Populism, in academia and journalism alike, has taken on a life of its own. The London-based Guardian offered its readers an explanation of “how to spot a populist” on the pages of a late 2018 edition (Rice-Oxley and Kalia Reference Rice-Oxley and Kalia2018). Multiple books on the topic have graced the top 10 best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. A skim of any of the leading journals or the briefest of attendances at a key conference shows an explosion of attention to the term within political science. Perhaps because of its popularity, the concept of populism has developed a certain elasticity, and it is routinely used to signal everything from the radical right-wing, to nationalist, to anti-immigrant political sentiments. As Jonathan Dean and Bice Maiguashca (Reference Dean and Maiguashca2020, 11) note, literature around the term “remains curiously inchoate, muddled and even misleading.”

For scholars of gender and politics, this puzzle goes further, given the mainstream silence around the distinctly masculine nature of populism. Across the globe, populist radical-right (PRR) parties have largely been Männerparteien (Mudde Reference Mudde2007), built around strongly macho characters such as Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte. Likewise, the strong gender gap that largely accompanies PRR voting and the prevalence of male candidates and leaders (with striking exceptions, Marine Le Pen being the most obvious) has seen little mainstream interrogation. Yet a new generation of scholarship has built up over the last decade to challenge this silence, and to highlight the ways in which gender is a fundamental factor in understanding the PRR’s popularity, voter base, and electoral success. So important is gender to the study of the PRR, this literature argues, that “The good news for feminists is that it is no longer possible to think seriously about democracy and politics while ignoring gender issues” (Graff and Korolczuk 2022, 4). While this statement may prove to be overly optimistic about the extent to which mainstream political science is willing to address gender (the same could have been said about any number of trends in the academic literature that have failed to cement gender as a “serious” topic of study), the three books reviewed here go far in demonstrating the centrality of gender to the study of populism.

Covering Hungary (Fodor), Poland (Graff and Korolczuk), and a wide variety of case studies across Europe and the Americas (the edited collection from Dietze and Roth), taken together, these books address two key concerns that link work on gender and populism. First, all three highlight a continuing question in this literature about the relationship between gender and the PRR: is gender a genuine substantive concern for the PRR, or is it instead a helpful tool that allows the PRR to build coalitions across conservative and right-wing movements? Second, all three books illustrate the importance of moving beyond merely the cultural or discursive aspects of gender and the PRR, and to think about them with the tools of political science and political economy. In particular, they argue for a consideration of the role that the decades-long neoliberal restructuring has to play here, most especially in the postcommunist context of Eastern Europe.

Right-Wing Populism and Gender: European Perspectives and Beyond (2020), an edited collection from Gabriele Dietze and Julia Roth, brings together a diverse range of case study and theoretical work, covering both Europe and a few considerations of the Americas. It moves the lens beyond Eastern Europe, which so much existing work has focused on, and analyzes the impact that the PRR has had on contemporary conversations around gender in Germany, France, and Austria. It shares a number of concerns with the other books reviewed here, most notably, the importance of emotions in this research. Specifically, Birgit Sauer’s chapter analyzes how a politics of fear and anxiety leads, in turn, to an anger toward “Others”; likewise, Imke Schmincke discusses the relationship between sexuality and affect. Multiple chapters also engage with the aforementioned question as to whether gender is central to the platform of PRR parties or merely a helpful coalition tool that brings them into alignment with the broader conservative movement. Schmincke argues that the utilization of gender and sexuality by the PRR is a strategic tool, mobilizing those who do not necessarily identify with the PRR (69). Eszter Kováts considers the way that the Hungarian government’s discussion of gender is a useful “fear-mongering mobilising tool” (88). In greater detail, Niels Spierings’s chapter explores this tension between the simultaneous “trivial” and “pivotal” nature of gender within these movements. He argues that there is a “trivotality of gender in the PRR” (43) that is not part of the “ideological core” (52) of these movements, but rather “an ideal frame through which PRR parties can showcase the core elements” (52) of their platforms. Most notable among these is the notion that gender is being pushed by elites, and that it is a distraction from the more important task of protecting the nation from the immigrant outsider.

