Unnatural Feelings The affective life of 'anti-gender' mobilisations

Unnatural Feelings The affective life of 'anti-gender' mobilisations

We had already clocked him pacing at the back. A latecomer, ill fitting in the book-lined library: white man in his forties, baggy clothes, shaved hair and prominent facial scar jarring with the one hundred twenty groomed young people in the room, all facing forward, rapt by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw's invocations to think and act intersectionally. He moves to lean on a pillar. My hackles rise, prickling down my spine. I tell myself that I have been working in an elite institution for too long and need to check my judgment; those hackles go down a bit. I am about to go and ask him if he would like to sit down and join us, when he starts to speak over Kimberlé. Both she and I know he is not going to stop; it's hardly our first encounter with attempted silencing. The man speaks louder and so does Kimberlé. His diatribe in Italian shows he isn't interested in dialogue; her American tones echo behind me. I walk straight up the aisle to about a foot away from him and raise my hands. Please stop talking over our guest; please sit down. Then, when he doesn't stop: please leave. He backs me up the way I have just come, and I keep the same distance - the two speakers now in discordant unison. Please stop talking over our guest, please leave this workshop, please be respectful, please leave. I manoeuvre him back up the aisle and he is shouting invective now, dirty ugly feminist, shut up ugly bitch. I don't really need the translation from Italian provided by students later. He is by the door he came in now, and as I back him up through the door, he grabs and twists my arm in a last ditch effort, then turns and shouts his way out, to be met by the security guards the PhD student stewards have already called. They wrestle him out of the building, and we can hear his echoes for minutes after we can no longer see him.

I am shaking. Kimberlé is shaking, students are shaking, some crying. Kimberlé breathes in her experience of decades and breathes out the last ninety minutes of an extraordinary workshop. She opens herself to the students' shock and anger and knits their experience back together with the intersectional theory they have read and thought they would simply be asked to say something clever about. One student tells us about her fear: that she would lose the hearing in her other ear, having lost it in one after being beaten by Hindu nationalists. Another whispers that she was looking for a table to hide under, as she had when that man came into the classroom and started shooting. We talk about our own privilege and this man's likely mental health issues, as well as the ways in which anti-feminism has always exploited subjective as well as collective vulnerabilities. We make the transnational connections across forms of anti-feminist, racist, homophobic and transphobic violence, and feel enraged at the possibility of our silence. We express feeling shame too, that we could not effectively interrupt this man without passing him over to security. What were we waiting for? An institutional response, perhaps, despite our collective schooling in the misogyny, classism and racism of institutions.

This article addresses the attacks on feminism and Gender Studies by an increasingly virulent anti-'gender ideology' movement, and asks after the best ways of grappling with the violence of these mobilisations at political, epistemic and collective levels. As is well documented, attacks on the concept of 'gender' and on feminist, anti-homophobic and intersectional social movements are a central part of how a right-wing populist agenda generates its appeal and furthers its aims. 'Gender Ideology', or the concept of 'gender' itself, has been consistently set up as eroding family values, challenging the natural status of heterosexual gender roles, and promoting perversion. Sonia Corrêa, David Patternote and Roman Kuhar describe these right-wing movements as operating at a transnational level, but focusing on a national or local scale, bringing together homophobic campaigns in France, Germany and Brazil, the defence of sovereignty in Poland, Serbia and Hungary, and religious reintrenchments in Costa Rica, Chile and Uganda. While the demonisation of feminism by the Right is hardly new, I agree with Kuhar and Patternote's suggestion that there is an increased fervour within these national as well as transnational movements that targets 'gender ideology' as a particular threat to national and local security, providing the perfect confluence of misogyny, homophobia and racism.

