The damages done by the “anti-gender movement”

As we were writing this editorial in early December 2023, the Russian Supreme Court banned what it calls “the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) movement” because of its supposedly extremist nature – all of this behind closed doors and without a defendant present. The curtailment of civil rights and the public sphere in Russia continues as its megalomanic and heteropatriarchal leader pursues his imperial fantasies and ambitions, arrogating himself positional superiority as much as the right to attack neighboring countries. The ban thus is another illustration of the entwined nature of anti-genderism, queerphobias, xenophobias, authoritarianism, and militarism.

The suggestion that notions of gender construction constitute a dangerous “ideology” started deep within the Vatican, a hypocritical guardian of reproductionist sexuality and the (often white supremacist) heteropatriarchal family that has allowed sexual abuse to run rampant in its own corridors. It has fueled an “anti-gender” and anti-LGBTQ+ backlash globally. What has been termed the “anti-gender movement” in Europe and Latin America has also empowered extremist and misogynist political leaders, who have given themselves permission to sexually assault women (Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro), refused to condemn intimate partner violence (IPV) (Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), abrogated reproductive rights, stoked resentment and fear against racialized minorities and migrants (Giorgia Meloni and the European right), and beaten the drums of war and vengeance (Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte).

Let us be clear: this “anti-gender movement” has already caused significant damage. It has questioned fundamental international norms of gender equality that had appeared settled and uncontroversial. It has cheered on violence in the name of securing the “traditional” family and the nation, such as when it helped to defeat the Colombian peace accords with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) or motivated the fight against narcotrafficking and crime in Mexico (Wilkinson 2021). It has helped to bring to power authoritarian leaders whose endorsements of sexism and racism are beyond the pale, and it has played a role in the impeachments of progressive presidents in Paraguay and Brazil (Szwako and Sívori 2021).

But feminist movements have not taken this assault lying down, and years of working to institutionalize gender equality principles are paying off. The fierce battles over the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention, IC) in the European Union and in various national parliaments provide an indication of the differential strengths of the opposing movements, documented in the pages of this journal (Berthet 2022; Gwiazda and Minkova, this issue). So too do the coalitions built across institutional spaces and progressive movements in Latin America and beyond (Zaremberg, Tabbush, and Friedman 2021). This issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics offers additional insight, highlighting not only battles within political institutions but also the urgent struggle over definitions and framings. The anti-gender movement has thrown down the gauntlet, but it has yet to understand what feminist ingenuity and solidarity can do.

In her article on anti-gender alliances and democratic backsliding in Turkey, Didem Unal shows us that the anti-gender movement is far from unified. Employing critical frame analysis, she finds discursive heterogeneity among anti-gender actors, separating hard-liners from soft-liners. The former embrace notions of male victimization and conspiracy thinking, whereas the latter show ambivalence regarding equal rights for women – though they share an opposition to homosexuality with the hard-liners. Unal explains how the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has increasingly moved from a soft-line to a hard-line attitude with regard to gender issues in parallel to its own increasing authoritarianism. Interestingly, the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM), the government-sponsored non-governmental organization (GONGO) created to generate alternative conceptualizations to gender equality based on complementarity, follows a soft-line approach that stops short of embracing gender essentialism. However, though the organization has been accused of serving as a Trojan horse for feminists, Unal warns us against seeing soft-liners as allies for a feminist counter-hegemonic politics.

The Turkish AKP government proudly celebrated signing the IC, only to withdraw from it later. Anna Gwiazda and Liana Minkova trace its differential fate beyond Turkey, in contexts of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. While Poland adopted the IC, Bulgaria did not. The authors show that a strong feminist advocacy coalition enabled ratification in Poland, whereas a strong anti-gender advocacy coalition prevented it in Bulgaria. The article highlights that these movements have established routes into “the state” that enable them to influence parliamentary votes as well as judgments of the constitutional court, as was the case in Bulgaria.

The complexity of these politics reminds us that it matters who staffs the state. While certainly not all women are feminists, bringing women into politics often opens doors for new conversations. Three articles in this issue address the inclusion of women in politics, on the one hand highlighting the increasing success of quota strategies, and on the other documenting the obstacles to political engagement that women continue to face. Jennifer M. Piscopo and Lorena Vázquez Correa trace the astonishing career of gender quotas in Mexico, where, they argue, “gender parity in everything” has been legislated and become the norm, encompassing the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government as well as subnational levels. They emphasize that quotas have not simply been introduced by legal fiat but require continuous reform in order to close emerging loopholes. Such reforms are being undertaken in countries throughout Latin America that have introduced quotas, ensuring a “steady route” towards gender parity.

The successes of this steady route stand in stark contrast to the massive barriers that women must surmount if they want to enter politics. Nick Mdika Tembo zeroes in on the issue of violence against women in politics in Malawi and on the way in which social media drives this violence. Drawing on Pumla Dineo Gqola’s notion of the “female fear factory,” he introduces us to smear campaigns against Malawian women politicians and shows how these campaigns amplified cultural stereotypes and drew on religious themes. But the Malawian women’s movement rose up in protest as the discursive violence turned into physical violations of these women, and it interrupted the operation of the female fear factory.

Feto bele – that is, “women can” – is also the message conveyed in the article on women’s leadership in Timor-Leste, by Sara Niner, Therese Nguyen Thi Phuong Tam, Emily Morrison, and Maria Evelina Iman. However, their research also documents problems. Though their interviewees associated women with honesty and intelligence, which they would like to see in politicians, they also voiced reservations about women’s abilities to lead. Stereotypes and prejudices, paired with structural barriers such as domestic burdens and lack of financial resources, emerge from the study as significant obstacles to women assuming leadership in Timor-Leste.

A final pair of articles moves the struggle over feminist agendas to the international level. Jooyoun Lee looks at the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement between Japan and South Korea through a gender lens. She argues that the negotiation and adoption of the Agreement constituted a performance of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities that sidelined the women concerned while enacting strategic goals and masculine solidarity between the two countries and the United States.

Finally, Elina Penttinen brings us back to the importance of interpretive power when she invites us to redefine IPV as torture. Drawing on rich materials gleaned from her activist research and her interviews with the participants of two online women’s support groups in Finland, she argues that IPV is not only enabled by patriarchal structures but should also be seen as a systematic strategy within abusive relationships. Her findings convincingly show how such violence exhibits all of the characteristics of torture; it is perpetrated purposively, reaches similar levels of severity, and generates comparably traumatic effects.

Penttinen’s article brings us back to Kimberly Hutchings’ provocation nearly 25 years ago, in which she pointed out that female genital cutting, unlike torture, is understood to be something that people should be able to endure (Hutchings 2000, 123). But what if female genital cutting or domestic violence, and not torture, had been the starting points for understanding bodily integrity in human rights law? Would these violations then seem less endurable? Would they be less tolerated? Penttinen’s argument gets us there; it disrupts what has been taken for granted, opens up new meanings and possibilities. It is the kind of work that is needed to imagine feminist futures. And it reminds us of the danger of ceding definitional authority to the anti-gender movement and of the need for our resistance to be more determined than ever.