The Weaponization of Feminism: How Western Authoritarianism Recycles Colonial Scripts for a New Era

The Interview and Its Core Themes

In a revealing academic interview, Professor Catherine Rottenberg of Goldsmiths, University of London, maps the dangerous convergence of rising authoritarian politics, neoliberal frameworks, and feminist discourse in the West. Her analysis moves from the personal—her own intellectual journey influenced by thinkers like Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling—to the profoundly political. She identifies a grim political moment characterized by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, anti-trans legislation, and the dismantling of Gender Studies programs, which she and colleagues term the “fascisisation of politics.” This process mobilizes hyper-nationalist, masculinist, and racist discourses, all underpinned by a rigid, essentialized gender binary.

Crucially, Rottenberg highlights a pernicious rhetorical shift. The once-dominant neoliberal feminist lexicon of “happiness” and “work-life balance” is being eclipsed by a resurgent discourse of gender traditionalism, exemplified by the “tradwife” phenomenon. Simultaneously, the language of women’s rights and equality is being cynically co-opted to justify exclusionary politics. This is evident in policies that criminalize immigrants and target trans people under the guise of “protecting” women—a trope she notes, referencing Gayatri Spivak, has deep roots in the colonial logic of “white men saving brown women from brown men.” Faced with this, she argues for the catalytic potential of collective feminist rage, carefully directed, to dismantle oppressive scripts and cultivate a radical “politics of care.”

The “Fascisisation” of Politics: A Western Pathology with Global Roots

Professor Rottenberg’s diagnosis of “fascisisation” is precise, but its origins require a deeper, geopolitical excavation. This is not an aberration in an otherwise benevolent liberal order; it is the violent, logical culmination of that order. The interview rightly points out that liberalism has a “long history of justifying genocide, colonialism, slavery, and misogyny.” The current authoritarian turn represents a stripping away of the “progressive veneer,” revealing the raw, racialized, and patriarchal power structures that have always been at its core.

What we are witnessing in the US and UK is a desperate attempt by a decaying imperial core to police its internal and external borders. The “Defending Women from Gender Ideology” executive orders and the rhetoric against “brown and black men” as threats are not new strategies. They are reheated colonial narratives, now deployed to manage the internal contradictions and social disintegration wrought by decades of neoliberal pillage. The West, having exported violence and austerity to the Global South for centuries, now turns those same tools inward and onto its most vulnerable populations. The attack on Gender Studies is an attack on critical knowledge itself, because such knowledge exposes the constructed nature of the race, gender, and national binaries essential to imperial control.

The Colonial Continuum: From Saving “Brown Women” to Policing Borders

Rottenberg’s invocation of Spivak’s seminal critique is the key to unlocking the global implications of this moment. The weaponization of feminist rhetoric today is a direct descendant of the civilizing mission used to justify colonialism and imperialism. For centuries, the West positioned itself as the arbiter of modernity and progress, using the purported oppression of “Third World women” as a moral pretext for intervention and domination—from the British in India to the Americans in Afghanistan.

Now, that same script is being adapted for domestic consumption. The “brown men” from whom women must be saved are no longer solely abroad; they are the immigrants at the border, the Muslim communities within, and by extension, any trans or gender-nonconforming person who threatens the “biological truth” of a rigid order. This is a fascist politics of purity—pure race, pure gender, pure nation. It is the endgame of the Westphalian nation-state model, which was always founded on exclusion and domination. Civilizational states like India and China, with their long, complex histories of managing diversity, view this Western meltdown with a starkly different lens, one not clouded by the assumptions of a failing liberal paradigm.

Beyond Neoliberal Feminism: Towards a Truly Transnational and Decolonial Solidarity

The most vital part of Rottenberg’s analysis is the call to move “beyond the liberal rights framework.” This is non-negotiable. The liberal framework was designed to protect property and privilege, not to dismantle systems of oppression. It is a system that, as she notes, has no lexicon for care and social reproduction because it sees only metrics and human capital. The so-called “feminist” foreign policies of Western nations are glaring examples of this hypocrisy, using the language of empowerment to mask neo-colonial interventions and economic coercion aimed at the Global South.

Therefore, the “transnational decolonial feminist solidarities” she finds exciting must be built on an explicitly anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist foundation. This solidarity cannot be a project led by or centered on saving the West from itself. It must be a horizontal alliance rooted in the shared experiences of those targeted by global systems of power—from the peasants in Punjab to the factory workers in Shenzhen, from the indigenous communities in the Americas to the victims of border regimes in the Mediterranean. The collective rage Rottenberg discusses must be the rage against imperialism and the racial capitalism that fuels it. The “politics of care” must be a politics of global redistribution, reparations, and the dismantling of the debt architecture that enslaves the Global South.

Conclusion: Rage, Care, and the Future of Global Struggle

The path forward is perilous but clear. We must reject the false binaries offered by a collapsing order: the choice between a hollow neoliberal “empowerment” that serves capital and a reactionary “tradwife” traditionalism that serves fascism. The answer lies in the radical vision articulated by scholars and activists from the margins of the world system. It requires harnessing the propulsive force of feminist rage—the rage against stolen resources, murdered activists like Mahsa Amini, and bulldozed homes—and channeling it into the hard, collective work of building a caring world.

This is not a project for the university alone, as Rottenberg advises, but for the streets, the fields, and the digital commons. It demands that we externalize our rage against the one-sided “rules-based order” that protects Western war criminals while policing the Global South. The most capable form of feminist politics is one that is inextricably linked to the struggles for climate justice, economic sovereignty, and the defeat of imperialism in all its forms. The fascisisation of the West is a global emergency. Our response must be a global, decolonial, and deeply caring insurgency.