Description
Protesters on the streets of São Paulo burn Judith Butler in effigy. The Hungarian government bans educational and media materials that ‘promote’ homosexuality or gender affirmation surgery. The Turkish government withdraws from the Istanbul Convention on violence against women. A British and two North American academics submit a series of fabricated papers to gender-related scholarly journals. These are all manifestations of transnational anti-gender politics. What do they have in common? How do they differ? And what can they tell us about global contestations today? In this paper, we adopt a specifically transnational feminist frame to examine a body of emerging research on anti-gender mobilisations across the world. We show that this body of work highlights the importance of interrogating transnational connections, such as networks of strategising, the development of epistemic frames, and material support, while also emphasising the need to examine these in relation to local histories and particularities. We discuss how a transnational perspective on anti-gender politics troubles the assumption that the epistemic bases of anti-gender politics are the exclusive reserve of far-right populism, of non-feminist activists, or of religious fundamentalism. We demonstrate that anti-gender mobilizations are shaped by and embedded in wider structures of coloniality and need to be understood in close relation to the ongoing realities of racial capitalism and intensified nationalisms across the globe. We thus argue against any attempt to construct Eurocentric teleological narratives about progress on the question of gender equality, as emerging research challenges us to ‘see,’ analytically speaking, the complicities of (white) mainstream feminism, academic knowledge production, and ostensibly liberal states with anti-gender epistemologies.
