Resumo da Conferência Inagural e Nota biográfica da Conferencista

Anti-gender politics and feminist responses to this trend in a comparative perspective por Elżbieta Korolczuk

Resumo

Over the past decade, anti-gender campaigns have proliferated globally, becoming a key political cleavage in contemporary politics. Religious fundamentalists, ultraconservative civil society organizations, and right-wing politicians are working in concert to redefine the meaning of equality and human rights, and to undermine the intersectional understanding of gender equality that has been promoted by feminist activists and thinkers. In this manner, the anti-gender forces frequently appropriate the language of human rights in order to denounce minorities and to confer distinctive protection upon already privileged groups. The specific context in which they operate determines the particular goals and strategies employed, but at the core of this project are the following objectives: opposition to gender theory and social constructivism, limitation of minority rights (including those of women, the LGBTQ+ community, migrants, and ethnic minorities), and reinstatement of clear gendered and racial hierarchies within societies.

In response to this trend, feminist actors have mobilized in many countries and internationally. They have organized mass protests, built coalitions across progressive movements, pushed for political changes, and built a knowledge base on the roots and effects of anti-gender politics. In this presentation, I will examine anti-gender politics and feminist responses to this trend, with a particular focus on two European countries: Poland and Sweden which are frequently regarded as contrasting cases in terms of gender equality and the quality of democracy. I will show that although the roots of anti-genderism and the forms it takes in these two contexts differ, there are nevertheless numerous similarities in the ways in which right-wing forces operate in Poland and Sweden. Moreover, there is much to be learned from the feminist strategies employed by the Polish feminist movement.

Nota biográfica

Elżbieta Korolczuk, Professor in sociology, works at the American Studies Center, Warsaw University and at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her research interests involve social movements, politics of reproduction as well as right-wing populism and mobilizations against “gender”. She published numerous articles and book chapters, as well as two volumes on social movements and civil society in Central Eastern Europe: Civil Society Revisited: Lessons from Poland co-edited with Kerstin Jacobsson (Berghahn Books, 2017), Rebellious Parents. Parental Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia co-edited with Katalin Fábián (Indiana University Press, 2017), and a book Bunt kobiet. Czarne Protesty i Strajki Kobiet [Women’s Rebellion. Black Protests and Women’s Strikes] co-authored with Beata Kowalska, Jennifer Ramme and Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez (European Solidarity Centre, 2019). Most recent publications include a monograph Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment written with Agnieszka Graff (2021, Routledge), which received The Bronislaw Malinowski Award in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America in 2022. She is also a commentator and a long-time women’s and human rights activist.