Resistance to anti-gender politics: The role of coalitions and the challenges of alliance building

Gender and sexuality became highly politicized, especially after the emergence of the first anti-gender campaigns in Europe in the mid-2000s. Mobilisations took place in several countries against sexual and reproductive rights, LGBTQI rights, children’s rights, gender, laws and policies against hate speech and discrimination. While the expanding literature on anti-gender campaigns has allowed us to gain significant insights about the larger political project of those involved, we know less about resistance to anti-gender politics. Although resistance to anti-gender politics seems to involve a multiplicity of actors, internally heterogeneous, at times organised in coalitions, the sparse literature on the topic focuses mostly on single-issue movements or campaigns, adopting a rather public policy approach. When accounting for the multiple actors involved, studies are based on the implicit idea that some social groups are “natural allies”, as for example, women, LGBTQI or racialized people, leaving unaddressed the tensions and challenges permeating coalition-making, as well as the processes that create and maintain boundaries between actors. To fill in these gaps, this paper analysing the ways in which the foregrounding of coalitions between actors contribute to strengthening and/or weakening of the resistance to anti-gender politics as well as the tensions and challenges that permeate coalition-making. Additionally, it will explore the ways in which different actors making resistance articulate the relationship between the various issues targeted by anti-gender politics. To do so, it adopts three-level comparison of the most dissimilar cases – France and Romania, grounded in political sociology, gender studies and decolonial theory. Drawing on ethnography, the empirical material consists of two strands: (1) new audio and textual data stemming from semi-structures interviews; (2) pre-existing textual and audio-visual data produced by activists, gender studies scholars, political officials or public institutions.