Resisting Anti-Gender Politics – Strategies, Solidarities, and Democratic Defense

Course description

Over the past decade, anti-gender politics have consolidated into a powerful transnational political formation shaping struggles over feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, academic freedom, and democratic governance. This course shifts the analytical centre of gravity from diagnosis to resistance and examines how feminist and LGBTQ+ scholars, activists, social movements, and institutions respond to anti-gender attacks across political, cultural, and geopolitical contexts. Drawing on recentinterdisciplinary scholarship, the course explores resistance not as a singular or unified reaction but as a heterogeneous field of strategies ranging from grassroots mobilization and coalition-building to legal, parliamentary, pedagogical, and epistemic interventions.

Analytically, the course builds on the understanding of anti-gender politics as an organized and productive political project rather than a mere backlash. Against this backdrop, resistance is approached as both defensive and transformative: contesting anti-gender discourses while simultaneously rethinking feminist strategies, solidarities, and democratic practices. Particular emphasis is placed on tensions and dilemmas within resistance, including questions of inclusion, intersectionality, securitization, institutionalization, and the risk of co-optation.

Empirically, the course engages with cases from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and transnational arenas, with particular attention to how resistance strategies are shaped by local political opportunity structures while remaining embedded in global dynamics. Special attention is given to feminist responses in contexts of democratic backsliding, authoritarian governance, and increasing restrictions on civil society and academia.

The course is explicitly interdisciplinary and relevant to PhD candidates in gender studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, law, media and cultural studies, global health, and related fields. It also aims to provide space for participants to reflect critically on their own research positionalities when studying highly politicized and contested fields.