Drawing upon ethnographic work that includes life histories of 100 members of France’s Rassemblement National (previously called the Front National; National Front, FN) and Italy’s Lega (previously called the Lega Nord; Northern League, LN), 24 semi-structured interviews with individuals in party leadership roles, extensive observation of internal group activities and public events, and archival work, Francesca Scrinzi’s The Racialization of Sexism offers the first book-length analysis of gender dynamics within the populist radical right (PRR) in Europe. With a focus on supply-side factors (i.e., PRR organizations and their members), it shows that we cannot understand the contemporary PRR without attention to these dynamics. Over the course of its introduction, theoretical framework, and six empirical chapters, the book presents analyses of the FN and the LN, simultaneously re-theorizing the role of gender in party recruitment and socialization. It does so while situating these parties’ messaging within their national social contexts.
The Racialization of Sexism takes a sociological approach to understanding these intersectional dynamics of PRR organizations, a political movement of increasing global importance. In this spirit, its particular contributions lie in two main areas: first, its clear-eyed attention to how members of these organizations interact with one another, constituting and re-constituting a distinctive politics of social identities over time; and second, its novel theorization of political position-taking around sex-gender and race-ethnicity. This latter contribution is especially important because it works to resolve PRR actors’ otherwise puzzling use of a more progressive gender lens for focusing their ethnocentrism.
The first empirical chapter, “The Racialization of Sexism” (chapter 2), provides a comprehensive background of national regimes of sex-gender, race-ethnicity, and religion/secularism in France and Italy, respectively, and it introduces the book’s two PRR case studies: the FN (in France) and the LN (in Italy). In both countries, PRR messaging on the matters of the Muslim veil and violence against women deploys the racialization of sexism, expressing relatively feminist concerns about women’s emancipation, yet simultaneously vilifying racialized men. High-profile incidents in both France and Italy have offered PRR actors the opportunity to use this framing to amplify their anti-immigrant sentiments.
Subsequent empirical chapters address the internal dynamics of the FN and LN, presenting findings from Scrinzi’s richly ethnographic data collection. Scrinzi explains that both parties are grounded in grassroots organizing, making it all the more important to examine gendered dynamics of membership recruitment and member socialization. For example, chapter 3’s attention to suborganizations specifically for women members shows that women’s spaces within these parties largely replicate fairly stereotypical ideas about “women’s issues,” concentrating on such matters as the family and education. Chapter 4’s attention to the gendered division of labor shows that women tend to do more menial and administrative tasks within the organizations of the FN and LN. Simultaneously, however, some (principally older) women members argue that, in doing this important work, women can be “better activists and politicians than men” (p. 105, emphasis in original). These women’s younger counterparts also engage in disproportionate shares of menial or administrative tasks, but they do not view this negatively or as discriminatory.
Chapter 5’s presentation of life histories of PRR members illustrates that the subjects, themselves, see gendered opportunities and constraints within their political careers, but they do not tend to view these dynamics as structurally inequitable. Chapter 6 takes stock of preceding empirical sections in order to argue that, while many of its findings illustrate traditionally gendered patterns, there is also considerable variation among subjects in how they describe their own motivations and goals. For example, some men subjects describe themselves as “driven by domestic concerns” (p. 155) as well, and they describe PRR communities as spaces where they can “express emotions such as care and sadness” (p. 156). Both these departures from hegemonic masculinity and the sheer variation among subjects are important for appreciating the PRR not as a monolithic mystery but rather as a living and evolving quadrant of the political space.
The book’s central cases of the FN and the LN are both drawn from the European advanced industrial democratic world, showcasing the development of PRR discourses within well-established party systems that are now experiencing fragmentation and change in the context of the twenty-first century. These cases are, therefore, especially useful for drawing our attention to gendered organizational dynamics within the PRR and to the racialization of sexism specifically within broader settings that have, overall, both secularized and grown more progressive with regard to areas such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) rights, yet where subsets of the population may express pushback against these social changes. Future research extending Scrinzi’s theoretical framework will do well to look to other regions to test its portability.
The book’s sociological approach to analyzing the PRR foregrounds its members’ and participants’ construction of the meanings of sex-gender and race-ethnicity through their words and actions. This approach understandably has less to say about the structural dynamics of PRR organizations and how these dynamics are deeply embedded in their institutional settings, which include the constraints and opportunities of their systems’ electoral rules, the incentives produced by national-level versus local political processes, and the like.
As a political scientist reading this book, I find myself asking a cluster of specifically institutional questions, such as whether and how PRR organizations’ very structure might reflect their values, and how the infrastructure through which these organizations recruit relates to the propagation of their messaging. The racialization of sexism is not only about PRR actors’ words and actions; it is also, intersubjectively, about how the PRR interact with their wider context. The book’s thoughtful attention to France and Italy as contrasting social settings is essential for addressing this latter point. However, at points in this book, a tight focus on the social nature of the PRR and upon social context risks obscuring the relevance of institutions. France and Italy’s political systems are structurally very different from one another, and these differences are highly consequential for PRR emergence and electoral success. Single-member legislative districts and two-round presidential contests present clear incentives for small, fragmented political movements in France to collaborate, with manifold implications for the evolution of smaller and more extremist ideological organizations. By contrast, political actors in Italy, including the PRR, operate within a generally more institutionally open environment. This observation generates other questions, such as the extent to which parties strategize distinctively across the settings of France and Italy, and how these differences inform generalizing Scrinzi’s model to apply more globally, beyond the region of Europe—say, to Canada, or to the Republic of Korea.
The Racialization of Sexism offers deeply important insights into the PRR in Europe. The book’s contributions also include its sophisticated theorization of the co-construction of the PRR’s positions on sex-gender and race-ethnicity, which advances the broader field of intersectionality for studying political movements and parties. Given both the ubiquity of patriarchy and the cross-pollination of messages and ideas across parties and around the world, scholars should also examine the racialization of sexism in a wider range of parties, across regions. Thus, areas for future research are many. In short, Scrinzi’s book is a treasure trove for scholars of not just the PRR and gender but also those studying party systems and political culture, among other areas.