There have been consistent attacks on Gender Studies as a field in recent years, with the closure of the degree at Central European University in Budapest, the attempted bombing at the National Secretariat for Gender Research at the University of Göteborg, and most recently the June twenty twenty legislative move to ban 'gender identity studies in schools and universities' in Romania. It is not that such campaigns have a central architecture (or architects), but more that their reliance on anti-'gender ideology' is precisely what allows for a transnational response to bring together otherwise disparate interests. As Andrea Pető notes in her protest at the closure of Gender Studies at CEU, 'the concept of "gender" is used to mobilize very different political forces to construct one, united enemy to hate'. Attempts to control the curriculum also characterised the mobilisation of divergent political strands in the Manif Pour Tous movement in France, which claimed that recognition of gay marriage would undermine complementary roles as the natural basis of marriage, and that the teaching of 'gender' to children was a politically motivated absurdity. Efforts to stop teaching 'genderism' in Germany similarly drew on what Eva von Redecker describes as 'the resentful mobilization against pluralism and "political correctness", which are perceived as instituted by "gender ideologues". The aggression that characterises this hostility is not only directed at legislative or institutional contexts; the derision towards 'gender' as a category is also directed towards its proponents. In Germany, for example, complaints seeking to remove Gender Studies teachers from the university were and remain vitriolic. In Hungary, Pető was subject to extensive harassment. In Brazil, feminists on university campuses endure consistent personal abuse, accused not only of violating nature, but exhibiting national betrayal in their adopting of 'foreign' terms of reference. In November twenty seventeen, while she was visiting Rio, right-wing activists burned Judith Butler in effigy, marking 'gender', '(homo)sexuality' and 'Americanness' as equally vile (and subject to violence).

Anti-'gender ideology' proponents frame their own project as a moderate, commonsense one that protects natural sex roles and the relationship between family and nation. It is always others who are the aggressors: feminists who want to pervert the course of natural childhood and adult roles; queers who relish the destruction of the family and have no allegiances or ties; and 'outsiders' who cannot be trusted and are the agents rather than objects of inequality. It is the 'gender ideologues' and the perverse foreigners who are the hysterics, the ones who always go too far, the ones who have no core values. These framings are important as a way of deflecting or projecting aggression onto the targets of violence, of course, and are essential to both inflame anti-'gender' feeling as legitimate, and its affective aggression as belonging to someone else. This article explores the spatio-temporal tricks that present gender equality as needing to be tempered by that common sense in the face of the destructiveness of both feminism gone too far, and reactionary cultural patriarchalism of the interloper. The focus throughout is on the affective life of anti-'gender ideology' claims, precisely as a way of trying to short-circuit that displacement effort. I explore its logic of the privileging of 'sex' as natural and complementary as precisely the locus of aggression, and make a claim for the importance of rooting feminist, queer and transnational approaches in anti-white supremacist affect. Overall, I am interested in exploring feminist methods for undoing the misogynist, homophobic and racist fantasies of annihilation - their own and ours - as an urgent task for our troubled present.

Spatio-temporal logics

'Gender ideology' is described by feminist commentators as a convenient 'empty signifier' that constitutes a useful trope to unite resistance to a range of rights and equality claims, an insistence on closed borders, and a feeling of dissatisfaction as the global order shifts on its austere axis. Yet that emptiness should not mislead us into thinking that these attacks are only casually linked, or that the presence of anti-feminism at their heart is in any way accidental. Writing of anti-'gender ideology' in Brazil, Joseph Souza highlights ways in which 'sexism provides a framework to connect right-wing ideologies of corruption, subversion and family values' that form a 'cognitive and affective glue' between accusations against feminism that would otherwise not make sense.

For a range of commentators, the anti-feminism that campaigns against the invented phenomenon of a global 'gender ideology' is a backlash against equality gains and a political mechanism to safeguard privilege or lament its perceived loss. It trades in what the editors of the Signs special issue on 'Gender and the Rise of the Right' describe as a 'hostility to feminism' that masks and contributes to the 'very real inequalities and fears produced by neoliberalism and globalization'. Yet this anti-feminism is not entirely straightforward. In both its religious and political versions, anti-'gender ideology' activists cast themselves as on the side of women's equality, and only antagonistic to a feminism that takes things too far, is too aggressively anti-family or imposes itself on specific (often global south) contexts. In making 'gender ideology' into the enemy of ordinary men and women, who want reasonable access to opportunity, relationships free from violence, or other improved conditions within conventional family frameworks, anti-'gender ideology' proponents claim the very ground feminism has called its own. Once it has been established that 'gender ideology' is what unites a range of challenges to the heteronormative modern family, claims for same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, sex education, trans* recognition or equal pay, being against it can be cast as a defence rather than an attack. In challenging the excesses of 'gender ideology' (the term itself casts 'gender' as a form of political, propagandistic posturing), then, anti-feminists can be reassured that they are resisting affronts to natural sex roles, rather than refusing women's equality per se.

