Locating the far right within contemporary patriarchal politics: Liberal and illiberal patriarchalisms in post-patriarchal Western Europe

The literature on West-European far-right gender politics often highlights the strategic ambiguities through which far-right actors claim to defend women’s and gay rights while advancing reactionary patriarchal projects. Building on accounts that locate these paradoxes in the articulation of Islamophobic femonationalist/homonationalist discourse and conservative anti-gender politics, this article adapts Mondon and Winter’s distinction between liberal and illiberal racisms to patriarchal politics, positioning the far right between illiberal and liberal patriarchalisms. It argues that the liberal mainstream sustains its post-patriarchal self-image by repudiating and externalising patriarchy through mechanisms of individualisation, marginalisation, and racialisation, which cast patriarchy as an illiberal residue associated with racialised and marginalised ‘others’. From this perspective, the far right occupies a strategic in-between space that enables it both to accommodate and radicalise post-patriarchal liberalism by normalising illiberal patriarchal politics within mainstream arenas. In doing so, the article reasserts the analytical value of patriarchy as a concept for understanding not only far-right politics but also contemporary reactionary politics more broadly.