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A growing body of research recognizes the impact of gender on social movement activity. Yet, far less attention has focused on the deployment of repressive methods in a gendered manner. The study contributes to comparative politics literature by proposing a typology of repression. At the start of mass mobilization, state authorities tend to invoke patriarchal norms to ridicule and stigmatize activists. Next, the coercive apparatus targets protesters through the use of psychological intimidation, physical violence, and sexual violence, as well as legal and economic repression. At the end of protests, the police resort to debasement and dehumanization of jailed protesters in a gendered manner. Drawing on the case of Belarus, one of the most restrictive political regimes in Europe, the study illustrates how repressive methods are gendered throughout different phases of mass mobilization. The study seeks to expand our understanding of various ways in which individuals are subject to repression.
This article investigates refugees’ labour to gain inclusion within the ‘host’ community, drawing on interviews with male Afghan former interpreters employed by Western armies. It makes an empirical contribution by centring them as active agents rather than as passive tropes in the racialised and gendered discourses of the ‘War on Terror’ and Western migration policies. It offers a synthesis between concepts from three fields: migration as translation, migrant masculinities and the battleground of conditional inclusion. By focusing on migrants’ self-translations in dialogue with translations of their bodies and stories by host-country institutions, I trace three strategies: insertion, subversion and exemption. While Afghan interpreters largely fail to be recognised as needing protection from harm, their insertion and subversion of discourses of protection based on service are more successful. Finally, they counter their interpellation as dangerous bodies with a strategy of exemption that can be momentarily successful but remains ultimately precarious.
In this article, I present the findings of a three-year qualitative research project studying feminist and queer activist groups that support refugees in Denmark, Germany and Sweden. My findings show how multilingual activists volunteered as linguistic interpreters to enable inclusive dialogue between refugees and host-country citizens in joint grassroots democratic coalition meetings. Based on interviews with different groups, I show that their linguistic-broker position gave these activists the leverage to challenge and bring to the attention of white-majority citizens the exclusionary dynamics of structural inequality and civic-status hierarchies that create tensions within supposedly open and inclusive joint meetings. By highlighting the critical, counter-hegemonic positionality of activist-translators in coalitions working on gender, the central contribution of my case study is to connect theories of translation and conflict mediation in transnational social movements with research that focuses on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in intersectional coalitions.
The article investigates whether media coverage varies for male and female legislators with regards to their activities in promoting women’s interests. To test this, 30 key women’s-issue-promoting legislators in South Korea are selected, primarily based on their legislative significance within a women’s-issue bill co-sponsorship network between 2004 and 2016, and their various substantive representation efforts are analysed by examining 45 news outlets. Findings reveal that while receiving less media coverage than their male counterparts overall, female legislators have higher odds of receiving a more focused spotlight concerning women’s-issue-promotion efforts. However, the gendered media coverage was only driven by women’s issues with strong stereotypically feminine policy characteristics, for example, abortion, contraception and sexual harassment, and not by those with both feminine and masculine policy characteristics, such as childcare support and maternity leave. The article demonstrates the importance of media-bias conditionality and thus calls for a more nuanced approach to be taken in future research.
This article is based on a case study of online media practices of the Czech far-right group Angry Mothers, the biggest far-right Facebook group in the Czech political context in 2018. We show how the group used visual storytelling to translate the narratives of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which has become one of the most dominant narratives in European and US far-right discourses over recent years. The conspiracy theory was introduced in the book Le Grande Replacement by Renaud Camus in and claims that powerful Jewish elites use their financial resources to promote ‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual + (LGBTQIA+) and gender ideologies’ and multiculturalism to destroy the white race, which will eventually die out. Based on theories of translation and visual storytelling, we demonstrate how the main tropes of its anti-Semitic narrative were diffused through the use of images stigmatising LGBTQIA+ people and other minorities in online communications of the Czech far-right group Angry Mothers.
In this article, we deliver an empirical analysis of far-right visualisations of womanhood on US Telegram channels. Previous studies show that the far right, which increasingly engages in misogynist, anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rhetoric, and opposition to feminism, is marked by the growing involvement of women in the roles of political leaders. Such engagement by women within the far right causes an ‘image problem’, as it makes the traditional gender image of wifely submission less convincing. Our analysis of images of womanhood shared on US far-right Telegram channels shows how far-right images of ‘approved’ performances of womanhood include transgressive gender performances of hegemonic femininity that are in conflict with conservative representations of womanhood in traditional nationalist ideology. Our findings also show how hateful images of liberal, non-binary and minority women serve as a tool for the construction of a variety of ‘approved’ far-right identity images of hegemonic femininity.
Compared with European men, the political self-efficacy of European women is significantly lower: in all European countries, women are generally more pessimistic about their abilities to understand, influence or participate in politics. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how political self-efficacy develops in general and about what explains the gender gap in particular. In this article, we set out to explore to what extent political self-efficacy is strengthened or weakened through observing parents’ political engagement and to what extent this is gender based. We will investigate this impact both overall and by gender, specifically examining the separate influences of the mother and the father, as well as their respective roles in shaping the political self-efficacy of women and men. Our findings suggest that maternal influence exceeds that of the father. While experiences of both an engaged mother and an engaged father increase the likelihood of high levels of political self-efficacy, we find that the experience of a politically engaged mother, in particular, reduces the likelihood of low levels of political self-efficacy in adulthood.
This article demonstrates the absence of young women in the formal global architecture of the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security agenda. It shows that there is little meaningful engagement with young women in the ten Women, Peace and Security resolutions and subsequently in the Women, Peace and Security national action plans designed by United Nations member states to implement the agenda. This article argues that the failure to explicitly consider young women undermines the intergenerational sustainability of the agenda, misses an opportunity to align Women, Peace and Security with the more recent Youth, Peace and Security agenda, and discourages inclusive thinking regarding the unique ways in which young women experience conflict and contribute to peace. In doing so, the article contributes to the growing voices advocating for a more inclusive approach to Women, Peace and Security, and makes a case for how young women’s explicit inclusion can strengthen the agenda.
A lack of diversity within local government in Australia and globally is recognised as a problem. Government efforts to increase the representation of women, youth, racialised minorities, people with disabilities and so on do not, however, address a major impediment to their participation: inadequate remuneration. In this article, we present data from a survey, interviews and ethnographic research to reveal the consequences of not paying councillors a living wage. A lens of critical volunteerism exposes the ways in which women are encouraged to become councillors as an extension of community activities, only to be underpaid for their labour. We argue that encouraging under-represented groups to contest for a place on councils without increasing the financial feasibility of them occupying the role will not only fail to address a lack of diversity on New South Wales councils but put too heavy a burden of representation on people least able to bear the costs.
Recent studies emphasise gender attitudes as an explanation for the gender gap in the radical-right vote. However, little is known on whether the (mis)match between the issues that are given the most salience by radical-right parties and (wo)men’s issue priorities accounts for the gender gap in the radical-right vote. Merging a large series of barometers conducted in Spain, including more than 9,000 radical-right voters from January 2020 to March 2023, we find that issue priorities are gendered and that VOX’s support is mainly driven by male issues. Also, importantly, regional nationalism and gender – two of VOX’s flagship issues – affect women’s and men’s probability of voting for VOX differently. These findings indicate that the main determinants of voting for VOX are largely driven by men, not women.