Anti-gender discourse hinges on a utopian fantasy of a bankrupt present and future, one that can only be remedied by a return to the integrity of naturalised and complementary sexual difference as the conventional bedrock of the local and the national, but with a twist. If women's subordination can be framed as something that has already been addressed, then a return to sex difference within a heteronormative, nationalist imaginary can be framed as opening up a future that occupies a sane middle ground. As Kapya Kaoma notes, the very 'future of the human family' relies on this complementarity. A return to sex complementarity is thus cast as the foundation of a local, regional or national future at direct odds with the bankruptcy of current global hegemony. Those who continue to insist on excessive denaturing can be positioned as part of an apocalyptic drive to a non-reproductive, barren future, and can be belittled and discarded. Feminism joins anti-racism and anti-disablism in the bin marked 'political correctness', and thus can be dismissed as absurd even as it is framed as a serious threat.

There is a spatial dimension to this claiming of the modern ground of equality by anti-'gender-ideology' advocates which is overlaid on its temporality, and that contributes to the ability to align the ills of feminists, queer subjects and migrants. Anti-'gender ideology' positions 'gender' as a kind of import-export commodity and its misguided adherents as its cosmopolitan brokers. Key to the contrast made between the safety of heterosexual family and a corrupting 'gender ideology', is where these come from and settle, as well as when they can be said to be appropriate. Anti-'gender ideology' arguments consistently construct 'gender' itself as an import, a foreign interloper that challenges the time and place of family and nation. In France, 'gender' is at once the 'enemy within' that tears at the very fabric of the sexual-democratic contract, and an exterior threat to 'national security' in the form of transnational politics and language. Thus, as Eric Fassin argues, 'gender' is problematic both for its challenge to the sovereignty of heterosexual sex difference, and because it is perceived as coming from America rather than being 'home grown'. It is foreign in the sense of both origin and its untranslatability. That 'foreignness' does not have to come from a specific national context, however. It can also be positioned precisely as that 'empty signifier' of the unreasonable demands of a transnational elite, and the institutions that protect their interests. Thus in Eastern Europe, 'gender' is constructed as an imposed transnational EU or neoliberal threat to national sovereignty, a threat that true Poles, Hungarians or Romanians can resist being subject to. In this respect anti-'gender ideology' arguments suture naturalised (hetero)sexual difference to nation both as a return to the sanity of pre-'political correctness' and as a way of resisting global forces in a post-industrial, post-welfare, securitised world.

To go back to the French context for a moment, if 'gender' and homosexuality are imports that threaten family and nation, then care must be taken to ensure that 'other' threat to Frenchness - Muslim religion or identity - is also kept on the outside. This is where the sane temporality of equality is so important, and why anti-'gender ideology' proponents need to claim a moderate ground. While 'gender ideology' goes too far on the one hand, the patriarchal control of Islam threatens to pull us back into an excessive past. Here of course, 'Frenchness' is always already neither Muslim, nor queer (and certainly not both). The externalisation of 'gender' in this European context, then, ensures that heterosexual difference is always 'secular' and white, as well as quintessentially moderate within what Fassin terms 'sexual nationalism'. For Kováts too, it is precisely the focus on authentic womanhood that ties anti-gender to anti-immigrant narratives of the national modern. This modern woman is neither alienated from her true sex, nor patriarchally subordinated to perverse Muslim maleness, and thus she is free to take up her natural role as her (white, heterosexual, male) partner's democratic complement. Importantly, then, what we see consistently in right-wing anti-'gender ideology' arguments is an interweaving of naturalised gender with naturalised racial and religious difference. That right wing populist appeal to a newly 'modern woman' is not confined to the West, of course, as the Hindu framing of Muslims as pre-modern, excessive, and closely aligned with homosexuality also suggests.

The claim that 'gender' is a foreign import or the preserve of a transnational elite class is a tactic that follows the time-honoured trick of blaming individuals or groups already viewed with suspicion or hostility for home grown ills and the economic and social difficulties that attend globalisation. And so it is perhaps not so surprising that it is the queer, the feminist, and the migrant that become over-associated with transnational elites and protection in anti 'gender ideology' discourse, while maleness, whiteness and heterosexuality are increasingly figured as bound to the local or the deflated national. So it is that white men emerge as under threat from progressive elites rather than imbued with power in their own right; they are the besieged, rather that the routine agents of misogynist, homophobic or racist violence.

