Martha, in Sweden there is an ongoing debate about officially implementing a gender-neutral pronoun (“hen”, a cross between the Swedish words for him/his and her/hers). A lot of people oppose it strongly (I dont). I view this debate as not purely linguistic, but as a lingual expression of a deeper socio-psychological-political concept of how we think about gender. Anyway, you just may find it interesting.

thank you Sarah, it is very interesting case.

And for those wanting to learn more about Polish madness about gender issue I recommend an article from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/opinion/sierakowski-the-polish-churchs-gender-problem.html?_r=1

In Austria it is mainly the political right-wing (most prominently the FPÖ, Freedom Party) that is against what it thinks of as "gender-madness". I have not done systematic research on the issue so this is just an impression: as I see it their main concerns at the moment are issues of family and education (e.g. with regard to a gender-sensitive kindergarten).

In Poland a program of so-called "equality kindergarten" also makes a great controversy among right-wing politicians, journalists and, of course, in the Church. The ideas that are at the heart of the program are quite misinterpreted by opponents.

In the U.S., backlash against gains made by women is very strong, and one of the main programs of the right wing (which is very powerful, and controls many states) is to roll back the gains that women have made towards equality. The rhetoric is framed mostly in terms of victimization: men are being victimized by women, who, in the guise of seeking equality, are really intent on stripping rights from men and reducing them to pathetic, feminized slaves. This victimization rhetoric isn't unique to the right's gender arguments -- they've generally framed the loss of privilege as a loss of "rights" in both gender and racial discourse. Thus, terms like "feminazi" and "political correctness" are used frequently by the right, as if they are being oppressed by the very people who they continue to oppress. Similarly, the rollback of women's reproductive rights is framed as a question of the "rights" of the fetus, which is immediately promoted to a higher position of privilege than the woman who conceives it. In this way, the language of "rights" is twisted to serve the forces of inequality.

Thank you Kali. As I see it - the situation in the U.S. is almost the same as in Poland.

My pleasure, Marta. I am pretty sure that the upper echelons of many right wing parties are in touch with each other across national borders, and share strategies, and sometimes funds. The right has always been more effective than the left at this kind of coordinated propaganda/power push. I think in Europe & N America, contemporary antifeminism (and racism) is often tied up tightly with neoliberal, pro-capitalist policies, which have certainly been pushed enthusiastically on Poland by the EU and by the U.S. Along with undermining the power of labor movements, global capital must also undermine liberation and equality/rights movements, and undercut socialist sentiment. Demonizing "undeserving" segments of the population is an effective way of accomplishing this, dividing the population, and of creating a class of more privileged society members (male and/or the ethnically/racially "acceptable") who are convinced that they are being victimized by those less privileged. The irony is that, at the same time as it feeds the sense of superiority of this more privileged class, global capital treats Eastern European states as colonies of the U.S. and N America, grabbing resources and setting up businesses there for as long as it can manage to exploit low-wage labor, and sweetheart tax deals. But it will ultimately move on (as it did in the Southern Mediterranean and Ireland), leaving those nations impoverished and debt-ridden in its wake. Anti-feminism and racism are just part of this tool chest. Of course, sexism and racism exist outside of global capitalism as well, but it's the flexibility and inventiveness of capitalism that makes them such dangerous tools in capitalist hands.

Kali Tal is right. In the United States, where I reside, many conservatives (mainly members of the Republican party) disfavor abortion and some have even advocated xrays to show the fetus to the reluctant mother. The argument of their opponents is that a woman has a right to choose what to do with her own body. As a United States citizen, I deplore that the voices of anti-gender have sounded in a nation that prides itself on being free.

Ukraina has what seems to be a quite proliferated and forceful "anti-gender" movement which also has spinoffs in Russia. They both call themselves "the Parents Movement" and have the same agendas (quite similar to US "grassroots moral movements") although the Russian one (which I am studying) is more into "anti-Child Rights" while the Ukrainian one focuses on gender. The difference has to do with current legal reforms that they are opposing. The Russians take their propaganda texts from Ukraina who seem influenced by German Catholic gender opposition (Gabriela Kuby for instance) but I have not been able to trace it in detail since I don't know Ukrainan language. It is all based on conspiracy theory, anyway - the Enemy (a liberal gay mafia heading the UN, EU, etc.) wants to destroy Russia/Ukraine/whoever by eliminating the family as an institution by eracidating differences between adults and children and between women and men. The Enemy reasons as follows: Since gender pertains to the social aspects of one’s sex and not the biological, it is a social construction. Therefore, it is also a subject of individual choice and should be so. “Natural” differences between the sexes should be eradicated entirely, together with the ostensibly concomitant differences between sexual desires. Children should be raised as “nil” until puberty, after which they will be allowed to choose between five different genders: hetero-, homo-, bi-, and transsexuality and, in addition, lesbianism.

