Gender As a Battleground: (Re)Degendering the Construction of 'I' and 'we' Identities in Populist Discourses

Gender has increasingly permeated public discourse, evolving from an academic and feminist topic to a central, divisive issue. The push to overcome gender inequalities has led to a paradigm of degendering, with linguistic degendering seen as key to reducing gender biases (Liu et al., 2018). The argument is that if gender categories are blurred, differential treatment based on gender becomes difficult. A perspective that has permeated not only the academic debate (Butler, 1990; Lorber, 2021) but has also proven capable of sparking public debate where the instances of degendering intersect with identity politics, offering it new nourishment (Moran, 2020).

This paper explores gender and identity construction in the public sphere, considering gender as a social and constitutive category for self- and others-identification (Ridgeway, 2011). Building on recent sociological literature (Riesman, 2018), the paper proposes a framework based on structuration theory, exploring the duality of structures through "cultural schemas" and "symbolic resources" (Cervia, 2024). It views gender identity as a structure driving individuation and singularization processes in late-modern societies (Martuccelli, 2010; Reckwitz, 2022).

The proposed interpretative framework is used to analyze the narratives put forward by anti-gender movements in Italy (the pro-life and family movement) over the past two years, as well as those advocated by LGBTQI+ movements, and the reconfiguration offered by populist parties. The empirical base, composed of a variety of sources (official documents, mandate programs, social media pages, etc.), is analyzed through a qualitative content analysis in order to examine how “cultural schemas” and “symbolic resources” interact with the reconfiguration of individual and collective identities, mobilized by populisms (Westheuser, Zollinger, 2021).

The paper concludes by interpreting the polarization in the public debate on gender identities as a reflection of the cleavage between hyperculture and cultural essentialism (Reckwitz, 2020).