Politics of reversal

Dangerous convergences of gender and race in migration and feminist politics

Abstract

Right-wing politicians who speak out for women’s rights while attacking emancipatory feminist politics appear to be a contradiction. Nevertheless, studies show that this is a widespread Western phenomenon in fact. It represents a discursive construction, one that Suvi Keskinen understands as a “politics of reversal”: namely as “the adoption and rearticulation of central feminist ideas […] to promote racist agendas” (2018, 161). However, racialized and culturalist gender discourses and images cannot only be found in the context of far-right parties and groups that can be easily and readily defined as “femonationalists” (ibid.). Rather, we can observe “dangerous convergences” of gender and race across the political spectrum, especially in the context of feminist and migration politics. These convergences, how they are produced within feminist as well as migration-related social fields, plus how they circulate and hence structure policies and politics are the focus of this article. We argue that culturalist and racializing gender discourses within current migration and feminist politics reinforce each other—whether intended or not. Hereby several incidences of sections of the international feminist movement deliberately opting for (racial) alliances with the state and law and order policies are illustrated.