A final externalising tactic that overlays space and time in anti-'gender ideology' discourse is the positioning of 'gender' as a colonial term, and its use as a continuation of lamentable imperialism. Citing Kováts, Corredor affirms that the 'language equating gender ideology with colonization, imperialism, and unwarranted cultural imposition has been another prevalent strategy for the Global Right'. Kaoma writes that 'anti-gender arguments circulate in sub-Saharan Africa within a frame that portrays 'gender' and homosexuality as neo-colonial imports', and as the contemporary imposition of transnational elites. And in a rather different frame, 'gender ideology' is cast as 'Western European' in Poland or Turkey and thus corrupt or a-religious. On this broader scale, then, sexual and gendered challenges to heterosexual family are positioned as a malign import expressly designed to prevent 'the nation' from reproducing itself, whether that nation is a Western one that struggles to retain its history, or a postcolonial one that struggles to assert its freedom.

As Corrêa points out, the harnessing of a decolonial discourse by anti-'gender-ideology' commentators who remain otherwise resolutely uninterested in anti-racist or decolonial politics is cynical at best. We might also want to point to the particular irony of critiquing feminists for their imposition of 'gender ideology' by those who seek to re-entrench those naturalised categories of sex and gender that are the hallmark of a colonial endeavour. It is precisely those naturalised forms that are presented as the future, in other words, that have a violent and colonial past linked to colonial administrations and the suturing of sexed and gendered difference to whiteness. That future can only be rhetorically assured through displacement of its history onto contemporary feminist and queer subjects rather than the white heterosexual men and women who continue to benefit from its legacy. Disingenuous though it may be, this discursive framing of 'gender equality movements as powerful and foreign colonizers' does important political work. As Elzbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff highlight, it enables anti-'gender ideology' advocates to position themselves as 'protectors of the world's colonized peoples, the disenfranchised and the economically disadvantaged. That mirroring of a colonial past with a global present thus allows for anti-'gender ideology' activists to link their nationalism and populism with decolonial resistance movements and anti-austerity activism rather than imperial projects in a profoundly ironic trick of the light.

It is more straightforward to counter the argument that authentic national identity is rooted in heterosexual sex difference, than the one that positions 'gender' and 'homosexuality' as colonial impositions, however. That colonial history is very real and present. The violence of 'gender' as a binary colonial imposition that regulates sexed and sexual behaviour in moral and religious frames, and that marks 'womanhood' as white and either Christian or (later) secular, is a legacy that feminists need to continue to pay close attention to. Indeed, the violence of Western concepts of 'gender' continues to delimit identity and perpetuate the epistemic violence of exclusion and inclusion. It is a sober truth that this accusation (that 'gender' is colonial) is all the more available to the Right precisely because of that history, and indeed precisely because of the continued claims by some strands of feminism that women's freedom and equality are most compromised outside of 'the West', or by queer scholars that gay and lesbian rights in their familiar Western form are a sign of 'the modern' that others must play catch-up to emulate.

It is feminist, queer and post- or decolonial thinkers who have pointed out how the flames of the fantasies of a specifically Western gendered and sexual 'modern' as guiding global progress narratives are fanned by national elites committed to maintaining established power relations. I am thinking here of the important work by Rahul Rao on the citation of colonial imposition of gender binaries as both an important part of the history and present of power relations, and as a way in which contemporary investments in national gender and sexual inequalities are managed. Rao's work is exemplary, precisely because it weaves a complex picture of those in power always working with the resources that they have at their disposal. In her intervention on anti-'gender ideology' and the Gulf region, Nour Almazidi writes in a similar vein of the ways in which national sovereignty is consistently imagined at the expense of sexual and gendered minorities within those contexts. For Almazidi, to back away from supporting gendered and sexual rights in those contexts because of the anxiety of reimposing colonial or Western frames is to cede the terrain. For these theorists, as for Uma Narayan writing about India over twenty years ago, the externalisation of gendered and sexual equality as a perverse imperial effect is one of the key ways in which progressive politics are foreclosed. We need then to wrestle gendered and sexual complexity back from right-wing anti-'gender ideology' advocates, insisting on the duplicity at the heart of their co-optation on the one hand, yet paying close attention to the multiple ways in which 'gender' travels with its historical and contemporary baggage of epistemological and deadly violence on the other.