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Article published In: Discourse Theory and the Turn to Practice
Edited by Benjamin De Cleen, Nico Carpentier, Jason Glynos, Jana Goyvaerts, Maximilian Grönegräs and Yannis Stavrakakis
[Journal of Language and Politics 24:1] 2025
► pp. 142–162

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“A massive field of action”

Feminist anti-essentialism and political discourse theory

ORCiD logo with link | Södertörn University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the author.

Published online: 7 January 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24195.gun
Abstract
Since the publication of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, issues related to gender and discourse have been a recurring yet not central theme in discourse theory (DT). Not only are the authors’ formulation of an anti-essentialist theory of hegemony explicitly influenced by feminist theoretical debates, but also much subsequent work has engaged with feminist theory. In Mouffe’s more recent work on left populism, however, references to feminist theory and politics are almost entirely absent — while at the same time issues of gender, reproduction and sexuality have become increasingly central to politics both in many national contexts and geopolitically. Against this background, this article argues that it is today urgent for DT to re-engage with feminist theory — not least in relation to issues of anti-essentialism — and to revive the exchange between the two theoretical fields, focusing especially on issues related to the specificities of bodily materiality.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse, gender, ideology: Conceptual clarifications
  • 3.Discourse, gender, and the emergence of neoliberal hegemony
  • 4.From progressive neoliberalism to anti-gender politics — gender and the populist moment
  • 5.Gender, discourse and contemporary boundary struggles
  • 6.An anti-essentialism for our times — understanding the articulation of a ‘people’
  • 7.Concluding discussion
  • Notes
  • References
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