Weaponizing Distrust, (Re)Claiming Resistances: Anti-Gender Struggles in the European East. Panel organized by the COST Action CA23149 Antigender-Politics

Abstract

Anti-gender mobilizations have over the last fifteen years spread widely and consolidated in many European democracies. The successes of these varied campaigns aiming to restrict or oppose gender and sexual rights (from LGBT+ to reproductive rights) owe a great deal to pseudo-democratic language (such as protecting democratic rights of the majority) and seemingly democratic means, such as petitions, referendums and marches or demonstrations. But, as the goals of these mobilizations are profoundly undemocratic, these mobilizations are contributing to illiberal trends in many of these societies. This is seen particularly well in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) where the anti-gender discourse was more easily spread not only on the fears of "gender" – a concept that became a bogeyman utilized by a wide array of religious-conservative, nationalistic and anti-immigrant groups for their own political purposes – but also on the preexisting climate of institutional distrust, characterizing these countries' flawed capitalist and democratic transitions. This context of wider distrust and societal, economic and political disfunction is exacerbated further by the transformation of the previously socialist bloc into the European semi-periphery, the so-called "European East". The European East is frequently a source of cheap labor and academic or highly educated migrants and it is an easy target of the conditionality regulations and the lectures of backwardness or lagging-behind, but it less rarely seen as an equal partner. This includes the area of gender and sexuality reform, regardless that some countries of the European East adopted more progressive post-World War Two policies than many of their European West counterparts. In this environment, the anti-gender actors in Central and Eastern Europe have found a fertile ground to mobilize political allies and the general public, building on the false dichotomies between Western and Eastern values, and exploiting the low levels of institutional trust – in the EU institutions, international and non-governmental organizations and their own governments and state institutions. Notably, many of these actors also use the old anti-authoritarian resistance tactics such as humor or ridicule, but this time to contribute to the normalization of denying rights to the marginalized and the oppressed, rather than to speak truth to the power or channel the frustration of those without a voice. In this panel, therefore, we spotlight such experiences from the European East to show how the anti-gender politics is used to erode democratic practices and legitimize new illiberal regimes in the context of institutional distrust and to examine how the strategies of resistance are appropriated by anti-gender actors. However, we are also attentive to how the anti-gender resistances are enacted regardless, and how these dynamics contribute to a wider struggle to define what it means to live in a democracy.

Title	Details
Anti-Gender Politics and Authoritarian Practices in Albania: Illiberalism through the Politics of Gender	View Paper Details
“Gay Is Bad, Gay Is Dumb”: Ridicule as a Discursive Strategy in Polish Conservative Media	View Paper Details
How Institutional Distrust Helps the Acceptance of Anti-Gender Messages	View Paper Details
Democratic Resistance in the Circle of Corporate Distrust, Gender Policies and Economic Inequality	View Paper Details