Dietz and Roths’s book contains contributions from several scholars who are already well established as leading figures in the work on populism and Eastern Europe, including Roman Kuhar, Agnieska Graff, and Eszter Kováts. Kováts’s chapter covers some of the same ground that Fodor’s book does, but her conclusions are striking and provide some of the stand-out arguments of the collection. She reminds us that the specific context for anti-gender politics needs to be taken into consideration—in this case, “the complete restructuring of the Hungarian state” (94) that the Viktor Orbán–led government has undertaken. More fundamentally, Kováts argues that the ways in which anti-gender politics are interpreted, understood, and argued against are also value laden: “Emancipatory movements do not exist in a vacuum: Their claims and vocabularies are also products of politico-economic processes and geopolitical power structures, and are therefore also subject to critique” (94). Scholars in the West, in other words, should be wary that we approach this topic from our own particular positions and that proposed remedies or even assumed positions of ‘good’ approaches to gender are not neutral.

The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary by Eva Fodor provides a book-length study of the same Hungarian case. Her work considers changing welfare provision in the country and the re-familialization of care work. Like Poland, discussed in Graff and Korolczuk’s text, Hungary presents a particularly interesting case study through which to consider gender and the PRR. The ruling governments of the Fidesz party in Hungary and the Law and Justice party in Poland are often lumped together in a broad brushstroke as part of a global right-wing resurgence. Yet, although doggedly neoliberal in many of their economic policies, both are simultaneously very willing to spend large amounts of state money on welfare provision for families and children which would be difficult to imagine in some Western Europe and North American contexts. However, this applies only to the “correct” type of family. As Fodor makes clear, Roma families and individuals benefit far less from these changes, and political discourse is often strongly anti-Roma. Hungary therefore provides an important context in which to understand the interactions between gender, the PRR, and policy change.

Fodor sets out to explain how the current Hungarian state welfare structure “carries some elements of both institutionalized gender relations in Western neoliberal democracies and the Central European state socialist gender regimes of the recent past” yet is also “distinctly different from both” (2). She argues for a novel state welfare model of “carefare” to explain contemporary Hungary. Carefare employs some Western neoliberal understandings of gender relations—women are expected to be in paid employment and, indeed, their entitlement to the majority of the new benefits that Orbán’s government has enacted is directly linked to employment status. State spending on nurseries and elder care has remained low, but political rhetoric and policy encourage the idea that care should remain a private, familial concern and that the government has “started to sentimentalize women’s care work and closely confound it with women’s identity as women” (54). In the second chapter, Fodor draws on a government-funded publication published on International Women’s Day in 2019 from men praising women. These quotations praise women as superhuman: continually kind, empathetic, and loving, in both the home and the workplace. They are understood as inherently selfless, as reflected in the minister of finance’s acknowledgment of women’s unpaid work in the home yet his simultaneous comment that “they [women] do this out of the kindness of their hearts without expecting any renumeration of any form, simply because they consider it the right thing to do” (56). Thus, the rhetoric implicitly argues, care work remains women’s “natural” role.

This combination of the expectation of waged labor, the valorization of “feminine” caring roles, and the lack of state support for care work means, Fodor argues, that “anti-liberal rule is … built on the backs of women, especially on the backs of hard-working, ambitious, lower-class women” (107). However, she also acknowledges that “carefare” policies do benefit some. In particular, beneficiaries include the demographics which support Fidesz and Orbán. Fodor writes, “Families with some attachment to the formal labour market” are doing better “thanks, in part, to the wide range of ‘family protection’ measures available to them in the form of loans and government grants” (57).

Fodor describes Hungary’s “carefare” as a “novel response” (108). Indeed, this combination of restricted state spending coupled with high levels of support for some types of families is currently unique to a few countries in Eastern Europe. However, other aspects of Hungary’s situation feel less novel. Women’s level of unpaid labor in the home is high across all Western neoliberal democracies, and many see a similar lack of universal maternal and childcare rights not tied to employment. The lack of federal right to maternity leave in the United States is a clear example of this. The novelty of Hungary’s position feels more in relation to the role of nationalist and pronatalist rhetoric, which is perhaps underplayed here.

Regardless, the focus in Fodor’s study on political economy and state welfare is novel and highly important. It illustrates the important and complex interplay between anti-gender rhetoric, state welfare policies, and the use of both to shore up demographic support and create convenient “moral panics” that distract from broader political issues. It provides an important detailed case study of how gender is not an “add-on” in any attempt to understand anti-liberal governments. Instead, it is fundamentally linked to not only ideology but these states’ attempts to reconfigure state welfare and state-citizen relations.

