Gender and Research announces a call for abstracts for the thematic issue: Who is Afraid of Gender Ideology? Micro-level Perspective on Anti-gender Activism and Politics and Their Demand Side.
The special issue tackles the global wave of mobilisations against gender equality and/or sexual citizenship and scholarship dealing with sexual and gender diversity. Such mobilisation is known as the anti-gender movement or anti-gender campaigns (for a comprehensive overview, see Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017) and it emerged in different parts of the world in a strikingly similar form: the actors involved in the movement promote patriarchal, often nationalist, ideology and use similar strategies, rhetoric, and in cases of civic organisations even graphic design in their logos. They seem to oppose the same enemy as they all claim to fight against so-called "gender ideology." Their struggle might have (and, in some countries, already does) fatal consequences for women and LGBTQIA+ people as they often strive to ban abortions, promote traditional gender roles and their inherent inequality and, in some extreme cases, call for a cure to homosexuality.
In some instances, anti-gender discourse and the opposition to the so-called “gender ideology” is a less sophisticated criticism of neoliberal capitalism and globalisation (Graff and Korolczuk, 2022; Kováts, 2017). As Graff and Korolczuk (2022) pointed out, it is structurally a populist discourse: it constructs global elites as both cultural colonizers and economic exploiters. Intersectional feminism and gender studies, on the other hand, are portrayed as a cover-up for rampant individualism and economic exploitation. In other cases, the anti-gender discourse is used by religious actors to strengthen the positions of religious institutions and Christian epistemology in society (Lavizzari & Prearo, 2018; Geva, 2019). Finally, other political actors use the discourse to promote neoliberal political ideology while appealing to culturally conservative people (Harvey, 2019).
Even though we have a thorough knowledge of the discursive strategies and the differences among the actors involved in the movement, we still know very little about which strata of relevant populations such discursive strategies resonate with, and/or what the reasonings and life trajectories of the people who joined the movement are. Thus, the aim of this special issue is to examine the reasoning behind the adoption of the discourse as a valid description of the real world. The special issue will shed light on the similarities and differences among the societal groups who actively adopt the anti-gender discourse globally. We invite contributions investigating anti-gender activism from the micro-level perspective or articles dealing with the demand side of the anti-gender discourse. We particularly welcome articles based on ethnographic research, qualitative interviews, socio-cultural analysis or similar. We welcome contributions from all geographies, however, we particularly welcome contributions from the countries that are often overlooked in the Western scholarship, for instance Latin America, the Gulf states, and others.
We aim to publish the issue in the first half of 2024. The deadline for abstracts is March 30, 2023, and the deadline for the full papers end of September 2023.
Please send your abstracts to: eva.svatonova@ff.cuni.cz and genderteam@soc.cas.cz.
About the editors:
Eva Svatoňová: a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at Copenhagen University and a research fellow at the Department of Political Science at Charles University in Prague. She specializes in political sociology and her research intersects areas of political discourses, far-right politics, anti-feminism, culture wars, social movement studies, and gender. She focuses particularly on Central and Eastern Europe and uses ethnograhic methods and sociocultural approaches to research how political discourses appeal to their target audiences.
Mina Baginová: a researcher (Charles University in Prague) at FATIGUE (Horizon 2020) project under the umbrella of University College London, and in partnership with Charles University in Prague. Within this project, she has been working on a phenomenon of a rise and forms of populism and illiberalism in East Central Europe. More specifically, her work focuses on social movements, transnational networks, and contemporary feminist and queer mobilizations that have emerged as a reaction to ‘anti-gender’ political alliances in East Central Europe and globally. With the background in social anthropology and social movements studies, she uses on-site multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography to analyze the strategies, practices, and inner dynamics of feminist movements in systematic change building after the 1989 neoliberal political transitions in the region. Her previous work includes research on migration and social justice movements in Greece and Turkey; and youth and feminist mobilizations after the post-dictatorship / post-conflict transitions in Latin America in Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.
