Women’s Body-Territory amid the Rise of Far-Right Politics

This panel examines how women’s bodies become sites through which political violence, right-wing mobilization, and authoritarian transformations are experienced, governed, and resisted. Across contexts including far-right movements, militarized borders, war, and internal conflicts, political turbulence is increasingly inscribed onto women’s embodied lives, shaping mobility, reproduction, and survival.

Rather than treating violence as an external or exceptional condition, drawing on Cabnal’s concept of body-territory that questions the separation between the human body and the natural world, the panel explores how it is embedded in everyday social relations and institutional arrangements, producing differentiated vulnerabilities along gendered, racialized, classed, and geopolitical lines. It pays attention to how women navigate, endure, and contest these conditions, and women’s bodies -their first territories- become politicized and territorialized in struggles over nationhood, belonging, and social order.

We are interested in contributions linking women’s embodied experiences to the expansion of far-right politics, authoritarian governance, militarized borders, and shifting regimes of reproduction and care, including research on reproductive governance and rights, gendered dimensions of displacement and migration, insecurity, feminist resistance, and collective survival strategies under political instability. It encourages comparative perspectives beyond a strict Global North/Global South divide, examining how similar logics of exclusion, control, and resistance operate across diverse geopolitical settings, including liberal democracies and where far-right politics is increasingly institutionalized.

Bringing feminist, decolonial, and intersectional approaches, the panel advances sociological understanding of how women’s embodiment is not only shaped by political turbulence but is also a terrain through which such turbulence is produced, contested, and made livable.