Gender as “Ebola from Brussels”: The Anticolonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism

This article examines the recent wave of grassroots mobilizations opposing gender equality, LGBT rights, and sex education, which vilify the term “gender” in public debates and policy documents. The antigender movement emerged simultaneously in various locations after 2010. We argue that this is not just another wave of antifeminist backlash or a new tactic of the Vatican in its ongoing efforts to undermine gender equality but represents a new ideological and political configuration that emerged in response to the global economic crisis of 2008 and the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy. The backlash of the eighties and nineties combined neoconservatism with market fundamentalism (which is to some extent still the case with neoconservative Christian fundamentalists in the United States and elsewhere), while the new movement—though in many ways a continuation of earlier trends—tends to combine gender conservatism with a critique of neoliberalism and globalization. Liberal elites are presented as “colonizers”; “genderism” is demonized as an ideology imposed by the world’s rich on the poor. Thanks to the anticolonial frame, antigenderism has remarkable ideological coherence and great mobilizing power: right-wing populists have captured the imagination and hearts of large portions of local populations more effectively than progressive movements have managed to do. The article examines the basic tenets of antigenderism, shedding light on how this ideology contributes to the contemporary transnational resurgence of illiberal populism. We argue that today’s global Right, while selectively borrowing from liberal-Left and feminist discourses, is in fact constructing a new universalism, an illiberal one. While the examples discussed are mostly from Poland, the pattern is transnational, and our conclusions may have serious implications for feminist theory and activism.