New publications on anti-gender politics and feminist response!
Check out our new publications from research within the CCINDLE Horizon-Europe about anti-gender politics and feminist response!
Sältenberg, Hansalbin, Silvia Díaz Fernández & Paloma Caravantes (2024) Two Gender–Equal Nations? Anti-Gender Re-Configurations of National Belonging in Sweden and Spain NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2024.2370309
Gender equality and the rights of LGBTQI* and people of colour are being contested across the globe due to the rise of anti-gender far-right politics and movements that threaten feminist socio-political gains. In a nostalgic defence for a traditional gender order, these exclusionary politics articulate nativist, gendered and racial ideas of the nation. This paper examines anti-gender discourses in relation to dominant discourses of gender equality in specific national contexts and nation-making. We develop the concept of nation-gender equality nexus to account for the different imaginaries of the nation in relation to gender equality that are (re)produced by anti-gender forces through a comparative study of Sweden and Spain. We argue that Swedish and Spanish anti-gender actors configure nationhood and belonging through the reinterpretation of dominant discourses on gender equality in their respective contexts, identifying two main axes that articulate this construction: religion-secularism and migration-race. As a result, anti-gender actors produce different nation-gender configurations that lead to specific boundaries of national belonging and exclusion across the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and citizenship.
Kantola, Johanna & Emanuela Lombardo (2024) Feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics in parliamentary contexts, International Feminist Journal of Politics, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2024.2366478
In the context of the prevalence of anti-gender politics in Europe, political institutions such as parliaments have become arenas of political struggles around gender and gender equality. While feminist scholarship has studied anti-gender politics, less attention has been paid to feminist responses to such opposition. The contribution of this article is to conceptualize feminist responses to anti-gender politics within political institutions, which we name feminist institutional responses. This conceptualization entails proposing a set of analytical categories for capturing forms of feminist institutional responses – namely, knowledge, coalition building, rule making, and everyday pragmatic engagement. We analyze 50 plenary debates on gender equality and two plenary debates on the State of the Union, as well as 135 interviews with members of the European Parliament and political staff during two terms that witnessed a rise in anti-gender politics, 2014–2019 and 2019–2024. The conceptualization of feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics in parliaments is important for identifying how institutional actors are countering the destructive potential of anti-gender politics and safeguarding parliaments as democratic sites for the advancement of gender equality policies.