Gender as death threat to the family: how the “security frame” shapes anti-gender activism in Mexico

ABSTRACT

This article offers an ethnographic and frame analysis of how Mexican anti-gender campaigners have leveraged Mexico’s twin crises of corruption and security to cast “gender ideology” strategically as a security issue through a “security frame.” It explores how formal security expertise and a deepening security culture shape the framing strategies of anti-gender campaigners who effectively weaponize gender ideology as a tool of culture war. Two discursive strategies are analyzed that make the security frame both cohesive and compelling: while the “nested empty signifier” of the culture of death renders gender ideology a credible death threat to the family by bringing security and gender politics into a common, cohesive security master frame, a logic of securitization constructs gender ideology as a potent, virulent, and imminent existential threat to the family that directs efforts to secure the family. An analysis of how anti-gender activists have developed and deployed the security frame in Mexico offers not just contextualized insight into how anti-gender campaigns have been articulated and sustained there, but also how anti-gender campaigns might mobilize widespread insecurities across Latin American contexts to advance illiberal political projects that impede broader discussions about institutional and democratic deficits.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-gender movements
• security frames
• Mexico
• democracy
• right-wing populism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I distinguish between “anti-gender” as an etic term referring to a political position or strategy and the emic term “pro-family” to refer to an identity and movement. While I adopt “anti-gender” for consistency with its growing academic usage, my own interlocutors would not describe themselves with this term but instead as “pro-family” activists. They are the only ones in Mexico who are actively organizing campaigns against gender, and thus I often use both of these overlapping terms. However, it is important to recognize that they are not the only ones who hold hostile views toward gender. Furthermore, the pro-family platform includes issues beyond gender, and there are some individuals who identify as pro-family but disagree with anti-gender views.

2 Though pro-family leaders’ rhetoric tends to lay claim to and even defend the tenets of liberal democracy, appealing to human rights frameworks in particular, their political aspirations more accurately reflect the pursuit of “unequal allocation of rights and duties” that characterizes contemporary ideological illiberalism (Kauth and King 2020). For more in-depth analysis of the imbrication of anti-gender movements with support for illberalism, see Fassin (2020), Mancini and Palazzo (forthcoming), and Reuterswärd (2021).

3 Whether or not they have drawn inspiration from these particular manuals, the enduring legacy of these kinds of political tactics reverberate in contemporary anti-gender activism, in which I observed various kinds of frame flipping, infiltration of opponent groups, and creation of front-like groups.

4 While other actors using alternative frames also exist, with Evangelical pro-family leaders in particular a growing presence, I have focused this analysis on FNF because of its widely recognized, outsized role (consistent with my ethnographic observations) in dominating pro-family movement strategy in Mexico in general and for popularizing the security frame in particular (Garma, Ramírez, and Corpus 2018; Vera Balanzario 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program: [Grant number P022A180003] and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Notes on contributors

Annie Wilkinson

Annie Wilkinson is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at University of California Irvine, USA. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences with an emphasis in Gender and Development from FLACSO-Ecuador and formerly worked in professional roles to support feminist activists and human rights researchers. She is the author of the book Sin sanidad, no hay santidad: las prácticas reparativas en Ecuador (Cleanliness Is Holiness: Reparative Practices in Ecuador), published by FLACSO-Ecuador (2013, reprinted 2019), and several other publications analyzing contemporary sexual politics in Ecuador. She is also a former board member of the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology and a current board member of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. She is currently completing her dissertation on the cultural politics of transnational anti-gender and anti-feminist activism in Mexico. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the US Fulbright-Hays Program, and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation).