Weaponizing Feminism: Counter-Intersectional Politics in Right-Wing and Populist Radical Right Discourses across Parliamentary Arenas

This article examines how right-wing and populist radical right (PRR) parties construct and contest feminism as a discursive field in parliamentary debates, and how these discursive constructions vary across different levels of institutionalization of feminist politics. Focusing on Italy and Spain, we analyze parliamentary debates on key bills addressing trans rights and homolesbobitransphobia (2018–2023), using a mixed-methods approach that combines semantic network and qualitative content analysis. We find that, in Spain, feminism emerges as a central discursive target, whereas Italian parties tend to avoid explicit references to it. Despite this, in both contexts right-wing and PRR parties strategically weaponize feminism to advance (femo)nationalist and trans-exclusionary agendas. The article underscores the role of parliamentary discourse in using feminism to foster counter-intersectional politics and shows how varying degrees of feminist institutionalization shape the development of different discursive strategies to weaponize feminism within parliamentary arenas.