify political inappropriateness, forceful leadership, outstanding excellence, or physical 2 violence – are constituted as a problem; too “self-ful”2 to conform to cultural rules about what women are supposed to be. It is worth noting that even feminist discourse uses the term “exceptional” (as in “exceptional woman syndrome”) to connote something negative – those successful women who fail to pull other women up with them (Downing, 2014). Attempting to explain why, in the UK, the Conservative Party has had two female Prime Ministers while Labour has never had a female leader, MP Jess Phillips has argued that while C/conservative women are happy to leave the status quo intact if they get a chance to lead, left-wing women would be more likely to want to change society for the good of all women – which male left-wing men may not permit (Rodger, 2017). Yet, obviously, not all right-identifying women see themselves as arch individualists or as leaders. Andrea Dworkin set out to discover why so many women in the USA of the 1980s voted for right-wing candidates when this seemed to go directly against their interests, given the often anti-woman leanings of US right-wing politics with its religious prohibitions, attempts to control reproductive freedoms, and disapproval of women in leadership roles. Surely such features should have proved unattractive to most women? Dworkin argues, however, that in a patriarchy the game of politics tout court is rigged against women. The left wing brings an illusion of sexual freedom, but only in male-dominated patriarchal terms, while the right – including the far right – may appeal to women precisely because it promises to limit the damage (sexual harm) to which women are exposed: As long as the sex-class system is intact, huge numbers of women will believe that the right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression; the best economic security as the economic dependents of men who must provide; the most reliable 3 protection against battery; the most respect. (Dworkin, 1983: 234.) Dworkin argues that women are attracted towards right-wing politics on the basis of promises of protection from male harm – and specifically from the “other”: the immigrant male, the outsider. This is a smokescreen, of course, since most harm that comes to women happens within the domestic sphere (Dworkin, 1983: 232). Here, as in many of Dworkin’s books, the world evoked as “patriarchy” is a totalitarian condition of male ownership of women in which the stakes of feminist liberation are high – in fact, the stakes are survival. While many would find Dworkin’s second-wave politics unpalatable or irrelevant today, it is instructive to consider the degree to which her analysis still resonates. This rhetoric of “protection from the other”, for example, can be seen still to feature heavily in the language and logic deployed to appeal to the voter by the right, and particularly the far right. The recent emergence of a wave of US alt-right women bloggers calling themselves “tradwives” suggests this. Their blogs blend a romanticization of traditional female gender roles and behaviours – obedience in marriage, homemaking, modest 1950s-style dress, family values – with a discourse of white supremacy and the imperative to produce white babies (in terms that are disturbingly reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985). One “tradwife” has claimed that “traditionalism does ‘what feminism is supposed to do’ in preventing women from being made into ‘sexual objects’ and treated ‘like a whore’” (Kelley, 2018). This suggests that the ideas noted by Dworkin (and presaged by Atwood’s creation of the authoritarian Gilead) in the 1980s persist in our present moment. Our present moment is, of course, the post-Brexit, post-Trump climate, which has seen a recent growth of the far right across Europe, as in America, marked, 4 for example, by the rise of Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, a serious challenge from the Front national in France in the 2017 election, and the increased support for Alternativ für Deutschland in the German election of the same year.