Again, this is what the anti-gender movement thinks that feminism wants - a quite queer reading of queer theory, I just wish that I knew where they got it from. Does anyone in this forum know?

Tova, I think this is directly out of the U.S. conservative movement's playbook. The fear-mongering about "destruction of the family" and the "perversion" of "natural" sex relationships (the right wing doesn't actually believe in gender, which is why they keep coming back to the word "natural") are constant across all U.S. fundamentalist Christian sects, as well as hard right Catholicism. It's easy for secular folk to forget that churches have long reach across international borders, and it's especially true for those that send out missions, which most fundamentalist (and commercial mega-churches) do. They look for and cultivate that anti-female (not anti-gender; in English I think it's crucial to maintain the distinction), homophobic message wherever their missions take them, and they seek out people who are likely to agree with them, or to find their message useful for political purposes. Liberal wings of Christianity are far less likely to run proselytizing missions, and have a lot less money to spread their views, so the anti-female homophobic message becomes equivalent to "godliness." The creation of straw (wo)men (arguments that the right claims feminists are making, but which no feminist has ever made) is a stock in trade, and those who dispute them simply don't have the resources and funding of those who put them forward. The fear that children will be indoctrinated is a reflection of the indoctrination project that these religious fundamentalists and right wingers are pushing on children already -- choice is threatening, as is anything that threatens the established authority of the right (inasmuch as it imagines it has an established "natural" authority). So I'd say that these ideas are spread across the globe by a network of like-minded religious organizations with similar interests, and taken up locally by right wing, authoritatian movements that seek to gain, retain, or regain power.

Kali and Tova, I lament that the world contagion of fear-mongering about family destruction in the name of antinaturalness is emanating from U. S. conservativism. To make this religious virulence understandable, if not praiseworthy in the least, I would say that it is a reaction against the general disaffection with all religion in the United States. The idea is that those who scream the loudest attract the most attention. This, of course, is having only negative results. Those deafened in the United States by the screams of their pious brothers run the other way to escape the noise.

I beg your pardon but when I read the comments it sounds to me a little too simple. Especially the frontier between a progressive genderbased feministic position on one side and a reactionary conservative religiously position on the other side doesn´t really describes the discourse situation adequately. So far as I know the discourse situation in Europe there are some mixed ups across the two sides.

For example in the discussion about the sexual self-determination the position of feministic and conservative religiously group are surprisingly similar so far as both stakeholders are against prostitution and pornography and both groups are calling for prohibition actions. Even if both argues with different substantiations are the results nearly identic.

Interpreting the critic on the gender approach and the feminism just as an anti-feministic backslash reaction of the conservatives or even of right wing extremists content the risk to lose the critical facility because it is no longer need to dispute with arguments when the person who is criticize is already made noncredible.

So far as I overlook the discussion in Germany it is a well running discourse mechanism to downgrade every critic on gender and feminism as anti-feministic backslash rhetoric of right wing extremists.

Do avoid misunderstandings I strictly disagree with any kind of naturalization or god’s willingness concerning the situation of man and women and the relationship of the sexes. I guess it is a big achievement that the human species is free to design it as they like it. But to say so it shows how common the suspicion of being an antifeminist is.

So it may been asked what kind of critic should that be.

To point it out shortly:

The gender approach content the risk of culturism. If everything is socially constructed and also the biology sex is just a constructed wording as J. Butler said, than reality would be multiple and arbitrary and everybody is living in an own one. So the physical reality would be loosed. As a scientist I can´t agree with this. And as a father I can share well the fear of people who do not like to build the separate identity development of child’s on this approach

Furthermore there is a serious critic on feminism. Independent from the different feministic currents the overall mutual perspective is gynocentric. I have doubts if it is possible to change a relationship when only one perspective comes to force (and the other is just the name of the overall framework). I observe often that this one eye blindness lead to a scheme of male perpetrator and female victims. From my personally point of view it is sufficient shown that victim and perpetrator can vary from situation to situation. And I like to ad: Responsibility too.

