This essays discusses Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cahadia’s intervention concerning the relationship between populism and feminism, agreeing with the authors that the articulation of progressive populism and anti-essentialist feminism is necessary. The most pressing related issues, it argues, are i) the book’s seeming understanding of feminism as necessarily being a ‘smaller’, perhaps even more particularistic, movement than populism; ii) its strong emphasis on the ontological necessity of one leader; a question which the essay argues is an ontic/empirical one, as well as one which might be one of the most serious obstacles for a successful articulation of the populism and feminism, and; iii) that the book’s proposal of a ‘ruptural institutionalism’ offers a promising route for further political and theoretical investigation, which might help feminism to steer an alternative route between current hegemonic (neoliberal) feminist articulations on the one hand, and neoconservative opposition to ‘gender’ on the other.
