Attacking “Gender” in the Field of Knowledge Production: a Path to De-democratization

One of the key areas where anti-gender politics unfolds is broadly defined space of knowledge production and dissemination, including education, academia, media and arts (Ergas et al 2022; Eslen-Ziya and Giorgi 2022; Korolczuk 2020; Paternotte 2019; Paternotte and Verloo 2021). In my presentation, I will discuss repressive and productive anti-gender interventions in the field of knowledge production and dissemination, showing how anti-gender politics undermines democratic values and practices. Anti-gender actors routinely claim that their mobilization is a struggle against “woke” censorship and “cancel culture” that are allegedly imposed on the academic community by the left. However, close examination of anti-gender initiatives and their effects proves otherwise. Anti-gender” movements explicitly frame gender studies and feminist scholarship as threats to national identity and traditional values, which leads to direct political interventions in higher education. These interventions result in restricting academic freedom and freedom of expression. Simultaneously, anti-gender movements destabilize democracy by the deliberate production of counter-science and pseudo-science taking the form of books, articles, think-tank reports, and moral-legal discourses that mimic academic knowledge while rejecting its empirical norms. Such materials, often financed by transnational conservative networks, are deployed to contest evidence-based research on gender, sexuality, and equality, as well as race, ethnicity or history. This epistemic strategy aims to generate confusion about what constitutes valid knowledge and provide pseudoscientific legitimization to openly discriminatory views. The semantic inversion of key terms concerning women’s and minority rights, facilitates the disorder of knowledge and the breakdown of trust in societies, deepening polarization and legitimizing violence. The presentation is based on the results of the Horizon Europe CCINDLE project (Co-creating inclusive intersectional democratic spaces across Europe).