PARIS — Marine Le Pen is showing a little leg.

Thigh, actually, in a new campaign poster of her in a short skirt that encapsulates her calculated, canny use of gender in her uphill campaign for the French presidency.

Though she usually wears pantsuits, her aides were quick to spin the image as a blow against Islamic fundamentalism, championing women’s rights to dress as they choose.

The feminization of Marine Le Pen in the current campaign is a tactical shift, but an important one. The poster is part of a broader strategy to draw more female voters and soften the image of a party long treated as a pariah in France. The poster also showed her deliberate appropriation of feminism in the service of her party’s Islamophobic message.

Before now, Ms. Le Pen has mainly transcended the barriers that hobble many other Frenchwomen in politics, somehow managing to be both woman and genderless at the same time.