Gender Theory in Troubled Times. Rachel Alsop
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being protected by these authoritarian rulers’ (Scott 2018). Poland, Hungary and Brazil are striking examples, but there are strands throughout Europe and elsewhere (Meret and Siim 2013; Verloo 2018; Kantola and Lombardo 2019). Globally we see a resurgence of populist politics both on the left (the Podemos movement in Spain or Syriza in Greece, for example) and on the right (elections of Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil; or the emergence of the Finns Party in Finland or One Nation in Australia). Focusing specifically on the emergence of right-wing populist politics, Kantola and Lombardo point to the ways in which ‘Feminist studies have shown how the discourse of radical right groups is visibly anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, conservative, nationalist, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and anti-democratic’ (2019: 3).
There is an interweaving of such right-wing populism with religious fundamentalism, which informs the attack on gendered rights. In Poland, for example, the nationalist Law and Justice party, closely aligned with a conservative Catholic Church, was elected in 2015 and tried to impose a full ban on abortion, which was narrowly defeated. Attempts to restrict access to abortion are ongoing, and LGBTQI+ people in Poland continue to encounter discrimination. In Hungary, there are parallel developments in which church and state seek to roll back women’s reproductive rights and the rights of sexual minorities to reinstate a traditional model of the family as a natural, God-given institution which is under attack (Peto 2016). Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil with a campaign that targeted the rights of women and was abusive to the LGBTQI+ community. His campaign was supported by conservative Pentecostal groups and was accompanied by alarming increases in violent deaths related to homophobia alongside racialized violence and increased violence against women. ‘In his post-election-victory speech, Bolsonaro said his campaign had relied on the Bible, “the toolbox to fix men and women”’ (Assis and Ogando 2018).
The authoritarian attack on gendered rights is found not only in states with unholy alliances with varieties of Christianity. Turkey, as part of its post-2016 coup, launched a crackdown on civil society, put LGBTQI+ defenders in prison, and fired rubber bullets at a Pride march in Istanbul. Turkey’s President Erdoğan consistently reinforces women’s traditional role within the family and society, ‘declaring that women are not equal to men … and that biological differences meant women and men could not serve the same functions, adding that manual work was unsuitable for the “delicate nature” of women’ (Agence France-Presse 2014). Here the resurgent nationalisms target Kurdish minorities as well as the migrants from Syria who are targets of the right across Europe. A recent AIDA report on Turkey suggests that ‘the vulnerability of migrant women, especially of single women, to all types of sexual harassment and assault is high and invisible. This makes them a potential target of not only the local population … which are generally very conservative, but also of male public officials who mostly rely on the impunity tradition of the Turkish state’ (AIDA 2018).
These shifts to the right have sparked strong and inspiring opposition – for example, the ‘Black Protests’ in Poland against restrictions of women’s reproductive rights and the gender justice movements in Brazil. The Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, was attended by an estimated 4.5 million women and led to ongoing demonstrations in the US and other places, the mobilization of opposition to Trump, and a drive to get more women into US politics. It paid off when, in the midterm elections in November 2018, which were shaped by gender issues, a record number of women and minority representatives were elected to Congress. ‘The 116th Congress [is] the most diverse in history, with 102 women, many more openly gay members, more blacks, more Latinos, the first two female Native Americans, a Somali immigrant and the first ever Palestinian American woman elected to the House’ (Abramson 2019).
Gender theory under attack
Gender theory is complex, informed by philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytic, economic, art, literary and other theoretical insights. This book is no exception. We do our best to make the theory clear, spell out the complexity and explain what points are in contention. The theories we explore come from multiple sources, and their origins are ones which we try to acknowledge. Their importance has been made evident from collective attempts to grapple with difference and inequality. Gender theory is often criticized and required to demonstrate its relevance to activist struggles. Such struggles are trying to promote gender equality and diversity globally and to combat the harms which accrue in most, if not all, societies to women and gender non-conformist people, especially the harms of economic deprivation, sexual violence and lack of access to power. The plea from theorists has been, and from us still would be, that we have to understand how gender differences are produced and maintained if we are to counteract them. bell hooks says: ‘I found a place of sanctuary in “theorizing,” in making sense out of what was happening.’ She is countering what she perceives as anti-intellectualism in some feminist circles by arguing that critical reflection is essential for practice. She acknowledges, however, that ‘theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end’ (hooks 1991).
This link of theory and practice, a point of contention within feminism, has been seized on by opponents of gender equality worldwide. Within a larger attack on intellectual inquiry, gender theory, as a sphere of academic endeavour, has become demonized by religious leaders and alt-right political parties as corrupting of the social order and dangerous if taught in any form to children or young adults. In November 2017, while attending a conference in São Paulo, Brazil, which she had helped to organize, the philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler was faced with a protest in which her effigy was burned as a witch and she was accused of destroying the family and encouraging paedophilia!2 It appears that far-right Christian groups organized the protests, and since then the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has initiated measures promising to combat ‘gender ideology’. Butler afterwards commented:
the allegation is that I am the founder of ‘the ideology of gender.’ That ideology, which is called ‘diabolical’ by these opponents, is considered to be a threat to the family. There does not seem to be any evidence that those who mobilized on this occasion had any familiarity with my text Gender Trouble, published in late 1989. But they took that text to be promoting the idea that one can become any gender one wants, that there are not natural laws or natural differences, and that both the biblical and scientific basis for establishing the differences between the sexes would be, or already is, destroyed by the theory attributed to me. …
My sense is that the group who engaged [in] this frenzy of effigy burning, stalking and harassment want to defend ‘Brazil’ as a place where LGBTQ people are not welcome, where the family remains heterosexual (so no gay marriage), where abortion is illegal and reproductive freedom does not exist. They want boys to be boys, and girls to be girls, and for there to be no complexity in questions such as these. The effort is antifeminist, antitrans, homophobic and nationalist, using social media to stage and disseminate their events. In this way, they resemble the forms of neo-fascism that we see emerging in different parts of the world. (Cited in Jasnik 2017)
As Butler signals, this attack was not an isolated event. Gender theory is being targeted in many other countries. Anti-feminist campaigns, demonizing so-called gender ideology, have been mobilized in various parts of the world, from Europe to the Americas to Australia (Corrêa 2017; Corrêa et al. 2018). Gender studies has been effectively banned from universities in Hungary, a member state of the European Union (Walker 2018). In Poland, another EU member state, from a
heretofore obscure foreign concept known only to specialists, gender [is] suddenly omnipresent in the tabloids, on Facebook and in the blogosphere. It [is] … the focus of endless and heated debate … in Poland’s Roman Catholic parishes – consistently demonized in sermons as a threat to the family. Gender is presented as the heart of the ‘Civilization of death’, and as a source of perversion and degradation. Parents [are] warned that their children [are] in danger. (Graff 2014)
The role of the Catholic Church is important here. From as far back as the 1990s, when the United Nations introduced the term ‘gender’ in its documents, its use was attacked by some Catholic groups.