In recent election campaigns in Bavaria, there has been an increase in anti-gender rhetoric that mobilizes against equality and feminist demands. This paper explores the extent to which discursive patterns related to anti-gender from election campaigns in Bavaria are reflected in the context of Bavarian workplaces. It includes a novel approach to identifying and contextualizing discursive patterns of anti-gender in political and non-political contexts. In addition, it discusses how the same discourses are presented differently in political and non-political contexts.
Using critical discourse analysis and drawing on political communication theory, patterns of gender discourses in political election campaign speeches from the 2023 Bavarian state election campaign and the 2024 federal German election campaign are explored, contextualizing them specifically in the context of anti-feminism. These findings are compared to discourses which were identified in data on company-internal communication from several qualitative studies conducted with two southern German companies.
Preliminary findings suggest that anti-gender discourse in political campaigns is often accompanied by a populist approach, suggesting that “the elite” wants to make life more difficult for “ordinary people” through demands for equality and regulations. In internal corporate communications, this discourse is reflected in subtle appeals to tradition, meritocracy, and depolarization. This paper offers a novel understanding of how anti-gender discourses travel across sectors and reshapes the overall understanding of gender over time.
