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Building on theoretical framings in critical race and queer studies, this article focuses on the first female prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, as an entry point to examining the current alignment between far-right populism, anti-gender movements, and White supremacist conspiracy theories in Europe. First, considering the contradictions that female leaders of far-right populist parties seem to negotiate, this article compares Meloni's communication strategies and political interventions to those of her counterparts in Europe. Second, employing the concept of 'productive racism', the article examines Meloni's birth rate agenda and related ambivalent stance towards 'migrant' women. In so doing, this article first demonstrates how existing theoretical frames, developed to examine current entanglements between feminist, anti-gender, and anti-immigration discourses, fall short of explaining why 'gender' can be used to 'stick' 'migrant' and queer subjects together, characterising both as threats to the sexual order of Europe. Even when 'migrant' women are depicted as hopeless victims, populist far-right leaders appraise them as either aberrant or otherwise deficient mothers. The article concludes by urging scholars of far-right populism, migration, and religion and their intersections with gender, to adopt race as a primary category of analysis and, therefore, consider that it is race that makes gender 'stick' as the common enemy of disparate political actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the term “transnational cinema” first appeared in 1997, most studies have focused on films epitomizing the logic of either profit maximization or ethnic affinity to explain phenomena such as the mainstreaming of Kung Fu movies. Yet, these two logics do not account for the entirety of the transnational projects that have been produced to date, hence the call for more studies on “trans-border patterns” that operate beyond both of them (Berry 2010, 123). In this article, we take up this call and approach the co-productions between China and Italy as exhibiting a “trans-border pattern” which satisfies interests beyond both the market and ethnic affinity. We trace the history of such a “pattern” back to the arrival of the Italian pioneer of Chinese cinema, Amerigo Lauro, in Shanghai in the early 1900s. We contextualize the productions of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo/China (1973), Giuliano Montaldo’s Marco Polo (1982) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) to provide exemplary cases of a non-market oriented affinity between two culturally distinct nations: China and Italy. We conclude by suggesting that China has pursued transnational co-productions with European countries such as Italy to exercise a more productive control than censorship over the ways China is to be represented internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]