Victor Frankenstein and his creature: the many lives of ‘gender ideology’

ABSTRACT

The expression ‘anti-gender campaigns’ has rapidly made its way to describe a new and specific wave of activist and policy initiatives against gender and sexual equalities. The goals of this article are twofold: to offer a close examination of the current state of anti-gender campaigns in Europe, and to look back at the scholarship produced in the last decade. Following the historical unfolding of these campaigns, this article explores four scenes that are crucial to contemporary anti-gender politics: churches, social movements, political parties and states. By emphasising that anti-gender campaigns encompass a wide diversity of political projects, it insists on the need to consider this plurality as constitutive of the phenomenon, a goal that requires to pay more attention to the actors who use them and the ways they do it. Rather than a discussion of new empirical material, this article invites scholars to reflect on the ways to approach these developments and offers a critical overview of existing scholarship. It shows that these campaigns are a transnational kit highly adaptable to local circumstances, and that these campaigns are simultaneously about and not about gender, gender being – following Joan W. Scott’s seminal reading – ‘a primary way of signifying relationships of power’. Using the novel Frankenstein, this article finally argues that anti-gender campaigns are no longer under the control of their creator – the Catholic Church – but, like the creature invented by Mary Shelley, they live an emancipated and autonomous life.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-gender campaigns
• backlash
• Catholicism
• populism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 At the time, General Rapporteur for the Rights of LGBTI people at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

2 United Nations Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

3 For a more nuanced approach and an overview of controversies among Latin American scholars, see Zaremberg et al. (2021). See also Graff et al. (2019).

4 Elizabeth Corredor develops a more complex understanding of backlash that acknowledges its productive dimension in a more recent text on the 2016 Colombian peace referendum agreement (2021).

5 In a same vein, see: https://www.lse.ac.uk/gender/news/2022/AHRC (last consulted 4 July 2022).

6 Sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (1999) has suggested the concept of ‘ideological code’ to understand how the notion of ‘political correctness’ has contributed to a transformation of public debate in the United States. This code structures text or talk. Through numerous and spontaneous repetitions, it progressively conceals its intellectual origins and acquires the status of truth. People use it and adopt it without knowing where it comes from and spread it further while reinforcing its legitimacy and its validity as a description of reality. This functioning contributes to naturalise a new intellectual context and to spread it further in society and across the world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Paternotte

David Paternotte is associate professor in Sociology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. After years of research on same-sex marriage, lesbian and gay activism and feminist movements, he has studied anti-gender campaigns for the last ten years. With Roman Kuhar, he has coedited the edited volume Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality in 2017. He is currently working on anti-trans mobilisations, academic freedom and right-wing politics of knowledge.