Reimagining Gender Roles: The Politics of Femininity in the Global South

This study analyses how right-wing populist governments in the Global South have politicized femininity to promote patriarchal nationalism, manifesting it as an instrument of ideological repression and enforcing gendered standards to consolidate power. In line with feminist political theory, postcolonial studies, and populism research, the study analyzes how women are made pivotal to nationalistic discourses, moral economies, and populist statecraft. Drawing from case studies of India, Brazil, El Salvador, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and the Philippines, the study finds that femininity is not merely a cultural construct or personal identity but a politically contested and constructed subject. The major patterns identified include idealizing womanhood with nationalism, silencing feminist resistance, and employing legal and technological resources to monitor and discipline gender-nonconforming subjects. Each nation with specific yet intersecting configurations of gendered populism encompasses disguised cultural idealism, witnessing evangelical and misogynist populism, integrated conservatism, militarized patriarchy, and performative paternalism. These gendered imaginaries are not random byproducts but conscious tools of populist rule, inscribed through legislation, media rhetoric, religious vocabularies, and violence legitimized by the state. Channelling these spaces, femininity is disciplined, mobilized, moralized, monitored, and called upon as an icon of purity, sacrifice, and tradition, yet women’s agency is cut short. Femininity, as both a contested and constructed space, is still a crucial site where the future of democracy and social justice in the Global South is under active negotiation.