Like The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary, Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment by Agnieska Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk begins from a position of the centrality of gender to the current politics of Poland and the wider populist surge. For the authors, “what is missing in the growing literature on populism is awareness of the centrality of gender issues within this new political culture” (11). The stakes are high—as they point out, what is at risk in Poland and other contexts is “part of a broader conflict, where what is truly at stake is the future of democracy” (3). This is particularly so in Poland, which the vast majority of this work focuses on, where anti-abortion measures are tied up with moves to fundamentally reshape the country’s Supreme Court in PiS’ favor. Yet Graff and Korolczuk stress the broader importance of their arguments here, situating the Polish case as part of a global phenomenon, as well as emphasizing the strong transnational connections to the anti-gender movement.

Following an initial chapter which provides an in-depth history of anti-gender thinking (with its roots stretching back to Catholic thought and key interventions by the Vatican from the mid-1990s onward), the book turns to address the ways in which anti-gender politics are strategically key as opposed to substantively important. They argue that “battles against ‘gender ideology’ . . . have served as a springboard for the political careers of previously lesser- known right-wing politicians and opened up opportunities for ultraconservatives to enter positions of power and influence” (90). As discussed earlier, a key tension at play here is again that between substance versus strategy in anti-gender discourse. Graff and Korolczuk largely stress the latter, showing ways in which anti-gender politics have been “expedient for [the] political agenda” (83) to populist politicians, and arguing that there is an “opportunistic synergy” between anti-gender movements and populist right-wing parties, “with both sides benefitting” (24). They argue that populism “readily feeds on narrative structures and arguments promoted by the anti-gender movement” due to its “thin-centred nature” and that “this collusion is not so much an intrinsic social conservatism of populist politicians, but [rather shows] that the ultraconservative critiques of gender have been framed in populist terms and are thus readily adaptable to populist politics” (165). Again, populist politics is presented as less concretely interested in gender, and more concerned with the leverage that it gives.

If Poland has been a key case study for the interaction of the populist right with anti-gender politics, it has also been a site of enormously widespread feminist mobilization. The book ends with a consideration of what the authors term, drawing on recent work by Chantal Mouffe, the rise of “populist feminism” in Poland. The final chapter (building upon previously published work in Dietze and Roth’s book) provides a detailed, and often firsthand, description of the so-called Black Protests as they have evolved in Poland in recent years. They describe how the vast majority of women involved in these protests think of themselves as “ordinary women” rather than political activists (156). Like other work in this area, their book draws heavily on the literature on the politics of emotions and its role in shaping the anti-gender movement. Τhey argue that “the Black Protests differed from earlier struggles for reproductive rights: they downplayed both human rights discourse and the liberal talk of individual choice, autonomy and the right to privacy. Instead, activists used language and imagery that were highly emotional and often dramatic” (158).

Taken together, the works by Fodor and by Graff and Korolczuk act as an important rejoinder to liberal feminist concepts of backsliding and backlash, which have largely grown up in Western scholarship. As Graff and Korolczuk note, “For decades, liberal feminism has operated on an assumption of progress: human rights discourse was successfully expanded to include women’s rights, liberal democracy was spreading, and gender studies were getting more and more sophisticated, inclusive and self- aware” (2). These works remind us that the trajectory of political history in other parts of the world has looked very different, and the current anti-gender moment, while clearly transnational in many ways, needs to be understood in relationship to local nuance, specific state structures and historical context. Put more simply, they show that feminism (and anti-feminism) do not mean the same things everywhere and that, as scholars of gender and politics, we need to be more attune to regional diversity.

Moreover, these books provide an important reminder of the need for a political economic consideration of the anti-gender phenomenon. This is particularly central to Fodor’s work, which argues that anti-gender politics are not just rhetoric but rather tangible and dramatic changes to state-citizen relations and the funding of social welfare. This has been given less attention in Western work on gender “backlash” and much-cited work on neoliberal feminism (Fraser Reference Fraser2013; Rottenberg Reference Rottenberg2018) has tended to see feminism on its own terms, not in conversation with regressive forces. Addressing the full extent of anti-gender politics, including the ways in which they interact with welfare and democratic change, as these books do, is key.

As discussed, these three works largely stress the strategic role that anti-gender politics plays in the populist moment, rather than the substantive (or lack thereof) commitment that key figures and parties may have to it. Regardless, the rhetoric of anti-gender politics appears here to stay and has obvious impact on the lives and safety of women and the LGBT+ community. As Kováts argues, it is incumbent on scholars of gender and politics to “not shy away from conflict, and look critically into the evolution of these concepts and why they have become so vulnerable” (95). Our area of study needs a more secure bulwark against political forces which seek to discredit and destroy it. So much is at stake.