“Feminism Imposes a Culture of Death”: Moral Panics and Anti-Gender Knowledge in Spain

Feminist advances are increasingly under attack by racist, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBTQIA+ actors, commonly referred to as anti-gender forces. This article examines how these actors mobilise knowledge production as part of the “anti-gender project” in Spain. We address three questions: (1) What normalising mechanisms do anti-gender actors use to legitimise their ideology and delegitimise feminist values and politics? (2) What epistemic regimes emerge from these mechanisms? (3) How does the “anti-gender project” resonate across institutional and digital spheres? Drawing on textual and audiovisual data (2021-2024), collected within the CCINDLE project (GA_101061256), we map the discursive resonances of anti-gender discourses across institutional politics, civil society, and digital cultures. Expanding beyond the usual scope on institutional actors (politicians and political elites), we include far-right influencers, think tanks, journalists, and trans-exclusionary organisations operating in the digital sphere. This broader scope highlights the dialogic relationship between institutional politics and digital cultures, revealing how the mediatisation of ideology shapes the discursive construction of the "new normal" and enables anti-gender agendas to circulate across spheres, gain legitimacy, and reshape public discourse. We argue that anti-gender actors mobilise moral panics as their primary normalising mechanism, specifically: (1) anti-feminist moral panic, (2) negationist panic around gender-based violence, (3) nativist moral panic, and (4) (trans)gender moral panic. The discursive juxtaposition of these moral panics creates epistemic regimes that delegitimise feminist, anti-racist, and LGBTQIA+ knowledge, while simultaneously legitimising political violence against their advocates. In the Spanish case, this epistemic project is advanced across both institutional and digital arenas. In doing so, anti-gender forces erode democratic principles and reconfigure democracy itself through authoritarian, patriarchal, and nativist logics.