Crisis as Method: Anti-Gender Politics and the Affective Governance of Neoliberalism in Turkey and Egypt

This paper argues that anti-gender politics in contemporary Turkey and post-Arab Spring Egypt are not merely reactive responses to economic and social crises, but are central to the very construction of crisis itself. Moving beyond interpretations of anti-gender mobilization as cultural backlash or crisis management, the paper conceptualizes it as a strategic mode of crisis construction within authoritarian neoliberal governance. Through a comparative analysis, it examines how the AKP regime in Turkey and the Sisi regime in Egypt discursively produce moral and cultural crises around gender and sexuality. These narratives transform structural contradictions such as rising inequality, welfare retrenchment, care deficits, and widespread precarity into threats allegedly posed by feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, “Western values”, and “foreign conspirators.” The paper draws on feminist political economy and the concept of disciplinary neoliberalism to explore how gender becomes a central arena where suffering is moralized, dissent is delegitimized, and new forms of social control are legitimized. It analyzes how religious idioms of duty, sacrifice, and divine order, together with nationalist discourses of cultural sovereignty and securitized narratives of internal and external threats, recast economic pain as moral necessity. Affect plays a key role in this process. Regimes mobilize emotional economies that convert public anxiety into moral panic and collective pride, shifting demands for justice and redistribution onto the terrain of gender. The paper compares not only institutional architectures (such as government ministries, religious authorities, pro-regime civil society organizations, and regulatory agencies) but also the broader discursive ecosystems through which anti-gender crisis narratives are produced and circulated. These include state-aligned media, legal and judicial mechanisms, and everyday moral economies. By examining how gender ideology becomes not just the object but the medium of governance, the paper shows how both regimes orchestrate affective and securitized infrastructures of consent. Anti-gender politics, it argues, serve not only to repress but also to mediate legitimacy, reorganize moral economies, and bind publics to neoliberal power in moments of systemic breakdown.