Intersectional Gender Politics on the Right, Antifeminist Backlash, and Feminist Politics of Resistance

This session seeks to analyze contemporary practices and discourses of resurgent right-wing movements, parties and governments in different world regions as they address women, gender and feminism. Gender politics on the right are often differentiated according to race, religion, citizenship status, and hetero-cis normativity, among other axes of difference, and they vary across national political formations. They are not always or obviously misogynist or patriarchal. In some contexts, they display forms of femo- or homo-nationalism or welfare chauvinsim. Right-wing movements actively recruit women and can be selectively “pro-woman”. We invite historicized and contextualized studies of contemporary mobilization on the right, informed by comparative and or transnational perspectives, which explore implications for intersectional gender diversity, equity and equality. Despite long histories and considerable variation across contexts, observers note a resurgence in right-wing mobilization across world regions that is accompanied by increased authoritarianism, repression of dissent, and targeting of critical social movements seeking an expansion of democratic and social rights. In this context, feminism (in some of its iterations) has also become a target of the right. We further invite consideration of “antifeminism” on the right, meaning attacks on or attempts to discredit (certain kinds of) feminists/feminisms as legitimate social, political and intellectual interlocuters. Lastly, in relation to all of the above, we invite consideration of queer-, trans-, Indigenous, antiracist, postcolonial and or transnational feminist resistance to the rising right.