Gendered Mobilizations AGAINST Equality: Civil Society Wars on ‘Gender Ideology’ in Eastern Europe

In the recent years Poland experienced an unprecedented social mobilization against gender equality. The dispute took the form of virulent attacks travelling from the catholic establishment and right-wing civil society groups to the local and national levels of administration and parliament. The initial reaction of feminist academia and activists was that of shock and surprise combined with patient attempts at explaining the meaning of terms. This paper looks in detail at how the ‘war on gender’ originated in the religious movements and spilled over into mainstream politics. While the initial responses by feminist and LGBTQ+ circles tended to see the phenomenon as a feature of the singularly Polish post-transformation cultural wars, from the perspective of time it is vital to analyse the ‘war on gender’ in the broader context of right-wing and ultra-religious civil society mobilizations in Eastern Europe (Russia, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania), but also as part of larger European movements. Given that feminism as a movement and a way of thinking was discredited in Eastern Europe since post-communist transformation, what is the significance of the anti-gender discourse now? In whose interest is the new anti-gender mobilization happening and what are the effects of this discourse on social movements and politics understood more broadly? Polish feminist scholars have shown that feminism and pro-choice activists have lost discursive dominance when it comes to abortion and reproductive rights in the last two decades in Poland. From a regional comparative perspective, I argue that we may be witnessing a similar process when it comes to gender equality. I discuss how the new Polish government has been successfully mainstreaming anti-gender rhetoric, using it to denigrate and cut funding to any perceived ‘genderist’ programs and institutions.