Feminationalism

I claim that women were closely engaged in combining the feminized body with national politics, a feminationalism.

This rhetoric of Norwegian exceptionalism did not only work to strengthen already well-established forms of what Nazila Kivi (2015) has termed “feminationalism” in Norway, where feminist rhetoric is used to buttress nationalist politics and self-understandings in ways that figures other geographies and populations as always already “backwards.” The framing of the anniversary also seemed to suggest that feminism is nothing but history in Norway, and that the job ahead is to export the Norwegian model of feminist equality to so-called less developed countries.

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez also introduced the notion of a “post-’Fifty Shades of Grey’ patriarchal heterosexuality” which combines feminationalism, homonationalism, white supremacist notions, ideas of eurocentric superiority and erotic capitalism.

In countries such as Denmark and Italy, xenophobic campaigns have taken on the form of ‘feminationalist’ rhetoric which claims that migration is undermining the rights and freedoms of the women in the destination countries. The discourse of ‘feminationalism’ is closely related to homonationalism in which the xenophobic right is claiming that migration is a threat to the rights of the LBGT community.

We now see a kind of racism that argues that Christian/Western values are civilized and a basis for democracy, while ’their’ values are reactionary and undemocratic. In the same way, femonationalism and homonationalism have evolved, where it is claimed that the oppression of women and LGBT people only exists amongst ’foreigners’ (the muslims). Feminationalism does not imply a common struggle for freedom, but sees the state as a protector of ’poor’ women from ’foreign’ men.