Queens, Right-Wing Femininity, and the Fantasy of Monarchy

WHY A QUEEN IS BETTER THAN A WOMAN KING

Four events concerning women took place in 2022: the funeral of Elizabeth II, the electoral victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the release of the movie The Woman King, and the widespread protests after the killing of Mahsa Amini in Iran. To understand what is going on in the world today, not just regarding the situation of women, it is necessary to analyze these four events together.

The rise of the New Right governments in Europe—the UK, Sweden, Italy—is not a surprise. It was long coming, as the result of the Left’s mistakes, including its failure to provide an adequate answer to the crisis of liberal democracies themselves (obviously, liberal democracy is no longer the political form that enables us to cope with the threat of new catastrophes). But we should bring out another feature of the Right’s revival: the important role of women, from Marine Le Pen in France to Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin, and Priti Patel are no longer eccentricities in the liberal establishment or in the new populist Right, which has found a way to integrate women who act stronger than masculine technocratic experts. They unite Rightist hardness with features usually associated with femininity (gentle care, etc.). In short, women provide a human face to the new radical Right. A new type of the Rightist woman leader fits perfectly for an era trying to combine authoritarianism with human sensitivity. After the failure of Socialism with a human face, we are now getting Fascism with a human face.

In no way should we characterize this figure of a woman as incompatible with true femininity and dismiss it as a product of patriarchal manipulation. Not only is there no underlying “true” femininity, one can easily imagine that, for many actual women, this new figure feels like a liberation from the rigid politically correct feminism. To this, one should add that in the new Rightist domain, top positions are also offered to women and non-white men—from Rishi Sunak (the British prime minister of Indian origin) to the (short-lived) UK chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng (who is Black), who tried to launch the biggest package of tax cuts in half a century.64

Signs abound, though, that make the inconsistencies of this new figure of femininity visible. Meloni’s movement is called Fratelli d’Italia, meaning “Brothers of Italy,” not sisters—just as the latest Hollywood blockbuster The Woman King is about woman as a king, not as a queen. The coincidence that Queen Elizabeth II’s death coincided with Elizabeth (Liz) Truss’s rise to power, contingent as it was, symbolizes this shift from Queen to Woman King.

The TV spectacle we were able to watch on September 9, 2022—the ceremony of Queen Elizabeth’s burial—reminds us of the paradox embodied by the British monarchy. The more the British monarch and the UK have lost their superpower statuses and become local powers, the more the status of the British royal family has become an ideological fantasy. According to official estimates, the ceremony was watched by 4 billion people around the world. We should not dismiss this as ideology masking actual power relations: The British royal fantasy is one of the key components that enable actual power relations to reproduce themselves.

This fantasy doesn’t only concern the present royal family. Remember how, in 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on the site previously occupied by Grey Friars Priory. The University of Leicester identified a skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III by using radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, identification of trauma sustained at the Battle of Bosworth, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on March 26, 2015, and again, the ceremony (where only a hundred or so people were expected) was witnessed by tens of thousands of people. Events like these cannot be dismissed as an enactment of reactionary fantasies. The correct insight they bear is the distinction between the symbolic head of power and the actual executive power. Kings and queens reign, they don’t rule; their reign is ceremonial and as such, crucial.

Recall the qualities expected from a monarch: S/he should stay out of political conflicts and radiate compassion and kindness, combined with basic patriotism. S/he should stay out of ideology in the narrow sense, which means s/he gives body to ideology at its purest. Her/his personal features are strictly linked to her/his royal function; their role is to provide a human touch to this function. When Prince Harry said two years ago: “I want you to hear the truth from me, as much as I can share—not as a Prince, or a Duke, but as Harry,” the absurdity of this claim immediately struck: The name “Harry” is used because he is a prince, otherwise he would be called “Mr. Windsor” or whatever, and Harry is noticed by the public only because he is a prince—who would otherwise be interested to “hear the truth” from him?

At the opposite end of this logic of monarchy, we find the situation described in The Woman King (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2022), a movie about the Agojie, the all-female warrior unit protecting the West African kingdom of Dahomey from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The story takes place in the 1820s and is focused on a (fictional) general Nanisca who trains the elite women warriors to fight Dahomey’s enemies. She is subordinate only to King Ghezo, a real-life figure who ruled Dahomey from 1818 to 1858 and engaged in the Atlantic slave trade up to the end of his reign. Among the opponents of Agojie are slave traders led by Santo Ferreira, who is fictional and portrayed as an enemy to Ghezo. (Ferreira is loosely inspired by Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Brazilian slave trader who helped Ghezo gain power.) Historically, Dahomey was a kingdom that conquered other African states and enslaved their citizens to sell in the Atlantic slave trade—most of the kingdom’s wealth was derived from slavery. The Agojie had a history of participating in slave raiding, and slavery in Dahomey persisted after the British Empire stopped Dahomey from continuing in the Atlantic slave trade.65 The warriors depicted in The Woman King thus effectively served and protected a king who traded slaves (and also used them for his palm oil plantations).