The Politics of Gender and Sexuality: The Promotion, Contestations, and Resistance to Anti-Gender Ideologies in Brazil and South Africa

Contemporary global, regional, and national politics are the sites of fierce (racialized and classed) contestations over gender and sexual rights between anti-gender movements and women’s and LGBTIQ+ defenders (including other actors). Characterized as an anti-gender ideology, the anti-gender movement refers to social movements, organizations and forces drawn from right-wing and fundamentalist religious and political lobbies. Drawing on decades-long historically and nationally specific trajectories, this current ‘backlash’ is contributing to an increasingly uncertain and polarized world by feeding increased authoritarianism, fundamentalist religious resurgence, and populist hyper-nationalism, a threat to democracy itself. Brazil has recently emerged from a Bolsonaro-led government, propelled to power by religious fundamentalists and right-wing political and economic groupings. Their bid to gain political and economic power mobilized populist nationalism based on the promotion of traditional family values, religion, and ‘democracy’. Bolsonaro's government saw the rolling back of feminist and LGBTIQ+ rights and gains. These political and sociocultural contestations continue today under a Lula-led government. In South Africa, the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age were integral to the colonial and apartheid project and continue to be central organizers of social relations today. The abrupt change from apartheid-era sexual regulation and censorship to a language and practice of sexual and gender rights and equality intensified existing disputes over gender and sexual norms, contested notions of culture and tradition and a shifting cultural politics of class, status, and generation. The last decade has seen an increasingly vocal anti-Constitutional populist discourse embodied in a range of religious and cultural right-wing groupings. This presentation will map key actors and processes of gendered and sexual contestations in Brazil and South Africa, foregrounding the sites of struggle of LGBTIQ+ movements, within and in relation to political, religious and cultural actors and sites.