In this chapter I synthesise the main feminist concepts that I intend to employ in the investigation of radical right populist ideology herein. In so doing, my intention has been not to deliver a detailed overview of feminist research. Rather, I have aimed to indicate how my own research project is anchored in the tradition of feminist research – providing the feminist conceptual vocabulary I employ in this work. In addition, I have reviewed the key contributions of feminist scholarship of nations and nationalism, which I considered of importance for this study. I have thus indicated a possible means to address the gender–blindness of the theoretical canon of radical right populism. More clearly, extrapolating from the findings of feminist scholarship on the field of nations and nationalism to the study of radical right populism, I argue that the people of radical right populist ideology may be conceptualised as a gendered construct, inasmuch as the nation of nationalist ideology. Additionally, the conceptual construct of the people – just as the nation and the gender performative – is, as detailed in the previous chapter,
18 It is nonetheless worth noting that the distinction between ‘good’ heterosexual men and ‘bad’
homosexual men has become less clear in the past decades. With the increase interaction between nationalism and homonormativity – take, for instance, the special ‘LGBT chapters’ of extreme right English Defence League (EDL) – it seems the boundaries have been moved in the direction of at least nominally incorporating into the national project those members of the LGBTQI community that submit to the nationalist ideals in the neoliberal context.
characterised by contingency and instability, being subject to a continuous process of definition, consolidation, contestation, and reinterpretation across time, as well as between various polities in which the concept is employed by the radical right populist ideology. In other words, a study of the radical right ideology could trace the discursive genealogy of the concept, and the place occupied by the hierarchical gender binary in this context; hence it would evidence the various changes, reinterpretations, and possible moments of tension across time. More clearly, the gender–sensitive lens at work in the present study ‘enables us to see the extent and structure of gender hierarchy. It permits us to examine both how social constructions of masculinity and femininity shape our ways of thinking and knowing how women’s and men’s lives are patterned differently as a consequence of gendered practices’ (Peterson & Runyan, 1993: 190).
Starting from the conceptual overlap between the people and the nation, which I noted in the previous chapter, and juxtaposing it with the gendered aspects of the national construct evidenced by feminist research in the field, I maintain that the femininity and masculinity performatives ascribed to the women and men constituting the people community might be seen in a similar way in radical right populist discourses as they are in nationalist discourses. There are several aspects that need to be shown here. In order to answer to the research questions I posited in the first chapter, I need to analyse how the people collectivity – overlapping with that of the national family construct – is gendered.
In order to do so, following on the footsteps of feminist scholarship of nationalism, I plan to employ the theoretical conceptualisation of the woman’s burden of national parenthood, and the position to which women have been relegated within the national collectivity to account for the functioning of the hierarchical gender binary in radical right populist ideology. As such, heteronormativity may represent a crucial criterion of intelligibility in radical right populist discourses. Consequently, of particular importance is to investigate the place that radical populist discourses may assign to women as bearers of the community, and as signifiers of the people as a homogeneous collectivity. On this matter, crucial is the awareness of the normative implications of assimilating motherhood to bearing the offspring of the family father, and by extrapolation the people’s offspring. Such a move therefore brings to attention the position of other, non–normative femininities in radical right populist ideology.
On the issue of people’s homogeneity, as I showed in the previous chapter, the radical right populist parties appear to be preoccupied with maintaining the purity of the people. Such a preoccupation requires investigating radical right populist appeals to the people’s men to defend their women from either internal or external threats – which similarly to nationalist descriptions might be oftentimes depicted in masculine terms. This may also indicate an attempt to control women’s bodies through various means – either by prohibiting the women’s interaction with the masculine Other under the threat of rape, or discouraging
women’s autonomy and the right to control their own bodies by positing the right to abortion as problematic and relating it to the ‘demographic race’.
Another aspect worth noting here is an awareness of the position of men and certain masculinity performatives at the heart of the national family construct.
