The Cost of Visibility: Gendered Political Violence Under Autocratising Regimes

Democratic backsliding and autocratic resurgence, marked by a reassertion of masculine patriarchal power (Boese et al., 2022; Chenoweth & Marks, 2026) coincides with a rise in gendered political violence (GPV) against women and LGBTIQ+ people (Krizsán et al., 2025): online harassment, physical threats, and reputational attacks, treated by existing research as separate problems rather than a single phenomenon. This session asks what changes when GPV is read as one.

We are interested in how GPV can be conceptualised as an interconnected socio-spatial ecology, moving across sites, between public and private space, online and offline, urban and rural settings, appearing in media discourses and institutional space, and how that movement settles into the physical world, shaping victims' everyday lives and ultimately who remains willing to stay visible in political life.

Political theory offers conceptual resources for understanding why this violence accompanies democratic backsliding: why it signals a crisis of patriarchal power rather than its triumph (Arendt, 1970) why some acts are recognised as harm while others go unregistered (Butler, 2020) and why institutions generate friction that is invisible to those who fit them and absorbed by those who do not (Puwar, 2004)

We ask what spatial thinking can add to GPV research, across built, legal, institutional, media, and digital environments, and what responses look like that move beyond security and surveillance toward care and spaces that reduce the cost of political presence.

We invite empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions from feminist geography, political sociology, critical legal studies, design and gender studies.