Special issue introduction: Contemporary international anti-feminism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Control, alt, delete: Patriarchal populist attacks on international women's rights
Global Constitutionalism, 2022
The rise of patriarchal populist leaders over the past decade has fortified a long-standing campaign by conservative governments and advocacy groups to undermine women's international human rights. Their efforts have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women's and girls' equality and health. Through our textual analysis of UN records, governmental and nongovernmental publications, media coverage of disputes over language, and background interviews with activists, we identify and delineate the significance of this 'norm spoiling' strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. We find that women's rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language: controlling what women's rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States' 'global gag rule'; altering the meaning of women's rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom; and deleting foundational words, such as 'gender' and 'sexual and reproductive health and rights', from international agreements. The role of language in today's patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders' speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women's rights.
cent conservative mobilisations across Europe alarm us, the progress that has been made in the field of gender equality has not only been rather stagnant and uneven, but also much shakier and easier to reverse than we had imagined. In countries such as Croatia, Germany, Italy, France, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia, the post-war consensus on human rights is currently being threatened as issues such as gender mainstreaming, sexual education, LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive rights have come under coordinated attacks carried out by the Church, religious and lay conservative NGOs, right wing politicians, and even grassroots mobilisations.
Resisting global anti-genderism with global feminist research
International Feminist Journal of Politics
Resisting global anti-genderism with global feminist research Right-wing misogyny is nothing new, but we are clearly witnessing a fresh and significant global rise of reactionary right-wing movements and governments. This upswing is notable for the specific, and often virulent, ways in which these entities rely on sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny in concert with other forms of bigotry based on citizenship status, ethnicity, religion, and sexual and gender identity. Any list of these might include: the incursions initiated by the US President Donald Trump; Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban; Poland's Law and Justice party (PiS); Brazil's President Jair Bolsanaro's explicit homophobia and antigenderism; the increasing transnational invocations of the "damage" done by "gender ideology" often accompanied by rancorous rallying calls to "antigenderism"; acerbic attacks on the rights of trans people; major push-backs on LGBT+ rights and visibility; the insidious work of self-defined "incels"; and the so very familiar claw-backs on reproductive rights. The violence of gendered, sexed, and raced assaults oftentimes seem to come "out of the blue"; whether an attack in the street, in the home, on a bus, or indeed to legislative rights and achievements made decades ago. And when such assaults gather speed and support on a global scale, holding on to the depth of knowledge and vital practices that so effectively expose and help stem the tide of largely white, hetero-patriarchal violence can begin to feel impossible. Yet copious local and national research is available which can trace the longer-term ideational and organizational underpinnings of what seems to surface "out of the blue," exposing such assaults as not to be quite so "out of the blue" at all. As Cynthia Enloe attests, [hetero-]patriarchy is not a new invention. 1 Unique and specific manifestations of right-wing anti-genderism are, often deliberately, designed to appeal to local and/or national publics. But they are combined with and secured by transnational discourses that have been consciously orchestrated and, in some cases, go back at least three decades. The Vatican and traditional religious leaders' coalition building during the 1990s UN Conferences, especially with respect to the deployment of the term "gender" in international documents, is evident in the speed with which the idea of "gender feminism" and "gender ideology" has spread across Latin America and Eastern Europe and beyond. And US-based organizations have very actively supported numerous gender-and sexuality-essentialist movements in other countries.
Ask a Feminist: Gender and the Rise of the Global Right
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
The rise of right-wing movements across the world has significant impact on gender and sexual identities. The appeal of right wing, authoritarian, and nationalist movements to "tradition" and "shared values" often resuscitates patriarchal social formations and ideologies oppressive of women and sexual minorities. Such movements also foment fear of and hostility toward racial, national, ethnic, or sexual "others." In presentations and conversations through the day, twelve speakers will bring the lenses of feminist theory and practice to bear on areas of the world including Colombia, El Salvador, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey, among others; repressive political rhetorics including neoliberalist rhetoric in India and anti-Muslim rhetoric in the United States; gendered violence; European anti-gender movements; and displaced and refugee subjects.
This paper explores current contestations of women’s rights and the implications thereof for international legislation. While contestation over women’s rights is a far from new phenomenon, over the past two decades opposition to gender equality has become better organized at the transnational level, mobilizing a dispersed set of state and non-state actors, and is becoming more successful in halting the progress of women’s rights. I argue that the position of oppositional actors vis-à-vis women rights activism appears to be strengthened by two recent political developments: democratic backsliding and the closure of civic space. Some preliminary findings show how these interrelated developments lead to an erosion of women’s rights at the national level. Governments use low key tactics to dismantle institutional and implementation arrangements and sideline women’s organisations. Next, I explore the implications of these developments for gender equality norms at the national and international level. The active strategy of counter norming adopted by conservative and religious state and non-state actors, designed to circumvent and also undermine Western norms, is increasingly successful. In addition to this, the threatened position of domestic actors monitoring compliance of international treaties, makes the chances of backsliding on international commitments much higher.
Global Contestations of Gender Rights
Global Contestations of Gender Rights, 2022
Across the globe, a growing number of social movements, such as demonstrations in support of equal civil status or reproductive freedom and against sexualized violence, show that women's and gender rights are highly contested. Against the backdrop of a long history of unequal rights implementation, the contributors to this volume deal with the questions of why and in which ways gender equality has become contested in various political contexts. Local case studies examine the relevant structural, institutional, and socio-cultural causes of the global challenges to equality. This book follows an interdisciplinary approach and unites scholars from law, linguistics, cultural studies, history, social sciences, and gender studies in diverse contexts.
Introduction: Gender and the Rise of the Global Right
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Introduction: Input by all Big feminist sigh. When we started thinking about this special issue, we knew it was important-as the warning signs of a global rightward turn were pretty obvious. But truth be told, it's worse than we thought. Everywhere you turn-even in locales thought safely social democratic if not socialist-some version of neo-populist, xenophobic, demagogic conservatism seems on the rise if not fully in place. And if you have any doubt about the
Unpacking “Gender Ideology” and the Global Right’s Antigender Countermovement
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2019
In July of 2016 during a closed session with Polish bishops, Pope Francis stated, “In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of these – I will call it clearly by its name – is [the ideology of] ‘gender.’” Several months later, in the Republic of Georgia, the Pope publicly condemned gender discourse as the “great enemy” in a “global war” of ideas. Around the globe, religious and other conservative actors are intensifying their attacks on feminist and LGBTQ+ scholarship and activism, casting advocates as “gender feminists” promoting a radical “gender ideology.” Language deployed by the Vatican, such as gender ideology, gender theory, and genderism, has been captured by right-wing enthusiasts to thwart emancipatory gender agendas worldwide. This article examines antigender campaigns as palpable transnational countermovements, and considers their use of gender ideology as salient counterstrategies to feminist and LGBTQ+ social movements. By situating antigenderism within countermovement theory, I show that recent antigender activity transcends generalized resistance and instead operates within distinct and coordinated countermovements to defeat feminist and LGBTQ+ policy. By conceptualizing antigenderism as a countermovement, I provide a useful framework for studying national and supranational antigenderism and for understanding the stakes in the tug-of-war among progressive social movements and countermovements for ontological and political control over the term “gender.”