Life expectancy as a kind of meta indicator for quality of life shows impressively how fast a rigid imagination of the contribution of discrimination and privilegiation among the sexes can be wrong.

I hope I do not have hurt anybody feelings.

Have a nice day

Volker

I do not for a second doubt the mere fact that ideas such as these are actively promoted by various “ideological stakeholders” at the global level, and that it started in the US. But I am interested in the empirical details of how the process as such. Russia, for instance, was invaded by Western missionaries (predominantly evangelical) in the early 1990s, but anti-proselyte laws largely kicked them out some years later. Whether or not they were the first to “plant” this discourse is unclear – there are such claims (sexologist Igor Kon, for instance), but on the other hand there are older domestic discourses on “Western sexual warfare”, including “immorality” and feminism as main weapons. And a Russian extreme nationalist would hardly need a US fundamentalist to concoct a conspiracy theory – the domestic tradition is rich enough in this respect too. In any case, since the late 1990s, fundamentalist Orthodox actors have been the main “managers” of gendered/sexualized conspiracy theory, probably aided by regional networking (like the axis Ukraine-Poland-Germany) and, in particular, Internet and its inexhaustible mines of information (and translation machines). In effect, agendas are strikingly similar with US ones, but with different emphasis on questions. I’m merely interested in which elements stem from where, i.e. the trajectories of certain flows of information. For instance, the idea about feminists wanting children to choose between exactly five different “genders” (the concept being merged with sexual orientation) indicates that someone somewhere sometime saw the title of Fausto-Sterlings seminal article, but without ever reading it. This thing about five genders is continuously repeated in the East, which makes me curios about its prevalence in the West. Same thing with protests against so-called Juvenile Justice legislation – big in Russia and Ukraine. I have certainly spotted it on Western websites of the kind, but I don’t know who started to develop this particular argument first, and where.

A bit nerdy, admittedly, but this is, so to say, the ethnographic bit of it all.

Lumping it together just as a backlash is not intellectually productive, I think. Feminism as we know it (now what that is, considering how many different “feminisms” there are) never became a popular trend over there, but was isolated to certain liberal intellectual circles. To many other women, an increased focus on their own traditional turf, home and family, means increased political influence and an extended scope for action. It may not rhyme with conventional Western feminist ideas about the ideal state of things, but my job is not to evaluate it according to such parameters. I’m an anthropologist and I want to know how these women think, and how moralist conservatism fits into their own conceptual universes. Moreover, the fall of Communism was followed by a backlash of a different kind – a radical and very chauvinist sexualization of virtually everything, from working life (job ads like “wanted: secretary without ‘prejudice’”, e.g. accepting sexual invitations from the boss) to mass media and public space (I remember German pornos being shown 4 p.m. in the “video salon” on the train Moscow-Riga in 1990…). So to many local actor, the present moralization of everything is probably a welcomed backlash against the former backlash.

Which does not mean I’m positive to this process (on the contrary), but I see no meaning in evaluating it against standards that have never been rooted in that particular context. It only leads to the somewhat simplistic statement that they are wrong and I am not, which isn’t of much use to anyone.

To doubt, is an essential feature of science.

In Budapest the F. Ebert Foundation has been organising discussions on this topic in Central Europe: for a summary view the following two videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g5vK1kj7as&feature=youtu.be and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQLw2OapiKo&feature=youtu.be 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304462331_Topical_Issues_on_Equality_before_the_Law_for_Intersex_and_Transgender_Persons

Article Topical Issues on Equality before the Law for Intersex and T...

Our book might be useful 

http://www.feps-europe.eu/assets/cae464d2-f4ca-468c-a93e-5d0dad365a83/feps-gender-as-symbolic-glue-wwwpdf.pdf

Quite interesting perspectives. I look at all these concepts as they relate to Yoruba cultures in relation to colonisation, christianisation, islamisation, globalisation and neo-colonisation, as all these play out institutions in our society as they all influence my people.

i will add this point of view: equality in developed cuntries implies more taxes by almost the same result, instead inequality in developing countries like mine makes people happier, some studies shows it in my opinion equality is a easy game, no risk no challenges, but if you wanna try equality dont worry just think its offensive for some women to give the easy way.

