Feminist Governance and the Challenge of Anti-Rights Discourse

International Women's Year in 1975 and the following two decades represented continuing, although non-linear, progress in the evolution of international gender equality norms. These norms became integrated in standards for good governance and democratisation. For many the Beijing Conference and Platform for Action was a highpoint in international commitment to gender equality. However, opposition to the use of the term ‘gender’ came from the Vatican, saying the idea of gender as a social construct violated the natural complementarity of the sexes and the interests of the family. Opposition has also come from evangelical sources and from populist movements pursuing an anti-globalist agenda. The very success of feminist governance innovation at international and regional levels has helped fuel this 'anti-gender' pushback. While international and regional normative frameworks remain largely in place, there have been setbacks in building and sustaining momentum, for example over the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, or the decision not to proceed with a fifth World Conference on Women. This opposition relies on a series of discursive strategies, and a support base that is simultaneously broad and discordant. This paper maps the discursive strategies of anti-gender pushback and attempts to erode feminist governance. Analysing advocacy tools in use by anti-gender actors, we look at how they seek to undermine, replace or reframe established norms in the multilateral system through mobilising discursive competition. Gender equality is no longer a settled international norm but rather the subject of renewed contestation in the name of the family. The retreats are real and in 2024 UN Women found that almost one in four governments reported pushback against women’s rights. However, it will be argued here that a major effect of such pushback at the multilateral level is the diversion of energy from advancing gender equality agendas to defending them. While a business case has already been needed to defend such agendas from neoliberal policy regimes, now populist attacks mean that new discursive strategies are required that speak to national values and contemporary grievances.