Audience Democracy and Anti-Gender Trouble: Understanding Pushback Against Gender Equality Through the Political Theory of Nadia Urbinati

In Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (2019), Nadia Urbinati urges us to focus on what populism does, rather than attempting to define what it is—specifically, how it transforms democracy once in power. She argues that populism in power disfigures constitutional democracy and undermines intermediary representative bodies, converting democracy into a form of radical majoritarianism in which the leader claims to directly represent a selectively defined “people” (Urbinati 2019). This paradoxical notion of “direct representation” depends on opposition to institutional mechanisms of accountability, including the media, political parties, and universities (see also Fassin 2024). The populist ideal of direct representation is closely linked to Urbinati’s concept of audience democracy, a distorted form of direct democracy in which citizens’ political participation is reduced to spectatorship. According to Urbinati, in the context of the internet and social media, citizens increasingly function as an audience, monitoring, surveilling, and evaluating representatives through visibility and publicity rather than engaging in collective deliberation or direct decision-making. Over the past decade, feminist scholars have argued that the rise of ideologically motivated anti-gender movements has coincided with the strengthening of right-wing populist and authoritarian leaders (e.g., Dietze and Roth 2020; Graff and Korolczuk 2022; Kováts 2018). In this field of research, anti-gender politics is increasingly associated with illiberal, far-right, ethno-nationalist, and authoritarian regimes, movements, and parties (Grzebalska and Pető 2018; Mayer, Ajanovic, and Sauer 2014), and many studies portray anti-gender actors as inherently anti-democratic. In my presentation, I examine Urbinati’s theorization of democratic disfigurement and audience democracy in the context of anti-gender politics. I argue that, within this framework, anti-gender politics is not simply anti-democratic. Rather, anti-gender emerges as a performative, strategic tool of representation: by framing gender equality, sexual and reproductive health and rights, LGBTQI+ rights, and related policies as imposed by a corrupt elite, populist leaders claim to speak for the “real people” and a silenced majority, while simultaneously actively undermining expertise, institutions, and democratic deliberation.