scholarly journals Opposition to “gender” in academia and beyond

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Korolczuk

The rise of ultraconservative, often religious movements and the right-wing electoral victories in many European countries, such as Poland, limit the opportunities for inserting feminist agenda in academia, institutional settings and public debates. In my presentation I will argue that national and transnational campaigns against “gender ideology” should be interpreted a new phase of the struggle around politics of expertise and knowledge-policy nexus, highlighting issues such as the sources of scientific authorization, the status of an expert, and the ways in which the relations between academia, politics, the media and public are shaped. Right-wing populists and religious fundamentalists opposing “gender” seek not only political but also epistemic power. They attempt to build up their own sources of legitimacy, which include forming new institutions, promoting new public intellectuals and producing new body of gender knowledge. How does this increasingly hostile political context re-shape the formation and mobilization of competing gender knowledges, and how women’s movements can succeed in achieving social change?

Author(s):  
G.E. I Ibragimova ◽  
◽  
A.M. Karamanov ◽  

The article examines the ascent of the party «Alternative for Germany» (AFD) from its creation in 2012 to a sharp jump in popularity in the parliamentary elections in 2017. Special emphasis is paid to the review of the strengthening of Eurosceptic rhetoric, criticism of modern German politics as a result of the arrival of farright politicians to the leading positions in the party. The article concludes that Euroscepticism has become one of the components of the broad populist platform of the party as the AFD has developed. Moreover, it is established that unexpectedly high support for the AFD by the German electorate and the party’s acquisition of the status of the main opposition force in the Bundestag becomes an important factor for the German establishment in the context of defending its position on further deepening the processes of European integration.


2020 ◽  
pp. 019251212094891
Author(s):  
Anna Gwiazda

This article disentangles the complexity of right-wing populism and feminist politics using an original framework based on inputs (representative claims) and outputs (policies) to examine a Polish case. In 2015, the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) formed a single-party majority government led by a female prime minister after winning the elections. PiS is ideologically conservative, promotes traditional and national values and is supported by the Catholic Church. Additionally, it is hostile towards what it calls ‘gender-ideology’ and is reluctant to implement feminist policies. This article also reveals that PiS represents conservative women’s interests and advocates an aspect of conservative feminism, therefore possessing a duality in its claims and policies. Overall, this article draws inferences about the nexus between social conservatism, populism and feminism, and thus seeks to contribute to the scholarly literature by examining a timely issue against the backdrop of rising populism, illiberalism and anti-gender campaigns.


2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Fuentes

AbstractThis article outlines the factors that explain changes in the rules of the game in Chile after the restoration of democracy in 1990. It looks particularly at the reasons why the right-wing parties—strong defenders of the constitution imposed by General Augusto Pinochet in 1980—accepted reforms that eliminated many of what the literature has termed authoritarian enclaves. The article explains this shift by observing significant changes in the political context that, in turn, affected the priorities of veto players. In this context, short-term strategic calculations by the right-wing parties, aiming to achieve a new balance of power less detrimental to their interests, opened a window of opportunity that led to congressional approval of important reforms. Particular institutional features of the Chilean political system—party discipline and a balance of power in favor of the executive—also helped the political actors to reach agreement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-167
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Korolczuk

Recent developments show that Poland’s anti-gender campaigns, initiated around 2012 by the Polish Catholic Church and ultraconservative organisations, will continue into the next parliamentary term. While the right-wing populist Law and Justice party has made attacks on ‘gender ideology’ a key element of the critique of individualism and neoliberal globalisation, anti-gender rhetoric is also today being adopted by neo-fascists, who combine a desire to maintain a gender hierarchy and hatred towards ‘sexual degenerates’ with anti-European Union sentiments and Islamophobia.


Intersections ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter Kováts

As early as 1995, Nancy Fraser problematized the shift of justice claims from redistribution towards recognition (Fraser, 1995). Since then, this shift has proven even more pronounced, displacing redistribution claims and reiterating identities (Fraser, 2000). At the same time, we can see how recognition claims in the form of identity politics became overall present in the social justice activism of the Anglo-Saxon countries, stirring heated controversies there, not only from the Right, but from Marxist, liberal and feminist points of view, too. On the European continent, these debates take the form of mostly right-wing movements mobilizing against ‘gender ideology’ and ‘political correctness’, portrayed as imminent danger coming from the US and/or the West. In my paper I critically engage with the widespread matrix of visualizing political positions and fault lines as being on two axes: economic (left and right) and cultural (liberal and authoritarian), and discuss why placing the attitudes towards ‘oppressed minorities’ on the cultural axis cuts the related issues from their embeddedness in material conditions. I point out that the cultural axes, the recognition shift, and the human rights paradigm type of articulation of injustices are going into the same direction, namely a culturalist interpretation of oppressions. Empirically based on the controversies around the Istanbul Convention (2017) and the Gender Studies MA programs (2017-2018) in Hungary and theoretically on Fraser’s concept of ‘perspectivic dualism’ as outlined in her debate with Axel Honneth (Fraser and Honneth, 2003), I argue that this culturalist interpretation both of prevailing injustices and of the right-wing contestations actually reinforces the cultural war framework of the Right rather than overcoming it.


Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Marie Goetz

Global norm-setting to advance women's rights has historically been a fertile area for feminist activism. These efforts in multilateral institutions have also, however, attracted a transnationally coordinated backlash. Initially spearheaded by the Vatican, the right-wing backlash has consolidated into a curious coalition that now includes authoritarian and right-wing populist regimes and bridges significant differences of religious belief, regime type, and ideology. Hostility to feminism has proven to be a valuable point of connection between interests that otherwise have little in common. Some tensions between feminist groups have been exploited by right-wing interests, in particular over sex workers' rights and the use of technology to alter the interpretation and experience of sexuality, reproduction, and gender (transgender issues, surrogacy, sex-selective abortion, and sexuality and disability). This essay reviews a recent instance of right-wing coordination, seen in the nearly successful effort to derail the 2019 meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. It examines the strategic responses of transnational feminist movements to this backlash in multilateral institutions, including their exploration of new transnational policy issues and experimentation with hybrid transnational spaces.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Bohdana Kurylo

Abstract IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.


AmeriQuests ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Angenot

Resentment has been and continues to be a component of numerous ideologies of our century, forming as much a part of the right wing (nationalism, antisemitism) as the left, as it finds its way into various expressions drawn from both socialism and feminism. Resentment relies on basic fallacies: That any superiority that is acquired in the empirical world, in the world such as we know it, is in itself and without any further discussion, a sign of moral "baseness." That the values attached to it by the dominant ones are contemptible in themselves, that is to say as values - and not merely those uneven (tangible and symbolic) benefits that the dominant ones draw from such values. And that any subordinate or inferior situation grants one the status of a victim, that any failure to take advantage in this world can be metamorphosed and justified through grievances directed at the dominant and the privileged groups - thereby permitting a total denial of responsibility. Such an attitude involves an axiological reversal, an Umsturz der Werte, which Nietzsche and Max Scheler already described in divergent ways. It is sometimes difficult to immediately distinguish within different militant ideologies and fallacies of resentment on one hand and on the other the will for justice and emancipation behind which such fallacies hide or with which they are intertwined. This essay describes the idealtype of what I have called the thought of resentment which expresses itself through a specific rhetoric of argumentation (or rather a sophistics) and through a pathos of rancour and grievance. It seems that at the end of this century in industrialized societies - societies disintegrating into suspicious lobbies, obsessed by claims of their "identity," twisting the concept of Rights to suit the bickering market of "rights to difference," societies composed of groups or "tribes" fostering endless litigations based on insurmountable disagreements and a vindictive re-invention of the past - resentment is once again becoming an all-consuming attitude. This trend may be explained by the collapse of Socialism and the utopias of Progress among other determinants. This essay studies and illustrates briefly the axiology and the rhetoric of resentment. It retraces its relationship with the relativism that prevails today in philosophy and the social sciences. It sheds light on some of the mechanics of discussion which have allowed resentment to organize itself into an impregnable sophistics resisting compromise and pluralism. Such sophistics grant resentment the self-justified advantage of indefinitely putting rational debate at bay.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-111
Author(s):  
Tianjiao Jiang

This article discusses both the positive and negative effects of Japan's three nuclear strategies: nuclear hedging, nuclear breakout, and the Korea-Japan Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (KJNWFZ). Nuclear hedging has been the longest established strategy to protect Japan's national security but it will become increasingly unreliable in the coming decades. Nuclear breakout, an alternative strategy, is impractical due to its high costs. In comparison, this article argues that KJNWFZ is the ideal option for Japan's future nuclear strategy. However, in recent years, the Japanese government has maintained the status quo, despite the scale of anti-nuclear protest across the country following the Fukushima crisis. Civilian anti-nuclear does not effectively in-fluence nuclear strategy decision-making, due to a combination of national electoral politics, interests groups, the 'veto players' of the right-wing, and the broader regional security context. In conclusion, the nuclear hedging policy remains the accepted balance of interests supported by decision-makers.


2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document