Such ascribing of men as family heads may reconfirm the asymmetric, patriarchal nature of the hierarchical gender binary manifest in radical right populist discourses. Here, emphasis is put on the plurality of masculinity performatives, and the position of hegemony some of them may be afforded in particular political–socio–cultural–economic circumstances. As such, certain hierarchies at work within the spectrum of masculinity performatives that underpin radical right populist discourses – more clearly, if the native heterosexual masculinity performative is heralded as the ideal in radical right populism – may involve the crafting of a hierarchy of subordination and even oppression of other masculinity performatives. The assumption of masculine leadership leads to a symbiotic relationship between the people and their male leaders, which in turn results in the representation of – to paraphrase Nagel (1998: 252) – honour, patriotism, cowardice, bravery, and duty as quintessential attributes of the hegemonic masculinity performative, and concurrently designate these as inherently defining dimensions for the whole body of people. To investigate these, in the following chapter I introduce the main tenets of the conceptual metaphor theory and present the most important lines of criticism this has met since its introduction.
Having the above criticism as a point of departure, I suggest a genealogical take on the analysis of conceptual metaphors, which enables my inquiry on the gendered nature of the radical right populist discourses and the ideology they underpin.
4 METHODOLOGICAL NOTES AND CHOICE OF EMPIRICAL MATERIAL
The analyst of manifestations of radical right populist ideology through discourse needs to be aware of several interrelated axes of structuring the political subject – gender, ethnicity/‘race’, social class, sexuality. This stance is grounded in the gendered nature of the people construct in such discourses. The people conception, as discussed previously, rests on the generic presentation of the collectivity, in metaphorical terms, as a family. The collective identification with an enlarged family thereby enables the ordering of radical right populist discourses according to a heteronormative criterion of intelligibility. With this in mind, I suggest in the following a discussion on the concept of metaphor.
Metaphor, as it is detailed in the present chapter, is not simply and innocently an embellishment of political discourse; in fact, it is actively producing the ‘reality’
that is described and reinforced through that discourse. More clearly, metaphor highlights how social relations are to be understood, in which way specific political issues are to be talked about, focuses attention on specific problems and elevates them to the centre stage of the political agenda, while purposively obscuring others. Consequently, the use of metaphor by political actors uncovers the ideological underpinnings of the discourse the metaphor is embedded in, and at the same time provides a comprehensive description of the specific worldview the said political actors entertain. Fleshing out the connection between metaphor, ideology, and discourse, I strengthen my argument for the investigation of conceptual metaphor in radical right populist discourses.
At a basic level, metaphor represents ‘the ideational construction of reality’
(Koller, 2004: 3), a communicative resource usually employed by language users to enrich ‘the expressiveness of their message through the most economical means available to them’ (Charteris–Black, 2004: 17). Put differently, metaphor can be defined as the beams of light from a ‘searchlight that selectively highlights some aspects of the unknown but leaves other aspects in the dark’ (Mühlhäusler, 2012:
9). In other words, depicting the people as a family collective enriches the expressiveness of radical right populist discourses, and concurrently suggests a certain level of closeness and even intimacy between the constitutive members of the people community. Indeed, kinship or simply ‘family’ or ‘own blood’ offers a high degree of certainty for self–identification. Against an ever globalising world characterised by fluidity and diversity, a reference to family ties enforces a view that regards the named community as immutable, ‘real’ and ‘natural’ (Baumann, 1995: 736; Carsten, 2004: 143). It is precisely the metaphorical construction that facilitates such transfer of attributes from the family concept to that of the people, which is of interest here.
The etymological origin of the word ‘metaphor’ is the Greek metapherein (meta– means ‘with’/‘after’, while –pherein stands for ‘to carry’, ‘to bear’), which
denotes a process of transfer of meaning (Aristotle, 1997: 1457b, 7–20). The aforesaid dynamic relation of motion, which metaphor brings about, has the ability to transport those participating in such communicative situations by calling into mind a specific emotional response – in a sense showing the common etymological root shared by ‘motion’ and ‘emotion’, and strengthening the central position of metaphor as bearer of meaning in communication among people (Charteris–Black, 2004: 19). It is worth noting that such a process of metapherein – in plain speech, of carrying over – takes place in a context in which the interlocutors have a specific expectation about the meaning of the metaphorical construct in question, in the sense that such a movement takes place in a communication context in which the metaphor has been previously anchored in language and discourse (Charteris–Black, 2011: 31). However, metaphors are not simple ‘doilies decorating daily speech and thought – and ensuing action – but an integral part of it. They cannot be taken away, leaving behind them some perfectly clear, unambiguous set of terms that have a one–to–one relationship with their referents’ (Yanow, 2008: 235). Put differently, metaphorical constructions are effective not only at an immediately apparent lexical level – for instance, how words are joined together in a text – but have a higher cognitive dimension as well – how these words joined together call in our minds certain ways of understanding what is being communicated to us. In this resides their importance to the study of political discourses.
