How to be a woman (in politics): constructions of gender in responses to Giorgia Meloni’s Instagram Posts

Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Italian far-right party Fratelli d’Italia, is the first female Presidente del Consiglio in the history of Italy and is known to be vocal against feminism and gender-related issues. This unique scenario calls for an examination of gender from several perspectives; this paper focuses on users’ responses to Giorgia Meloni’s gendered posts (LGBTQIA + families, patriarchy, abortion, mansplaining) during the general election campaign in 2022. To situate the investigation, we engage with literature on far-right populism, (anti-)gender rhetoric, and online comments. Methodologically, we investigate six gendered posts by triangulating Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. The examination of the language used stems from corpus-driven results, i.e. bigrams containing donna/e (woman/women) and expands to all the woman/women-forms in the corpus. The results of the six posts selected for the analysis present three main topics: construction of abortion, Meloni’s perceived engagement with other women, and descriptions of Meloni’s womanhood in politics. In connection with the last topic, the paper found that Instagram users conceptualize Meloni as an exceptional woman, a fighter against some gendered chaos, and, to a certain extent, a gentler extremist.