Homologies of Anti-Gender Politics: Normalisation, Legitimacy and Affective Politics of Gender

Abstract

Anti-gender and anti-feminist movements have become well-established both locally and transnationally. While well-studied across contexts and disciplines, analyses often remain siloed - focusing either on law and policy, or on discourse and digital media, or on affective dynamics in everyday life. This panel addresses the need to connect these perspectives. By bringing together papers that each analyse a distinct site - from policy to digital culture, and families - the panel examines how reactionary gender politics become mainstreamed, legitimised and affectively powerful. Rather than framing anti-gender politics as backlash, the panel understands it as a durable political formation whose success lies in its diffusion across seemingly unrelated spheres. As Korolczuk et al. (2025) argue, anti-gender politics are not only a reaction to feminist and queer gains but also entangled with dominant neoliberal and racialised structures. Accordingly, Boyce Kay (2024) highlights how reactionary feminism offers fatalistic yet emotionally compelling narratives of gender, drawing on popular disillusionment with neoliberal feminism to generate its affective force. Roggeband et al. (2025) locate these developments within the structural exclusions of liberal democracy itself, arguing that capitalism, colonialism and heteropatriarchy continue to shape who is recognised as a legitimate political subject. Each paper in the panel focuses on one domain through which these dynamics unfold. One explores how anti-feminist ideologies are circulated through interview-style podcasts and self-help media, where reactionary gender norms are emotionalised and made personally relevant. Another analysis investigates how anti-gender discourses are lived and felt within middle-class heterosexual families, where norms around gender, care and morality are reproduced through everyday practices. The third contribution looks at legal and policy instruments and examines how they help institutionalise anti-gender agendas by framing certain identities and risks as governable. While each paper utilises a different empirical and conceptual approach, the panel as a whole foregrounds how anti-feminist and anti-gender politics gain power through their cross-domain resonance. By assembling research on digital culture, family life, policy and knowledge, the panel makes visible the homologies that allow reactionary gender politics to become ordinary - embedded in institutions, circulated through normative discourses and culture, and reinforced in the everyday. This integrative perspective addresses a gap in current scholarship, namely, the tendency to isolate analyses of different spheres. By bringing them into conversation, the panel provides a framework for not only understanding how anti-gender politics are sustained, but also how they are rendered legitimate and ordinary across contemporary social and political life.

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