The limits of ‘backlash’ masculinity: on the value of reframing gendered resistance as ‘countermovement’

This paper proposes a reconsideration of backlash as the dominant frame for analysing resistance to gender equality. Widely used to describe reactionary responses to feminist progress, the term often under-theorizes the strategic, organized and structural dimensions of contemporary masculinist mobilization. Building on feminist accounts of patriarchal adaptation, we foreground masculinity as a coordinated and politically organized project, well beyond an affective, purely reactionary or cultural reflex. Developing this argument, we propose countermovement as a useful, complementary but different analytic lens. Drawing on Meyer and Staggenborg’s account of countermovements as strategically mobilized opposition, and Karl Polanyi’s theory of ‘double movement’ as a patterned societal response to systemic disruption, we offer a hybrid framework for understanding how masculinities are assembled, and legitimized. This reframing clarifies the political logic and predictability of gendered reaction, but also the structural conditions in which we observe the coexistence of divergent masculinities, including both grievance-based and reflexive or caring forms. These are not contradictions, but relational responses within a broader process of gender system reorganization. In reframing backlash through the logic of countermovement, the paper aims to stimulate renewed debate about how gender scholars conceptualize masculinity/ies’ role in the ongoing struggle over power, legitimacy, and transformation.