On the limiting power of political institutions: feminist activism against anti-gender mobilizations in the Belgian House of Representatives

While anti-gender articulations found much of their original impetus mobilizing at the international political level and have been know for also mobilizing public opinion in the streets, they progressively found their way into state politics. Governments, ranging from the local to the national level, have launched decisions and policies that reproduce anti-gender rationale and target sexual and reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, sex and gender education, gender equality (policies), or discrimination (cf. Paternotte 2023). Anti-gender rhetoric is also increasingly propagated by MPs, mainly but not exclusively from populist and/or radical right parties. For long, scholars have studied how and under what conditions feminist actors manage to advance gender and sexual equality. Political institutions were thought to be important for such endeavours and the embedding of such equality in (in)formal institutions was seen as a step towards a more equal society. This contribution wants to flip this perspective, investigating instead the limits of institutional political fora in advancing gender and sexual equality. We will concentrate on the parliamentary setting and construct our argument relying on examples from a selection of interviews recently conducted in the Belgian federal Lower House, the Chamber of Representatives. While Belgium was a laggard when it comes to gender equality, it was a forerunner on LGBTQI+ rights, and overall the assumption reigned that such rights are acquired. Anti-gender mobilisations were long overlooked in Belgium and only recently gained more attention. However, strategies to undermine gender and LGBTQI+ equality and rights - which include abortion, self-determination of gender identity, anti-discrimination laws, the funding of institutions and civil society initiatives - are increasingly present in Belgian federal politics. To counter such anti-gender initiatives, MPs engage with defending and strengthening gender and LGBTQI equality and rights. Our aim is to conceptualize feminist actions, strategies, and collaborations (both within and outside of parliament) to strengthen gender and LGBTQI+ rights and policies, thereby focusing not so much on the enabling but on the constraining factors of the parliamentary institutional setting for feminist coalitions within an institutionalized political sphere.