The Quiet Uprising: Gender, Power, and Women's Roles in Right-Wing Populist Regimes in the Global South

This chapter explores the gendered dynamics of right-wing populism (RWP) in the Global South by examining women's political agency in Indonesia and the Philippines. Beyond the crude dichotomies of co-optation and resistance, it examines how women negotiate, navigate, and occasionally reinforce the moral and patriarchal ideologies that underpin populist governments. The chapter conceptualises populism as a performative political logic that creates meaning, stages moral legitimacy, and distributes affective authority, rather than as an ideology. It does this by drawing on Ernesto Laclau's discourse theory and Saba Mahmood's idea of strategic agency. Using a comparative perspective, it demonstrates how culturally rooted roles such as mother, caregiver, or moral guardian become means for women's political participation under RWP. Although Indonesia and the Philippines have different regime styles, both situations show how women use moral scripts and affective legitimacy to increase their political visibility. The tensions at the core of populist gender politics are exposed by the chapter's argument that these forms of agency are strategically equivocal rather than emancipatory.