This book charts the new phase of global struggles around gender equality and sexual democracy: the ultraconservative mobilization against "gender ideology" and feminist efforts to counteract it. It argues that anti-gender campaigns, which emerged around 2010 in Europe, are not a simple continuation of the anti-feminist backlash dating back to the 1970s, but part of a new political configuration. Opposition to "gender" has become a key element of the rise of right-wing populism, which successfully harnesses the anxiety, shame and anger caused by neoliberalism and threatens to destroy liberal democracy. Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment offers a novel conceptualization of the relationship between the ultraconservative anti-gender movement and right-wing populist parties, examining the opportunistic synergy between these actors. The authors map the anti-gender campaigns as a global movement, putting the Polish case in a comparative perspective. They show that the anti-gender rhetoric is best understood as a reactionary critique of neoliberalism as a socio-cultural formation. The book also studies the recent wave of feminist mass mobilizations, viewing the transnational revolt of women as a left populist movement. This is an important study for those doing research in politics, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies and sociology. It will also be useful for activists and policy makers. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

While research in right-wing populism has recently been blossoming, a systematic study of the intersection of right-wing populism and gender is still missing, even though gender issues are ubiquitous in discourses of the radical right ranging from »ethnosexism« against immigrants, to »anti-genderism.« This volume shows that the intersectionality of gender, race and class is constitutional for radical right discourse. From different European perspectives, the contributions investigate the ways in which gender is used as a meta-language, strategic tool and »affective bridge« for ordering and hierarchizing political objectives in the discourse of the diverse actors of the »right-wing complex.«

This book is a systematic consideration of the link between the extreme right and the discourse about developments in regard to gender issues within different national states. The contributors analyze right-wing extremist tendencies in Europe under the specific perspective on gender. The volume brings together the few existing findings concerning the quantitative dimension of activities carried out by men and women in different countries, and illuminates and juxtaposes gender ratios along with the role of women in right-wing extremism. Along with the gender-specific access to right-wing groups, the chapters look at networks, organizational forms, specific strategies of female right-wing extremists, their ideologies (especially regarding femininity and masculinity), hetero normativity, discourses on sexuality, and preventive and counter-strategies. The book will be of use to students and scholars interested in gender and politics, European politics, and political extremism.

This edited collection offers a transnational and comparative approach to understanding anti-gender mobilizations in Europe.

Those who survived the brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family have tended to portray the rise of the women’s movement and feminist activism as part of the overall story of the anti-Somoza resistance. But this depiction of heroic struggle obscures a much more complicated history. As Victoria González-Rivera reveals in this book, some Nicaraguan women expressed early interest in eliminating the tyranny of male domination, and this interest grew into full-fledged campaigns for female suffrage and access to education by the 1880s. By the 1920s a feminist movement had emerged among urban, middle-class women, and it lasted for two more decades until it was eclipsed in the 1950s by a nonfeminist movement of mainly Catholic, urban, middle-class and working-class women who supported the liberal, populist, patron-clientelistic regime of the Somozas in return for the right to vote and various economic, educational, and political opportunities. Counterintuitively, it was actually the Somozas who encouraged women's participation in the public sphere (as long as they remained loyal Somocistas). Their opponents, the Sandinistas and Conservatives, often appealed to women through their maternal identity. What emerges from this fine-grained analysis is a picture of a much more complex political landscape than that portrayed by the simplifying myths of current Nicaraguan historiography, and we can now see why and how the Somoza dictatorship did not endure by dint of fear and compulsion alone.

In contrast to the wealth of studies on progress towards gender equality, opposition to gender equality is rarely studied, which makes it difficult to understand the positive and negative dynamics of gender equality as a political project. The first of its kind, this timely collection examines the potential and challenges of our current scholarship on understanding opposition to gender+ equality in Europe. Divided into three parts, Mieke Verloo and her team of international experts begin Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe by theorizing the dynamics of opposition to gender equality policies in Europe. Part Two highlights oppositional actors (politicians, governments, citizens, policy makers, churches) and political arenas (parliament, courts, Internet), as well as different and opposing visions of gender+ equality. Part Three concludes with a framework for understanding oppositional dynamics on gender equality change. Setting the agenda for future research, this book will be useful for students of gender and politics, social movements, European integration, and policy studies, as well as for high-level policymakers, students, and feminist activists alike. It will be an inspiration to thinkers and doers and to scholars and political actors.

With the rise to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the early 2000s in Turkey, the headscarf that used be looked down upon by the secular middle and upper classes moved to the mainstream. It has since become a symbol of desirable womanhood. This development has pushed Turkey's secular feminists, who had been critical of the headscarf ban, to the margins. This book is the first to trace this new phase of conservative gender politics by examining the images of women's headscarves across secular and Islamic news media. Based on the analysis of photographs and the columns of conservative women journalists, the book sheds light on how the AKP is transforming the image of womanhood. It also identifies the rise of the conservative female journalist as an important phenomenon in the country. Esra Özcan problematizes designators such as “Islamist women” or “Islamic feminists” and instead aims to understand these women in terms of their commitment to right-wing activism and politics, which has so far been ignored. An original contribution to feminist scholarship on Muslim women, this book draws on the unique perspectives of Visual Culture and Communication Studies.