Anti-feminist rhetoric and discourses of culture: The Turkish case

In recent decades, one of the primary targets of the authoritarian coalition in Turkey has been the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and the policies promoting gender equality. This coalition - comprising the long-ruling government and rising anti-feminist, anti-gender groups - has developed intersecting discourses that legitimize regressive politics. This article maps these discourses through quantitative (discourse network analysis, DNA) and qualitative (critical frame analysis) methods, showing how nationalism, anti-Westernism, and cultural uniqueness are mobilized to moralize gender debates and normalize authoritarianism. The DNA draws on approximately 17,500 articles from eight Turkish newspapers (2018–2022), focusing on 83 gender-related policy issues. It reveals how nationalist and culturalist phrases have become embedded in gender debates, and how actors deploy them to resist equality demands and justify democratic backsliding. We then examine two anti-gender campaigns: Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention and the repeal of gender equality policies in education. Critical frame analysis of selected campaign documents shows three affective frames: (1) the West as a civilizational threat to Turkish culture; (2) gender equality as a Trojan horse serving this threat; and (3) the call for strong leadership to defend the nation. We argue that these dynamics reflect an elective affinity between nationalist discourses of cultural uniqueness and masculinism, producing gender-regressive politics intertwined with authoritarianism. Anti-gender mobilizations derive moralizing power from religious and nationalist frames, while these broader discourses, in turn, depend on anti-gender politics for their reproduction.