Authoritarian regimes, while relying on repression, also face the ongoing challenge of generating legitimacy as a key survival strategy. When performance-based legitimacy erodes due to contested hegemonies, economic crises, or shifting global dynamics, such regimes increasingly turn to symbolic power and cultural narratives. Among these symbolic domains, gender plays a central role in mobilizing support and drawing in-group/out-group boundaries. This dynamic is particularly visible in the Turkish context, where the deepening of authoritarian rule has been accompanied by the growing use of gender as a symbolic register for shaping national identity and positioning Turkey within a moralized geopolitical hierarchy, contrasting it with a “decadent” West and global “gender ideology”. This article examines anti-gender politics in Turkey as a key site of authoritarian governance, where legitimation, symbolic meaning-making, and geopolitical identity intersect through civilizational binaries and moral discourse. It explores how gendered civilizational tropes draw symbolic boundaries, project transnational influence, and reinforce a conservative gender order domestically. It argues that presenting Turkey as the guardian of family and tradition against Western democracies is central to the ruling regime’s populist-authoritarian project, yet remains contested. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of discourse data, the analysis demonstrates that such contestation unfolds along three interrelated axes: (1) the gap between populist state rhetoric and public attitudes toward gender equality and LGBTI+ rights; (2) ideological fractures and competing claims among Islamist and conservative actors following Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention; and (3) the persistence of feminist and LGBTI+ counter-publics that reclaim moral and political agency through locally grounded struggles. Together, these tensions reveal that Turkey’s anti-gender regime, while authoritarian in structure and transnationally embedded, is internally fragmented and contingent upon continuous symbolic, institutional, and affective work. The article concludes that rather than a coherent hegemonic project, the Turkish case constitutes an ongoing process of legitimation, crisis management, and meaning-making, highlighting the fragility of anti-gender authoritarianism.
