Manipulating Science: Narratives of the Anti-Gender Movement and Far-Right Populist Politics in Italy

In recent decades, Italy has witnessed the rise of far-right populist parties and the Anti-Gender Movement, both promoting sexual nationalism (Garbagnoli 2017), femonationalism, heteronormativity, xenophobia, and transphobia (Colella 2021), undermining reproductive rights and LGBTQAI+ protections. This paper investigates how these actors strategically manipulate scientific knowledge to advance anti-gender and pro-life agendas. Drawing on narrative analysis (Riessman 2008), it examines how science, biology, and medicine are selectively mobilized to legitimize their narratives: invoking biological essentialism and sex binarism to defend the heteronormative family, the sacral role of motherhood, and pro-life positions, while circulating pseudo-scientific claims when scientific consensus challenges their aims. Through two case studies, the paper analyses how scientific authority is reconfigured and redeployed within anti-gender narratives. The first case study analyzes Fratelli d’Italia’s proposed bill for the establishment of the “Day of Nascent Life” (2022), which frames declining birth rates as a demographic and scientific emergency to justify the supremacy of the heteronormative family and celebrate the sacrality of mothers and newborns. The second examines the public response of Pro Vita & Famiglia to the vandalization of their anti-abortion manifestos by Non Una di Meno’s feminist activists, where the association claims exclusive ownership of “real science” and invokes medical authority to legitimize anti-abortion stances and delegitimize feminist arguments as “anti-scientific”. Together, these cases illustrate the dual role of science in populist anti-gender settings: both as a legitimising force for their narratives and as a target of epistemic manipulations - an approach close to “science-related populism” (Made & Schäfer 2020). Situating these practices within broader processes of ideological reappropriation, the paper draws parallels with femonationalism (Farris, 2017) and feminist appropriation (Calderaro, 2025). It argues that anti-gender and far-right populist actors engage in a strategic reconfiguration of knowledge, blending scientific authority, pseudo-science, and moral panic to construct alternative epistemic regimes that reshape reproductive governance (Morgan 2019), justify exclusionary policies (Kuhar 2015) and legitimize democratic backsliding. Ultimately, the study highlights the importance of recognizing scientific uncertainty and complexity (Jasanoff 2007) to counter the instrumentalization of science in populist and anti-gender settings and move beyond scientific sexual binarism.