Squeezing the demos: how anti-gender campaigns tap into exclusionary legacies to redefine democracy

Across Europe, but also beyond, we see so called anti-gender campaigns driven by a heterogenous set of right wing, conservative and religious actors promoting political projects that idealize the nation and the 'people’ as white, patriarchal, and heteronormative focus on the three N’s of nation, nature, and norms, centering the “traditional family” as the cornerstone of society. This ideal of the nation is accompanied by a vision of democracy that is majoritarian and anti-pluralist, contesting the rights of gendered, sexual and racialised minorities, denying or even (violently) excluding them as part of “the people” and “the demos”. This paper zooms in on the particular understanding of the demos by anti-gender mobilizations. While little of the work on anti-gender mobilizations puts the emphasis on a longer term perspective when analysing their origins and rise, we contend that it is important to take them into account to get a better understanding of the current political tensions anti-gender mobilizations are part of. More particularly we try to unpack how the understanding of the demos by anti-gender mobilizations taps into the exclusionary legacies of the foundations of contemporary Western democracies. Indeed, contemporary Western democracies, while formally presented as egalitarian, bear the traces of exclusionary mechanisms that can be traced back to the legacies of capitalism and neo-liberalism, colonialism, Christianity, and fascism. In this paper we analyse how each of these legacies contributes to current exclusionary mechanisms anti-gender mobilizations can tap into and build upon to construct and spread their understanding of the demos.