Democracy and Demography: Intersectional Dimensions of German Politics Myra Marx Ferree 1,2, * Feminist theory revealed liberal democracy as gendered masculine in a macrointer- sectional way that privileged racial-ethnic and economic power, enforced hetero- normativity, and constructed gender-binary citizenship. Merely reformed to accommodate women, many brotherhood–breadwinner democracies now face deeper challenges. As the second demographic transition undermines the hege- mony of binary gender relations, it reorganizes political conflict on an axis of re- productive politics. Germany’s Green and Alternative fu ¨ r Deutschland parties exemplify opposite ends of this axis. The Green clusters of issues reflect intersec- tional societal ideals that demasculinize democracy, while reactionary populism repoliticizes masculinity to defend the family–state relations of the breadwinner– brotherhood gender system. Democracy is a contested term. The institutionalization of proce- dural democracy often went hand-in-hand with the exclusion of certain kinds of issues and constituents from access to politics. The view of democracy as institutional, representative, and achieved is in tension with the framing of de- mocracy as participatory, discursive, and aspirational (Ferree 2013, 421). As authoritarians come to power through electoral means and then begin to dis- mantle the norms that hold them accountable for their actions, worries about losing the values of democracy have become global. But what is the nature of the democratic systems that are changing, and how is gender implicated in these challenges? Although “democracy” is literally the power of the people, the question still arises, “which people”? The “demos” of any democracy rests on the social construction of a people demographically reproduced over time, and thus on a politics of reproduction. The gender system that governs the politics of re- production is both a material set of power relations and the symbolic relations 1 University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA 2 Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA *mferree@ssc.wisc.edu socpol: Social Politics, Fall 2021 pp. 532–555 doi:10.1093/sp/jxab016 # The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Social Politics 2021 Volume 28 Number 3 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sp/article/28/3/532/6426300 by guest on 20 April 2023