Another book on the issue collecting different Euopean perspectives and including an article on cooperation between Russian & US-actors in these 'ant-gender' movements:

https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/antigender_campaigns_in_europe/3-156-7734fc12-00e3-47fc-8478-05897740ac19 - please get in touch if you want more info on the book.

Israel, Ivan thanks for your opinions, interesting points of view.

Stefanie thank for link. I will read it.

Hi Marta

In India the situation for women is terrible. There is very meagre parliamentary representation and even the anti dowry and anti-violence legislations have been receiving backlash. In fact what is sad is the law is complicit in enforcing these hegemonies. Recently the Indian Supreme Court said that women are committing "legal terrorism" by "abusing" the anti-dowry and anti-domestic abuse Act. All statistics point in the opposite direction. The second article also talks about lower caste and vulnerable minority women in particular

https://thewire.in/gender/section-498a-domestic-cruelty-laws

https://thewire.in/caste/flawed-official-data-and-the-idea-of-misuse-of-law

Thank you Anukriti. But there is sth happen in India. As I've read on Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of women in Kerala formed a human chain to demonstrate their support for gender equality. What do you think about this action ?

Please find the attachment!

https://apps.opensocietyfoundations.org/amp/voices/gender-ideology-fiction-could-do-real-harm

Regards,

Maham Muzamil

follow!

@Maham Muzamil in Poland we have very simillar narrativ according to, what they called, "gender ideology".

Marta

Yes I do agree that we have a large amount of activism in India too - especially at the grassroots level. The one you refer to - the human chain - was formed to allow women entry into a particular temple - which was reserved only for men (citing the reason that if women enter that temple, the Lord's vow of celibacy will be broken).

This particular case is interesting because one would think that fighting a battle for equal rights to pray to a god of one's faith, should be easier and acceptable - but this case clearly demonstrates that even such issues receive backlash.

Dear Marta

we have a big issue with gender in Ukraine, too.

I think, one part of the problem is the diffuse semantics of the term 'gender' which means social and cultural attributes and power relations of sexes as social classes, on one hand, and individual self-identification as male or female, on the other. This diffusiveness is misused by anti-gender propaganda and black rhetoric. Scholars must come up with refined terminolgy to separate efforts for equal opportunities of men and women as social classes from LGBT paradigm, separate social sex from psycholgical/biological sexuality, interests of female 50% of humankind from interests of tiny sexual minorities. Avoiding the word gender and replacing 'gender equality/equity' by lengthy constructins like 'equal opportunities for women and men' often helps to achieve a better rapport.

Secondly, also in Ukraine, Church is a big player in anti-gender campaign. But on the other side, there is a long 'moderate feminist' tradition in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church and gender studies in Ukrainian catholic universities. If you are potentially interested, we can think of arranging an international conference in Kyiv or Lviv to discuss the issue and find a solution.

I have a strong conviction that no country is free from gender ideology. In Iraq, women are often dubbed as weak, incompetent, and passionate in comparison with men. Such gendered profiling is quite impossible to change in the near future.

Nigeria has similar challenges, maybe even worse than most developing countries. although recently a lot of women have started speaking up in the quest for equality, the level of backlash they are receiving is alarming. The Senate and House of Rep seats both dominated by men have refused to pass a gender equality law for the past 6-7 years. The religious institutions in the country also give power to patriarchy by feeding women the idea that they are less than men.

Unfortunately, those who have liberated their mindsets are too few and face backlash from both men and women at all levels.

There are strong religious,cultural and social issues that justify gender biases. .THE BELIEFS THAT ARE BASED ON THE SOURCES HIGHLIGHTED MAKE IT VERY DIFFICULT TO INDEPENDENTLY TALK ABOUT WOMEN EMANCIPATION

Hello Marta. In Perú there are movements that use the "Gender Ideology" discourse to discredit political iniciatives that try to promote gender equality in the political agenda. One of these movements, at least the one that has the most followers and economic power, is the "Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas" (roughly translated it means Don't Mess With My Kids). Apparently, it´s an international movement, where known CMHNTM cells are located in Colombia and Ecuador. The Gender Ideology discourse has had a strong impact, specially, in the education arena.