Democratic Disfigurement or Populist Backlash? Investigating Anti-Gender Politics in Europe

Application summary

The "Democratic Disfigurement" research project examines mobilization against gender equality and representative democracy in Europe. Existing academic research and policy reports predominantly classify so called “anti-gender” campaigns as simply populist and anti-democratic. In contrast, this research project provides a new, theoretically informed contribution to existing scholarship by researching and explicating 1) the arguments by anti-gender actors and 2) the attempts to criticize, analyze and counter the mobilization, from the position of feminist academic research as well as political initiatives at the EU level. With a focus on the multiplicity of voices and arguments that claim to defend democracy in Europe, the project utilizes the political theory of Nadia Urbinati and hypothesizes that anti-gender proponents and their opponents in fact operate with different concepts of ‘majority’/ ’minority’ and ‘people’. In addition, their views of representative democracy differ substantially. These conceptual differences are key for understanding not only the conflicting conceptions of democracy, but furthermore, how and why precisely gender has become a central field of contestation in the struggle for the meaning and future of democracy. In light of the theoretical and textual analysis of the project, anti-gender campaigning turns out to be oriented towards much more than opposing gender equality: the wider goal is to disfigure representative democracy and its institutions permanently.