Feminism(s) and anti-gender backlash: lessons from Latin America

Reflecting on contemporary feminist activism, an established Brazilian feminist summarized that “before, we fought to gain rights; now, we fight against them being taken away” (as cited in Molyneux et al. 2021, 19). This phrase echoes the experiences of feminists around the world who find themselves defending women’s rights – if not their and their communities’ very lives – in hostile times, devoting much of their energy to preserving previous achievements. This Special Issue, and the IFJP/FLACSO-Mexico co-sponsored conference “Feminisms and Conservatisms in Latin America” (September 2019) from which the articles were drawn, contribute to our understanding of feminisms and gender backlash by highlighting how feminists in Latin America, a region well known for the strength of its progressive movements, are grappling with concerted opposition to gender equality and wider global political shifts that pose renewed challenges to feminist politics.

Such opposition is certainly not new (Friedman 2003), but a quarter century after the United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995), feminists face a very different political context to that of the end of the Cold War. In recent years, anti-gender equality organizations and movements have grown in strength, coordination, and impact at multiple levels and in multiple spaces, permeating state and multilateral institutions, political parties, and governmental coalitions (Biroli and Caminotti 2020; Corrêa, Paternotte, and Kuhar 2018; Corredor 2019; Graff, Kapur, and Walters 2019; Piscopo and Walsh 2020; Roggeband and Krizsán 2020; Sandler and Goetz 2020). Following similar European trends (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017), since 2016 transnational anti-gender campaigns have become embedded in local and national contexts across most of Latin America and the Caribbean (Biroli, Machado, and Vaggione 2020). That year marked a new cycle of street mobilizations and public campaigns by religious and secular organizations that opposed comprehensive sexuality education in schools, and, with the slogan “Don’t mess with my kids,” defended what they considered to be the “natural” (heterosexual) family (Corrêa 2018). Since then, anti-gender equality actors have organized around a wider range of sexuality and gender policy issues, and with particular vehemence on abortion and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) rights, with the aim of questioning the relevance of gender equality as a central public policy objective (Rousseau 2020; Zaremberg 2020). Moreover, campaigns against “gender ideology” – as originally the Vatican and more contemporary proponents call it – have shaped national political and electoral competition: from the defeat of Colombia’s Peace Accord referendum in 2016 to national electoral campaigns in Brazil and Costa Rica in 2018 (Wilkinson, this issue). As this Special Issue attests, whether through electoral alliances, ministerial appointments, or basic service delivery, conservative actors who oppose gender equality have gained influence in state institutions across the region. Yet taken together, these articles also show the impact of opposition to gender equality as contextual, multifaceted, and variable, depending on the relative strength of democratic institutions and their secular traditions, the policy legacies of left-leaning administrations, and the relative strength and influence of feminist movements.

In the wider context of democratic erosion, campaigns against gender equality have found fertile ground in the rise of right-wing political parties, as well as in authoritarian, nationalist, xenophobic forces that aim to “normalize” inequalities, hollow out public welfare provision, and reinstate real or imagined gender, social, or racial hierarchies (Biroli 2019; Roggeband and Krizsán 2020). Overall, these actors have deployed three broad strategies of influence:

1. attempts to reframe public debates on women’s rights by creating moral panics around the state of “the family” and/or “the nation” (Balieiro 2018; Corrêa 2018; Miskolci 2018; see Szwako and Sivori, this issue; Wilkinson, this issue);

2. efforts to water down commitments, key institutions, and policy frameworks for gender equality, or to sideline gender equality as a key state policy objective (Roggeband and Krizsán 2020; see Rodríguez Gustá, this issue; Ruibal, this issue);

3. actions to strip feminists and gender studies university programs of legitimacy and authority, or to reduce the operating space for women’s human rights organizations and women human rights defenders (Juhász and Pap 2018).

As a result, both women’s human rights and their promoters face ongoing challenges.

Where concerted anti-gender equality activism was visible or had gained access to state structures, the COVID-19 pandemic provided further opportunities to reinforce anti-feminist rhetoric and reality. In contexts such as Brazil and Mexico, as elsewhere outside the region, counter-movements won ground by linking their efforts to COVID-19 conspiracy theories and conservative family values; by restricting the space for human rights activists to challenge them; and, in some instances, by rolling back legal commitments to international women’s rights (Denkovski, Bernarding, and Lunz 2021). Against this backdrop, this Special Issue focuses on the interactions between and among feminists, counter-movements, and state institutions to potently chronicle how feminists in Latin America are contesting such backlash. Depending on their institutional contexts and organizational capacities, feminists have been quick to respond to these threats by developing new strategies and advocacy tactics, building coalitions across institutional spaces or with other progressive movements, or deepening transnational solidarities to withstand opposition and framing campaigns for gender equality and human rights in new ways. As the article by Zaremberg and Rezende de Almeida in particular shows, feminists’ resistance to backlash urgently requires systematic analysis and comparative research.

