"In an Islamic Catalonia there would be gang rapes, genital mutilation, forced marriages." The phrase is from Sílvia Orriols, but it could be from any other leader of the European radical right. Portraying Islam as fundamentalist and retrograde, as the great Other of European identity, is one of the main lines of discourse shared by these groups. To construct this image, women's rights and feminist concerns are exploited, a strategy that Sara Farris calls femonationalism. Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy have perfected this technique in their quest for more female voters and to align their racism with egalitarian social consensus—a vague defense of women or LGBTQ+ people that is not reflected in other parliamentary votes.
As is evident, these parties are not concerned about gender-based violence—they deny, for example, its structural nature and the fact that it occurs mostly in the domestic sphere—but rather turn it into just another symptom of the "cultural invasion" we are supposedly experiencing. Aliança Catalana prohibits the burkini in Ripoll's swimming pools, proposes banning the veil in schools because it considers it a "form of gender-based violence," and disseminates data on rapists imprisoned in Catalonia, emphasizing their foreign origin, not to defend women but to portray Muslims as a cultural threat. "Where Muslims are the majority, civilization ends and barbarism begins," says Orriols, echoing Vox's position.
Thus, machismo is supposedly something belonging to other cultures, while ours has already overcome it, reaching a supposedly superior stage of civilization; nothing could be further from the ideological frameworks that legitimized colonization in the past. One of these frameworks, that of foreigners as a sexual threat, resurfaces when migrants are portrayed as rapists or are said to be the main perpetrators of gang rapes. This discourse is also useful for stoking security panics: "We want a state where women can go out at night without rape spray," was one of Aliança Catalana's campaign slogans. This policy is designed to fuel the fear that legitimizes the exclusion and exploitation of migrants and transforms any social issue into a cultural conflict. The housing problem, or the difficulties in reproducing an expansive welfare state, would then be solved by closing borders, excluding migrants, or "expelling foreign criminals." Isn't that already happening? The security-driven cultural war is underway, and a segment of the middle class, frightened and frustrated by the failure of the independence movement, is embracing it. A segment that seems to be growing.
Security panic is easily linked to identity panic, where Catalan identity is constructed through an apocalyptic vision anchored in discourses about population replacement and the idea of imminent danger—to the language and our identity. The taboo surrounding immigration has been broken in the pro-independence political sphere, where in the past, a "welcoming" Catalonia was more the prevailing view. Although this shouldn't be entirely surprising: when a nation is built, a boundary of belonging is always defined, ready to be deepened at the first sign of crisis. Today, above all, that border is drawn against Muslims, who are considered, in turn, a Spanish weapon for the dissolution of the Catalan nation. But these narratives don't arise solely from frustrated separatism; they are replicated throughout the Spanish state—in Vox, Alvise, and in the recent skirmishes of the PP. The consequences are tangible because this discourse is taking root—or perhaps connecting with existing fears—and is leading to violence: attacks on centers for migrant children and racist assaults that are spreading like wildfire. Feminism has something fundamental at stake here. After years of tenaciously building a collective consciousness against gender-based violence, it cannot allow it to become an instrument of border control or to serve to justify new forms of exclusion. Sexist violence is also fueled by the same structures that sustain racism, poverty, and exploitation. Dismantling them requires rejecting the false narratives of protection and security that only perpetuate inequality. Not in our name.