The political rhetoric and the ideologically motivated conduct of political actors, which underpins political discourses, require a string of oversimplified explanations, which are expressed metaphorically. Put simply, the increasing complexity and heterogeneity of social norms has been presented by political actors in a simplified form with the help of metaphorical constructions, thereby allowing a basic understanding of such issues of common interest. Nevertheless, researchers have warned, by employing metaphors discursively, political actors make use of the metaphors’ inherent ability to disproportionately highlight certain elements of social practices, which at the same time obscure if not outright omit some others. More precisely, political actors emphasise with the help of metaphors some specific aspects of the issue at stake, while silencing some others, thereby reflecting their ideological stand on the matter (Carver & Pikalo, 2008: 3;
Edelman, 2001: 4; Gregg, 2004: 60). The type of ideological underpinning that metaphors are involved in does not become apparent at once. Awareness of the relationship between a particular lexical metaphor present in a certain political discourse, the conceptual metaphor that it may be related to and their place within a wider cluster of metaphors, vary greatly from one individual to another.
Nonetheless, ‘awareness of their motivation in socially influential domains of language use improves our understanding of the ideological basis for metaphor choice’ (Charteris–Black, 2004: 244). Returning to the example above, referring to the people in metaphorical terms as a national family emphasises the unitary
aspect of the community, and thus alleges a common albeit distant genetic heritage. At the same time, it obscures the diversity of the collectivity in terms of gender identification, social class and sexual preferences.
To account for the ideological work metaphors do, in this chapter I elaborate the methodological apparatus that enables the analysis of the discursive articulations of radical right populist ideology. This is undertaken in several steps.
At first, I discuss the Aristotelian ambiguity in the use of metaphor in rhetorical contexts (Aristotle, 1997; 2010). I thereby problematise the understanding of metaphors as mere lexical embellishments and their capacity for persuasion. In so doing, I assess the key findings of metaphor research in the field of pragmatics, modern hermeneutics, and philosophy of language (cf. Black, 1993; Ricoeur, 2003; Searle, 1993). The ‘conceptual turn’ (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003) is of crucial importance for the present study. The main tenets of conceptual metaphor theory are therefore presented in detail. The Lakoffian conceptual constructs of the
NATION IS A FAMILY metaphor and that of the STRICT FATHER receive particular attention (Lakoff, 2002). Its subsequent critiques (cf. Charteris–Black, 2004;
Chilton, 2004; Hart, 2010; Kövecses, 2002; Tendahl, 2009) are then elaborated upon, and the feminist interventions in the study of metaphors are presented against this background (cf. Adams, 2009; Ahrens & Lee, 2009; Carney, 2008;
Haste, 1994; Koller & Semino, 2009; Meier & Lombardo, 2009; von der Lippe, 1999). Discussing the challenges of designing an appropriate methodological apparatus (Boréus & Bergström, 2009) and avoiding circular argumentation (cf.
Kertész & Rákosi, 2009; Kövecses, 2008), I suggest a syncretic methodology for the analysis of conceptual metaphors in discursive contexts (cf. Carver & Pikalo, 2008; Gibbs & Lonergan, 2009; Mottier, 2008; Musolff, 2003; Semino, 2008).
The genealogical aspect of this methodology and its importance to understanding the ideological manifestations in radical right populist discourses is then explained at length. Subsequently, I describe the empirical material selected from the discourses of two European radical right populist parties to be analysed in the following chapters with the help of the aforesaid methodology. The parties’
newspapers are then introduced as their ideological mouthpieces, and their importance for the present investigation is shown.