Anti-Gender World Building

Anti-gender movements are well-funded, coordinated networks aiming to weaken civil and human rights, reinforce sex/gender hierarchies, and bring about an illiberal international order. CSW70 confirmed that progressive actors possess significant understanding of their opponents’ tactics and resources. This knowledge must now translate into coordinated action that is bold enough to match the scale of what we are facing: a world-building project that seeks to construct a global order founded on hierarchy, exclusion, and the institution of anti-democratic norms.

Reflections from CSW70

The 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) convened at a moment of intensifying contestation over gender equality and women’s rights. What it also revealed, however, is that civil society, diplomats, and progressive governments have gained a strong understanding of the actors, funding channels, and strategies driving these contestations. Now that there is a stronger collective understanding of what these actors are doing and how, we must not lose sight of the question of why: to what ends are certain actors seeking to omit the recognition of sexual and reproductive rights, gender diversity, or the existence of multiple forms of family? This article argues that the »why« question demands attention to the colonial power relations and interests served by the ideologies and agendas promoted by anti-gender actors. Understanding anti-gender politics as a world-building project, a deliberate effort to construct a new social and geopolitical order premised on hierarchy and exclusion, is what makes it possible to grasp the long-term objectives of organizations that position themselves as »pro-family«.

Drawing on the author’s reflections as a researcher who has studied transnational anti-gender politics for more than a decade, analysis presented Link and title points toward four interconnected priorities for progressive actors: 

• first, translating empirical monitoring into deeper power analysis, asking whose interests anti-gender agendas serve and what world they seek to build, primarily by centring colonial and decolonial perspectives;
• second, building cross-movement solidarity with intention and care, reclaiming narratives and the political imagination from those who seek to narrow it, and sustaining the progressive civil society organizations on the front lines of this struggle;
• third, investing in cities and municipalities as underutilized but vital frontlines of resistance and innovation;
• and fourth, paying urgent attention to bilateral diplomacy as an underexamined but increasingly critical arena of anti-gender politics.

Haley McEwen, PhD, is a Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). Her research examines transnational anti-gender politics and movements, with a focus on their implications for feminist and LGBTIQ+ rights, global governance, and diplomacy. She has over a decade of experience working at the intersection of academic research and advocacy on gender justice.