Feminist resistance and the quiet machinery of backlash in Uruguay

Uruguay is often celebrated as a regional pioneer in gender equality, yet the passage of feminist reforms has not ended contestation over gender rights. This paper argues that anti-gender resistance has increasingly shifted from overt legislative opposition to less visible arenas of implementation, where rights are contested through underfunding, administrative discretion, legal redesign, and bureaucratic delay. Drawing on qualitative research conducted between 2024 and 2026, including interviews with activists, advocates, and policymakers, the paper examines three policy domains—abortion, trans rights, and gender-based violence—to identify recurring mechanisms of backlash and adaptation. Across these cases, resistance evolves through democratic procedures, secular discourses of parental rights and due process, and implementation-stage obstruction. In response, feminist actors have redirected their efforts toward monitoring implementation, contesting budgets, providing territorial accompaniment, and sustaining public mobilisation. The Uruguayan case demonstrates that the central battleground of contemporary gender politics lies not only in the enactment of rights but also in the everyday institutional processes through which those rights are either realised or hollowed out in practice.