Societal Democratization from Below: Feminist Movements and Anti-Gender Regimes in Italy

This paper examines how feminist movements in Italy respond to anti-gender politics across interconnected institutional domains. Building on gender regime theory (Verloo, 2018, 2022; Walby, 2020; 2009), the paper conceives society as composed of domains - violence, polity, civil society, economy, knowledge, and bodily politics - where feminist and anti-gender projects struggle over the organization of power and the boundaries of democracy (Smrdelj & Kuhar, 2025). Anti-gender actors attempt to reshape these domains through direct attacks, depoliticization, and procedural closure, advancing an authoritarian project that restricts participation and equality (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017; Lavizzari, 2025; Lombardo, 2024; Verloo & Paternotte, 2018). Drawing on theorisations of how anti-gender regimes undermine processes of societal democratization (Lombardo, 2024), this paper investigates how the feminist project (Walby, 2011) counteracts these dynamics and advances innovative democratic practices (Caravantes, & Lombardo, 2023; Kantola & Lombardo, 2024) across institutional domains. It focuses on feminist mobilizations around gender-based violence, education, labor market and sexual and reproductive rights - fields that cut across several domains and reveal the interaction between movements and institutions as well as the ways struggles within one domain influence and reshape others. We explore how feminist actors reframe public debates, build alliances, and maintain infrastructures of care and expertise to contest anti-gender hegemony. The analysis asks which domains and intersecting inequalities of gender, sexuality, class, and race are addressed in feminist responses, and how these responses contribute to societal democratization. The paper draws on discourse and critical frame analysis of feminist actors’ statements and parliamentary debates (on three policy issues); 30 semi-structured interviews with feminist activists and policy makers; and co-creation labs1 conducted within By linking gender regime theory with social movement studies, the paper argues that feminist activism in Italy performs a democratizing function that is both defensive and innovative: it resists the anti-gender project while pushing for alternative forms of participation, knowledge production, and relational politics. The study contributes to understanding how feminist movements act as agents of democratic renewal under conditions of authoritarian and anti-gender backlash.