Theorizing LGBTIQ+ Politics, Knowledge and Anti-Gender Contestations

Abstract

This panel brings together theoretical contributions that interrogate how LGBTIQ+ politics, knowledge production, and anti-gender contestations intersect in contemporary democracies. The papers uncover the conceptual architectures through which anti-LGBTIQ+ narratives gain traction, focusing on the epistemic, political, and institutional mechanisms that sustain backlash dynamics. Contributions examine the persistence of queer conspiracy theories as a recurring political motif, tracing how transnational anxieties, nationalism, and anti-cosmopolitanism reproduce exclusionary imaginaries across historical contexts. They also theorize the multilayered contestations shaping transgender healthcare, highlighting tensions between pathologization, depathologization, diagnostic regimes, and shifting societal attitudes, and proposing an integrated framework that links micro-, meso- and macro-level dynamics. Further work analyses how conservative Christian Democratic actors mainstream anti-trans discourse in Germany, showing how centrist legitimacy frames, procedural registers, and appeals to democratic values are strategically mobilised to normalise rollback politics. Finally, the panel explores how anti-gender mobilisations contest epistemic authority by appropriating scientific legitimacy and deploying pseudo-scientific claims to discredit gender studies and reshape public understandings of expertise and evidence.

Title	Details
The 'Anti-Democratic Moderate Femocrat': Conservative Christian Democratic Female Politicians and the Mainstreaming of Anti-Trans Discourse in Germany	View Paper Details
Identity as Resistance: Cultural Strategies of Sovereignty in the Baltics	View Paper Details
In the name of science: Anti-gender mobilizations and the contest for epistemic power	View Paper Details
Queer Conspiracy Theories as Political Motif: A Theoretical Framework	View Paper Details
Theorizing contestations and challenges regarding transgender healthcare	View Paper Details