Recently, the High Court in England ruled that only those deemed biological females are legally recognised as women. In Hungary, gender identity recognition has been effectively abolished. In the US, illegalisation of abortions and attacks on the LGBTQI+ community are intensifying, under the auspices of religious groups. Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention dates back almost four years. Recently, the Greek Prime Minister declared that there are only two genders, as biology dictates.
These are just a few examples of gender inequalities that are deepening across the globe; suffice it to say why an interpretation of the rise of the far right today, and broadly of the consolidation of an authoritarian neoliberal strategy in Europe and America, cannot but put the issue of gender at the centre of the debate. As Jane Caplan once said, reading Maria Antonietta Macciocchi: “You can’t talk about fascism unless you are also prepared to discuss patriarchy”.[1]
The fascist discourse
In Greece, five years have passed since the conviction of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn as a criminal organisation. However, the ideological elements that contributed to its electoral surge remain; sometimes taking the form of political support of far-right groups, sometimes being transformed into social practices of exclusion and xenophobia, sometimes becoming a pole of pressure for an increasingly right-wing shift in the political scene. Moreover, surveys of political attitudes confirm that, for years, the percentage of Greek society sympathetic to the extreme right has been consistently close to 8%. Today, three far-right parties are parliamentary represented (four, taking into account the European Parliament), a development that accompanies the gradual collapse of SYRIZA, the apparent retreat of left-wing political formations in general, and the authoritarian trajectory of the ruling party.
It is in such an ideological context that the international attack on gender rights is taking place in Greece. And it is in the context of this international attacks that the far right is cultivating moral panics on the issues of gender and feminism, which go by the name of “woke agenda” and “gender ideology”. Such rhetoric is also endorsed by neoliberal political formations, alt-right and religious groups, the media, and even parts of the left. I argue that, regardless of the subjects that make use of it, this rhetoric follows closely the fundamental elements of a purely fascist discourse.
The recent experience of Golden Dawn in Greece has brought us into contact with the most authentic form of fascist discourse: a discourse that gathers all the scattered conservative and racist ideologies, organises them into static and self-evident stereotypical truths and systematises them into commands for violent action against those deemed enemies. While such fascist discourse may no longer be expressed publicly, it is nevertheless crucial to be able to discern those elements of current political discourses that are in common with it, not only in terms of themes but also in terms of discursive strategies, that is, of political strategies at the level of discourse.
The core element of the fascist discourse is the triptych “Blood – Race – Nation”, from which all arguments and discursive strategies emanate. Blood is the biological factor which determines the formation of various social characteristics and groups. In short, the biological aspect governs and produces the social one. Thus, the biological category of “blood” produces the social category of the “Greeks”, so the destruction of the nation marks the biological death of the homeland.
In this rhetoric, women constitute the biological precondition of the nation since they are biologically charged with reproducing the national blood. The body of women belongs to the service of the nation: self-determination, feminism, and any non cis-heteronormative behaviour is inimical to the existence of the nation.
Although this is the fundamental argument of the fascist discourse, its essentially racist core – blood – has always been shared, in different versions, by various far-right formations as well as by official state discourses. Besides, this racist ideological core has been a component of the emergence of nation-states themselves. However, today, it is the very discursive strategies of fascist discourse that are being reinvoked as well: the creation of a sense of urgency vis-a-vis a mortal existential threat; conspiracy schemes of obscure plans being hatched by dark circles; construction of enemies, always class or ideologically oppressed minorities, described as dehumanised entities.
In this context, far-right inspired discourses detect a new threat to the nation: gender ideology. LGBTQI+ and feminist subjects are targeted as invaders, the Other, the essentially unintegrated, unable to be categorised because they defy biology. Through a rhetorical inversion of existing social relations, those subjects are presented not as marginalised groups but as possessing power and aiming to take away rights from the social majority in order to impose their own. They are described as mortal enemies, as was the case with immigrants previously, or with communists and Jews before that. Thus, homophobia, transphobia and genderphobia stand alongside Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-communism.
In this context, anti-woke discourses are articulated as discourses of resistance to the New World Order, as discourses of liberation of the oppressed majority, of relief from the tyranny of the irrational and the political correctness imposed from the West, along with the globalisation elites, as discourses for the salvation of masculinity, which is in crisis. Thus, the far right attempts to incorporate a more positive, productive, even libidinal dynamic.
So, the authoritarian discourse becomes appealing not only because it invites us to return to a place that is familiar and safe, but because it actually invites us to act: “Take back what they are trying to take away”, it yells. It thus inspires military fantasies of disenfranchisement and promises the return of lost power. As Toscano says, reading Foucault: “Fascism is not just the apotheosis of the leader above the sheeplike masses of his followers; it is also […] the reinvention of the settler logic of petty sovereignty, a […] ‘liberalising’ and ‘privatising’ of the monopoly of violence”,[2] namely the transfer of power, of the power to kill and rape.
