Employing women's rights as a racist weapon: The case of Giorgia Meloni in Italy's radical right

Lasio, D, Girei, E, de Oliveira, JM, Piras, L and Serri, F (2025) Employing women's rights as a racist weapon: The case of Giorgia Meloni in Italy's radical right. Women's Studies International Forum, 114. p. 103237. ISSN 0277-5395

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Abstract

This study analyses how Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Italian radical right party Fratelli d'Italia and current Prime Minister, employs women's rights as a discursive strategy to legitimise nationalist and anti-immigration positions. Drawing on scholarship in gender, postcolonial and migration studies, it reveals how Meloni's standing for (carefully selected) women's rights serves to nurture and perpetuate orientalised representations of Muslim migrants, grounded in the same binary thinking that justifies colonialism and white supremacy. Based on the analysis of Meloni's social media posts published between January 2015 and September 2022, we argue that her representations of women's rights function as discursive weapons deployed to uphold racialised and exclusionary nationalist agendas. By contextualising her defence of women's rights within her broader self-positioning as the “Christian mother of the homeland”, we highlight her dismissal of gender politics, contributing to existing debates on femonationalism.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	1699 Other Studies in Human Society; 1801 Law; 2002 Cultural Studies; Gender Studies; 4404 Development studies; 4405 Gender studies; 4804 Law in context
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
Divisions:	Liverpool Business School
Publisher:	Elsevier BV
Date of acceptance:	26 October 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	6 November 2025
Date Deposited:	06 Nov 2025 11:34
Last Modified:	06 Nov 2025 11:45
DOI or ID number:	10.1016/j.wsif.2025.103237
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27504

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