Politics of Knowledge and Anti-Gender Movement

The anti-gender movement in Europe is not only a struggle over the legislative frames of intimate/sexual citizenship policies, but it is also a struggle over the production of knowledge. In fact knowledge has become an indispensable “toolkit of (…) populist rhetoric” (Wodak, 2015: 4) which both denounces gender studies as not scientific – radical feminists are accused to have abducted universities and schools – and reinforces the existing hierarchies within knowledge production where natural sciences and/or the use of quantitative methodology occupies a leading position. As the central image of the anti-gender movement is the “innocent child” – particularly in issues pertaining to sexual education in schools and same-sex adoptions – the struggles over validity of (sociological and psychological) studies are condensed around the question of wellbeing of children. Anti-gender discourse is presented as scientific, while its actors have already started to work on some kind of a parallel science or – particularly in Eastern Europe – give voice to (American) authors who are academically discredited in their local environments, but effectively promote their ideas outside their country of origin. This presentation will look into the (ab)use of knowledge as a populist toolkit in the anti-gender movement, focusing on examples from Slovenia and Croatia, where one of the first targets of the movement were academics, who pointed to the populist