The nation core and contemporary trends
The main tendency in Greece remains committed to this essentially racist nationalist core, as reflected in the rise of extreme right-wing groups, but also in the legitimisation of sexist and homophobic state strategies along with the sexist and homophobic public discourses of state officials. And yet, a certain systemic instrumentalisation of feminist and LGBTQI+ discourses has become evident in recent years.
A typical example is the identification of state support for women with measures to strengthen the family. The transformation of the General Secretariat for Gender Equality into the General Secretariat for Family Policy and Gender Equality, and later the creation of the Hellenic Ministry of Social Cohesion and Family, which was invested with discourses around the so-called ‘demographic problem’, were indicative, as Koutsoulenti mentions.[3] In the name of the protection of women, the nationalist threat of the annihilation of the nation is activated through the explicit link between ‘women – family – demographic problem’, and is directly attached to the anti-immigration politics of death at the borders.
Moreover, the invocation of women’s rights becomes itself a component of Islamophobic discourses, which present immigrants from the East as bearers of an inherently sexist culture, which compromises the well-being of Western women and the advancements on women’s rights. Thus, male migrants are described as a threat, and women as helpless and unprotected victims. In the name of protecting women, a form of nationalist and colonialist feminism is articulated, suitable for imperialist uses.
To describe this international tendency, Sara Farris introduces the term femonationalism.[4] According to Farris, it is not just a conjunctural instrumentalisation of feminist discourses, but a systemic tendency of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, a strong materialist tendency that is, associated with the reorganisation of the workforce and the reproduction of class inequality: on the one hand, poor and marginalised immigrant men are considered, we might say, recalling the contributions of black and decolonial feminism, as always-already criminal subjects, the first candidate group to fill the prisons in the name of white women’s protection laws, thus becoming the necessary reserve army of labour. On the other hand, immigrant women can be funnelled into the social reproductive work industry, largely as domestic workers, filling the needs of white households so that their members, both male and female, are able to thrive in the world of business.
The precondition is none other than full acceptance of Western norms and ‘values’. Hence, the ban of face-covering veil in France, for example, again under the pretext of protecting women from religious sexism and the consequent accusation of immigrants being responsible for sexism in France. The gender equality invoked by femocrats, femonationalists, as well as carceral feminists, goes hand in hand with the stigmatisation and illegalisation of entire populations, the intensification of surveillance and militarisation of borders, and the increased penalties against the poor.
As Jaspir Puar demonstrated with the concept of homonationalism, that later inspired Farris, “the ‘acceptance’ and ‘tolerance’ of gay and lesbian subjects”, together with legal and social recognition, also goes hand in hand with “the curtailing of welfare provisions, immigrant rights and the expansion of state power”[5] and “have become the barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated”.[6] It is precisely this homonationalist tendency that arms, among others, the states of the ‘civilised’ West to recognise national sovereignty of the state of Israel and to justify the genocide of the Palestinians, marked as retrogressive and intolerant Muslims.
Approaching both femonationalism and homonationalism this way, it becomes obvious that neither notion constitutes a break within the heteronormative national capitalist core but they are rather an extension of this very core. That is why even a hardcore heteronormative capitalist strategy is capable of accommodating both the instrumentalisation of feminist and LGBTQI+ demands and their partial integration and appropriation. The price is precisely the integration into normative, either homo- or hetero-normative, national frameworks and the silencing of their class and intersectional determinations.
If there is a thread that connects the racist core of nationalist discourses with various white feminist and homonationalist discourses, it is precisely the colonialist perspective: the enlightened certainty of the superiority of Western civilisation, which sometimes takes the form of the protector – against the black rapist or the Muslim oppressor–, sometimes the form of the imperialist liberator, and sometimes the agent that defends Western morality, i.e. humanity as a whole. What is presented as tolerance is in fact the “benevolent”, “magnanimous”, hegemonic normativity of the West, whose constitutive condition is the construction of exclusions: those who are normal and the others, those that deserve to live and those that do not, those that are tolerated and those that define the measure of normality by their very exclusion.
Characteristically, the Greek far-right group “Voice of Reason” states: “Gay people and same-sex couples today are increasingly accepted in social, family and professional life. And so they should be. They have no different rights from anyone else. We are not Islam here. We are the cradle of the free world. […] But in recent years the LGBT agenda has been advancing demands that are more and more unreasonable”.[7] We see now that the superior West is tolerant up to the limit of reason. And anything that reproduces the established gendered certainties is baptised reason, common sense, in opposition to everything else that is psychiatrised as irrational and decadent.
Whence do these discourses draw such certainty and obviousness? Politically speaking, from a perspective of power and privilege, deemed objective and non-negotiable, they draw within the imperialist social formations. Rhetorically and ideologically speaking, by invoking biological data, presented as natural and unchanging throughout the ages. This invocation reactivates the racist core of normativity, but in an enlightening-civilisational cloak. Here, common sense is identified with biology.