Conceptualizing conservative backlash as a “counter-movement,” at least in Latin America, is contentious. During the “Feminisms and Conservativisms” conference, participants debated the definition of counter-movements, understood as “the reaction to real or imagined progressive changes” (Faludi 1991, quoted in Piscopo and Walsh 2020, 267). However, they wondered whether these actors are reacting to feminist advances or whether, inversely, the feminist movement is “reacting to the reaction” in a counter-defensive position to conservative initiatives. This discussion arose particularly with respect to Central America, where more than 40 percent of the population identifies as Evangelical, and also to Brazil, where conservative religious actors have a substantial political presence. Although most articles included in this issue, in retrospective analyses, finally come back to the idea of a counter-movement as consisting of actors who seek to roll back women’s progressive rights, it is critical to consider contexts where conservatives are taking the lead rather than merely reacting.

Conference discussions also focused on the relational disputes among state institutions, feminists, and counter-movements. Participants found particularly suggestive Roggeband and Krizsán’s (2020) proposal of a more dynamic understanding of these relationships in a tripartite perspective. Moreover, a relational approach also recognizes that actors can be movement activists and committed officials at the same time. Thus, feminists (as well as conservative actors) can be simultaneously inside and outside state institutions, transforming their function and scope (Banaszak 2010). Thus, even while feminism movements have taken the streets through protests that definitively blur the online/offline binary, holistic analysis demands a focus on state institutions in all of their dynamic complexity (Abers and Keck 2013; Jessop 2007), because disputes with counter-movements imply challenges in both the state and the streets.

Beyond these intertwined arenas, the conference considered the family as a co-constitutive framing of regional conservative counter-movements. A morality centered on the heteronormative traditional family is fundamental to the parochial response against cosmopolitan and family diversity approaches based in liberal democratic and human rights frames. Conservative forces frequently deploy communication strategies founded in emotionally triggering narratives that tap into people’s common social fears and anxieties – whether economic uncertainty, demographic shifts, humanitarian crises or migration flows, high crime or violence rates, or widespread corruption – to gain public support and reframe public debates away from equality concerns and pluralism. With these narratives, the restoration of a “national” and/or “traditional” family, along with reified conservative gender roles, is positioned as the most effective solution to those societal risks that individuals are currently facing (Corrêa 2018; Miskolci 2018).

The rich empirical work presented at the conference offered a range of insights into these and other debates, not all of which can be captured by this Special Issue. However, these articles contribute to our understanding of not only regional gender and sexuality politics and policies, but also the extent to which gender and sexuality politics matter to critical global issues such as democracy, development, and security.

For example, demands for security in a region often rent by devastating violence have been forged to conservative gender politics. Annie Wilkinson deploys an in-depth ethnography to illuminate a national case of the thoroughly transnational anti-gender campaigns sweeping across as well as within world regions. She shows how Mexican activists, some with backgrounds in the security sector and inspired by extra-regional securitization approaches, have brought “security and gender politics into a common, cohesive security meta-frame” that “constructs gender ideology as a potent, virulent, and imminent existential threat to the family.” Her analysis not only contextualizes anti-gender initiatives within a country suffering from extreme insecurity, but also reminds us that such campaigns can be expert at wielding larger national narratives to advance broader political projects of illiberal control.

The deeply gendered social institution of the family has also been linked to the fate of democratically elected leaders. José Szwako and Horacio F. Sivori’s comparison of the impeachment processes of two left-leaning Latin American presidents, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay (in 2012) and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil (in 2016), reveals the extent to which a “moral conservatism” of gender and sexuality drives both the spectacular and routine national politics of left-wing as well as right-wing political parties. As they show through a discursive analysis of impeachment debates, the power of “family grammars” reaches beyond and complicates the now taken-for-granted analysis centering the significance of politicians’ religious identities or commitments. In Paraguay, Lugo was portrayed as simultaneously threatening the nation and the family. In Brazil, both supporters and opponents of Rousseff’s impeachment invoked a pro-family discourse in justifying their actions.

