Femonationalism, gendered anti-Muslim racism and reproductive anxiety: Perspectives from the United Kingdom and Germany

Focussing on two different Western European nation states, the United Kingdom and Germany, we explore the apparent paradox of liberal feminist support for right-wing and authoritarian populist parties. First, we explore the wider political context of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim neo-nationalist discourse within which this paradox occurs. Second, while critical scholarship has often focused on far-right ‘populism’, this obscures the role that centre-right and left-wing political discourses play in fostering and normalising anti-Muslim racism and gendered Islamophobia specifically. Finally, through exploring media and political discourses, we examine how narratives of integration are explicitly linked to reproductive anxieties. We argue that contemporary gendered nationalist discourses are interwoven with these narratives of reproductive anxiety and whiteness, and they span the political spectrum. Through exploring the nation as an ethnicised project where women play a central role in its biological, cultural, and symbolic reproduction, the convergence of some strands of liberal feminism with far-right politics become less paradoxical than it would initially appear.