The exclusions established by the universalising discourse of Western imperialism produce bodies unworthy of living, bodies that ought to remain outside institutions. These effectively consist in exclusions from citizenship: who deserves to be called a citizen? Antigone’s question seems to resonate to this day.
Unexpected convergences
If the invocation of biology is not new for nationalism, it is surprising though that today similar invocations are also made by feminist discourses that were not originally nationalist. If the struggle for gender rights is targeted by the entire spectrum of the right, trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people are being targeted by a part of feminism, even on the left, as well.
Anti-gender feminists argue for the priority of sex over gender; at best, gender is devalued as an imaginary construct with no material basis, and at worst as capitalist-inspired fake need. But, if this is the case, then the question must be raised from the beginning: what is materialism? Can materialism be reduced to biology? Would it not be merely a mechanistic phenomenology to say that our bodily materiality is limited to our visible anatomical parts rather than to recognise that it is organised on the basis of social exclusions, traumas, and class-based social relations intersectionally defined? Why is transness presented as an individualised identity of neoliberal inspiration when trans people are subjected to deeply material, class and broader social exclusions on a daily basis? Does this not constitute a material fact for a left anti-capitalist strategy?
To the argument that the oppression of women is based on the exploitation of their ability to bear children, made possible by their biology, Butler responds: “It would be counterproductive and wrong to attribute the existence of oppressive systems to biology, when instead we should be asking how those oppressive systems contort biological matters to achieve their own unjust ends”.[8] In other words, what capitalist patriarchy primarily exploits is not the possibility of producing children but, conversely, the establishment of social roles that reproduce the existing social system, which is achieved precisely because these roles are naturalised, i.e. presented as given by biology.
If femininity is not interpreted as a social relation and as a dynamic and multi-determined imprint of performative social practices but as something defined by biology, it follows that it is regarded in terms of anatomical property, analogous to the property of Greek or any other national identity. Thus, a certain sex belonging system is constructed, alongside the national belonging one. It is essentially a form of property-concept of citizenship within the territory of sex, which, like any form of property, is founded on exclusion and inequality.
In this context, the essentialist conception of womanhood constitutes the grammar of a “we” based on class exclusions. Thus, not only does it not confront patriarchal national discourses, but, on the contrary, it extends them, forming a continuum ending in a left-wing femonationalism. And, sadly, the phrase “the foreigners are coming”, i.e. the unentitled non-nationals, “taking our jobs and bringing down our wages” sounds quite like the reasoning according to which trans people are appropriating something that belongs only to the entitled and properly gendered nation, hurting the legitimate members of that very nation.
Facing a system based on exclusion and inequality, the criterion for a revolutionary political theory and strategy aiming at interpreting and radically changing this world is the opening up of a path in the opposite direction to the one imposed on us. A path that, in the face of the naturalisation of blood and biology, chooses inventiveness, transformation, ingenuity; a path that, instead of closing, it incessantly opens up the regime of citizenship in all fields; a path that, instead of panicking with ‘woke agendas’, it is able to recognise the class exploitation of the multiply oppressed subjects, at the same time as it identifies the state tactics of exploiting their demands. A path that does not make room for the state to further repress, eradicate rights, and even deeply institutionalise inequality. And, above all, a path on which excluded subjects and their fears of further exclusion in a period of the rise of the far-right and the far-right state strategies are not just heard but placed at the very core of the strategy. This is the only certain, conceivable criterion for materialism today.
Despina Paraskeva-Veloudogianni is an editor and PhD candidate working in Athens. A member of the HM Athens organising committee, her publications include the monograph “Enemy, Blood, Punisher: analysing 13 speaches by the “leader” of Golden Dawn”, published in Greek by Nissos in 2015.
Cover photo: a stencil in Athens commemorating Zak Kostopoulos / Zackie Oh, near the place where the LGBTQ+ activist, drag artist and columnist was killed in broad daylight on 21 September 2018.
[1] Jane Caplan, “Introduction to ‘Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology’”, Feminist Review 1, 1979, pp. 59-66.
[2] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Verso, London 2023, p. 141.
[3] Andromachi Coutsoulenti, “The ‘anti-woke’ religion of the Alt-Right: Gender and LGBTQI+ rights in the Far-Right cyberspace”, in Rosa Vasilaki et. al. The Alt-Right in Greece: The Transformations of the Extreme-Right in the Post-Pandemic Period, Topos, Athens 2025, pp. 137-184.
[4] Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2017.
[5] Jasbir K. Puar, “Homonationalism as Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities”, Jindai Giobal Law Review 4(2), November 2013, pp. 23-43.
[6] Jasbir Puar, “Rethinking Homonationalism”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45(2), April 2013, pp. 336-339.
[7] https://fonilogikis.gr/arches-kai-axies/
[8] Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender, Allen Lane, London 2024.
