CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Dimitrijevic, Zorana |
|---|---|
| Title | Femopopulism: Discursive Instrumentalization of Women's Rights in the Populist Rhetoric of the Serbian Progressive Party |
| Summary | Treatment of women's rights is recognized as an essential indicator of the state of human and minority rights in a country. Seen as something that cannot and should not be compromised, gender equality is often instrumentalized for different political agendas. While major scholarly work on the instrumentalization of women's rights for political purposes has focused on countries of Western Europe and argued that women's rights are usually used as an alibi for Islamophobia and anti-immigrant campaigns, not much literature has been written on the phenomenon outside of Western Europe. This thesis aims to fill that gap by looking at Serbia, an EU candidate country, and the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Based on the discourse analysis of the ruling party's officials, this thesis argues that the party has used women's rights as a tool for reaching its own political goals. The findings of the thesis suggest that these goals can be divided into two thematic units: the first one refers to the SNS officials' instrumentalization of discourse about gender equality in the EU accession process; the second one shows that the rhetoric about women's rights is an inseparable part of the SNS' comprehensive populist strategy of stigmatizing its political opponents with the aim of gaining support from the electorate. The findings imply that the ruling SNS invokes women's rights strategically – when it contributes to its political agenda – but fails to address structural problems related to gender equality and domestic violence on other occasions. |
| Supervisor | Bochsler, Daniel |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/dimitrijevic_zorana.pdf |
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