While family constitutes an arena for movement–counter-movement disputes, the state is also a critical space for these conflicts. The remaining articles take into account both state complexity and its relationships with movements and counter-movements, thus offering a rich contribution to the extensive literature on state feminism and feminist governance. For example, the innovative work by Gisela Zaremberg and Debora Rezende de Almeida widens our perspective on what feminist policy “success” means in order to take into account the unfortunately ever more relevant resistance to conservative encroachment on established rights. Their comparison of Mexico and Brazil demonstrates “that simple ‘defeat versus success’ parameters are not enough to understand the power of feminist networks in resisting conservatives.” In their analysis of how feminists attempt to block conservative policy agendas through institutional networks at national and subnational levels, they find that not only network articulation across institutional arenas, but also connection to diverse constituencies within feminist and women’s movements, are critical to opposing anti-rights campaigns.

Delving further into institutional design, in yet another fruitful comparative case study Ana Laura Rodríguez Gustá compares the trajectories of the women’s policy agencies (WPAs, also known as national women’s machinery) of Argentina and Brazil to explore whether political ideology determines the effectiveness of institutionalized spaces to promote feminist outcomes. She finds that WPAs are used by both left-wing and right-wing governments to “instrumentally negotiate when they need to build constituencies or  …  reciprocate loyalties,” responding to the mobilizational energies of feminist constituencies in party politics and the streets. Moreover, she shows that the type of right-wing party matters: backlash is much more pronounced under illiberal right-wing forces, whereas center-right leaders may see benefits in a “gender agenda” to appeal to more centrist supporters. Thus, this article points out that there is not an automatic relationship between right-wing parties and backlash, as well as reminding us of the lesson of the left-leaning “Pink Tide” period in the region (2000–2015) that there is also not an automatic association between left-wing parties and a progressive pro-gender policy (Friedman 2019).

Finally, Alba Ruibal asks us to (re)consider the role of judicialization, particularly the power of constitutional courts, with regard to deeply contested rights claims around reproductive autonomy. In the face of legislatures that are unable or unwilling to take action, whether in terms of advancing rights or deterring backlash, her study shows that courts are important “alternative venues for feminist advocacy.” Moreover, her ambitious analysis of the role of constitutional courts in the liberalization of abortion laws in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico reveals that feminist advocacy can lead to wider precedents for institutional politics. As she explains, “Abortion cases have been critical to the development of procedural mechanisms and the advancement of a new type of relationship between the courts and civil society.”

Taken as a whole, this Special Issue reminds us to be attentive to the sometimes unexpected avenues through which anti-gender conservativisms take aim at the people, policies, and institutions promoting gender and sexuality justice. However, this research also highlights the concerted and ongoing efforts to maintain and advance such agendas – not least of which (although not the focus of these particular articles) are the mass movements of those who, prior to and when possible during the COVID-19 pandemic, have put their bodies in all of their wonderful human and ideological diversity on the line to insist on the recognition of their rights, their humanity, and their connection to the interdependent web of life. In the face of so much future uncertainty, connections across movements and institutional arenas, always critical to feminist politics, will certainly continue to be vital links to explore, and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gisela Zaremberg

Gisela Zaremberg is a Professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Mexico, where she coordinates the Master’s program on Public Policy and Gender. She holds a PhD in Research on Social Science with a Mention in Political Science from FLACSO, Mexico, and a Master’s in Social Policy from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her book Votes, Women and Social Assistance in Peronist Argentina and PRIista Mexico (1947–1964) won the Donna Lee Van Cott Prize for Best Book on Political Institutions in Latin America, by the Latin American Political Institutions Section (LAPIS) of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). She has published on gender, feminism, conservative backlash, and democratic innovation in several prestigious academic journals including Politics & Gender, the Journal of Politics in Latin America, and the Latin American Research Review.

Constanza Tabbush

Constanza Tabbush is currently working as a Research Specialist at UN Women, while on leave from her position at the National Research Council and the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She co-authored the latest edition of UN Women’s flagship report Progress of the World’s Women 2019–2020: Families in a Changing World and contributed to the edited collection Seeking Rights from the Left: Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Left (Duke University Press, 2019). She has published extensively on gender, social policy, and social and feminist movements in Latin America. Since 2018, she has served as an Associate Editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Elisabeth Jay Friedman

Elisabeth Jay Friedman is Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at the University of San Francisco, USA, and co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is author of Interpreting the Internet: Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America (University of California Press, 2016), and editor of Seeking Rights from the Left: Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Pink Tide (Duke University Press, 2019), published in Spanish as Género, sexualidad e izquierdas latinoamericanas (CLACSO, 2020). Her research interests include social movements’ intersections with digital media and the impact of new generations and transnational ideas on feminist communities and strategies.