Feminist projects have been contested and opposed across time and space by different actors for varying reasons. Social movement theorists use the concept of ‘countermovement’, in an instrumental understanding, as movements that make contrary claims to an original movement. The issue is primarily sequencing (temporal order of movement emergence) and the nature of the claims (framed in reference to the first or not).
This movement-countermovement dynamics may be a useful, albeit limited, approach to unravel the oppositional dynamics to the gender+ equality project. Limited, because opposition to feminist projects does not always take the form of organized, collective action, nor can opposition easily be identified or located in a collective actor. Useful, as it may provide us with insights about conditions under which opposition is likely to occur, how opposition is organized and what makes opposition/oppositional actors successful.
