Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe

Mobilizing against Equality

Roman Kuhar, David Paternotte

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786600011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After decades of steady progress in terms of gender and sexual rights, several parts of Europe are facing new waves of resistance to a so-called ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender theory’. Opposition to progressive gender equality is manifested in challenges to marriage equality, abortion, reproductive technologies, gender mainstreaming, sex education, sexual liberalism, transgender rights, antidiscrimination policies and even to the notion of gender itself. This book examines how an academic concept of gender, when translated by religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, can become a mobilizing tool for, and the target of, social movements. How can we explain religious discourses about sex difference turning intro massive street demonstrations? How do forms of organization and protest travel across borders? Who are the actors behind these movements? This collection is a transnational and comparative attempt to better understand anti-gender mobilizations in Europe. It focuses on national manifestations in eleven European countries, including Russia, from massive street protests to forms of resistance such as email bombarding and street vigils. It examines the intersection of religious politics with rising populism and nationalistic anxieties in contemporary Europe.

Chapter 1

“Gender ideology” in movement: Introduction

David Paternotte and Roman Kuhar¹

Piazza San Francesco, Bologna, Italy, 5 October 2014. A handful of people are standing on a square, two meters from each other, with a book in their hands. They read in silence for one hour. They claim to defend the freedom of expression and combat the destruction of the human and of civilization. Like them, a few thousand other citizens have gathered on the same day in more than 100 Italian cities.² This group, called the Sentinelle in Piedi (Standing Guards), first appeared in 2013 to oppose the Scalfarotto Bill against homophobia. Since then, such rallies have mushroomed across Italy and have become one of the landmark modes of action of opponents to LGBT rights and “gender ideology” in the country. Participants in these vigils present themselves as the heirs of Gandhi or Socrates, that is, as the victims of political abuse, and members of a movement of resistance. Standing on a public square, they refer to other forms of citizen protests occurring at the time, such as the Arab Spring and the protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square.

Kongresni trg, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 12 December 2015. Eight days before the second referendum on marriage equality in Slovenia. A group of about 70 people line up in straight lines with about two meters between each of them on one of Ljubljana’s largest squares. They are reading a book in silence. The group is called Stražarji (The Guards), and they present themselves as advocates for freedom of speech, thought and conscience. They are instructed not to engage in debate with other people and not to react to any provocation. The Guards claim to be “sick of the fact” that “gender theory” activists impose their own will and a way of life upon them. According to their own leaflet, they are the guards of “a natural family as a union of a man, a woman and children” and of “matrimony union between a man and a woman”.³ They also defend the right of a child to have a father and a mother, the respect for male and female identities and the parents’ freedom to raise their children as they wish. Unlike other protesters who usually occupy the public space by protesting loudly, they demonstrate in silence, as they believe that their consciousness can speak up only in silence.⁴ However, they did not want their action to be unheard: In a press statement they asked the media to report on the event, which was part of the referendum campaign.

These two examples show the diffusion of specific modes of action across Europe. In both cases, demonstrators claim to defend the freedom of speech, thought and conscience. They contest gender equality and LGBT rights and invoke the intriguing notions of “gender ideology”, “gender theory” or “(anti)genderism”. Such mobilizations are not unique. They have spread across Europe in recent years. In fact, Slovenian activists were inspired by Italian activists, and Italian activists were themselves inspired by a French group, the Veilleurs (Vigilist), which they imported to their own country and hybridized. Born in 2013 in Paris, this group initially gathered a few (mostly Catholic) youngsters who wanted to oppose the same-sex marriage bill and promote “human ecology”. Reclaiming a tradition of non-violent resistance, they organize candlelit sit-ins in public squares, during which they sing and read extracts from books by authors as diverse as Gramsci, Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Saint-Exupéry (Lindell 2014). Unlike the French, the Italian and Slovenian protesters stood and remained silent. Their movement became more important than the French one and was later emulated in France with the foundation of the Veilleurs debout (Standing Vigilist). These finally took the name of their Italian counterparts: the Sentinelles (Garbagnoli 2016a).

The silent reading of books is only one form of action in the repertoire of a new movement emerging in Europe, which claims to oppose gender and mobilizes against some of its most pernicious effects. As this book will discuss, these campaigns, which all bear a striking resemblance, have emerged in different parts of the continent. They share discourses, strategies and modes of action across borders; observe what each other is doing; and are increasingly connected transnationally (Hodžić and Bijelić 2014; Paternotte 2015). These similarities are the starting point of this book, which attempts to understand the origin of these mobilizations, their concrete manifestations on the ground and their diffusion. Our focus is on national manifestations of a transnationally circulating movement against “gender ideology”. In this book, we want to shed light on and better understand campaigns against gender in Europe today.

Scholars have described similar mobilizations against gender equality and/or sexual citizenship in other parts of the world. The objectives and the modes of action of the American Christian Right have long been studied, leading to fruitful academic debates on notions such as counter-movements and culture wars. Research has focused both on the history and the development of this movement (Diamond 1989; Liebman and Wuthnow 1983; Williams 2010) and on its influence on specific issues such as women’s rights, especially abortion (Saurette and Gordon 2015), and LGBT rights (Fetner 2008; Herman 1997; Stone 2012). Latin American scholars have also long produced important work (Vaggione 2010). This is particularly the case of Argentine sociologist Juan Marco Vaggione, who has examined the deprivatization of religion and the “reactive politicization” of gender and sexual politics by religious movements in the region, following José Casanova’s seminal insights (1994). Vaggione (2005, 2012) claims this process has been accompanied by an NGOization of religious actors and by a secularization of their discourse. More recently, scholarship on Africa has documented the export of the American culture wars (Kaoma 2009, 2012), often with a focus on Protestant Churches, as well as the intersections with concerns about national sovereignty and traditional authenticity (Anderson 2011; van Klinken 2013; van Klinken and Zebracki 2015).

This scholarship insists on the role of conservative understandings of religion as a catalyser for opposition to gender and sexual equalities, as well as on an ongoing process that seeks to reaffirm religion in public space. They show as well that these two projects often intersect with issues related to nationalism and a defence of national sovereignty (Ayoub 2016; Gryzmala-Busse 2015). This was dramatically illustrated by the rejection of the Colombia peace agreement in a referendum in 2016. Indeed, according to several observers,⁵ debates about peace have intersected with an “anti-gender panic” promoted by the same actors who opposed the deal with the FARC.

Until now, there has been very limited research on such mobilizations in Europe (Ozzano and Giorgi 2015; Verloo 2017). This is partly due to their recent character, which have mostly developed since the 2010s. This absence, however, is also explained by the predominance of a teleological account of gender and sexual politics in the region. Scholars, observers and actors alike were generally convinced that Europe was on an unstoppable way towards “full” gender equality and sexual citizenship. They assumed that opposition was largely foreign to the European experience or could only subsist as reminder of the past, primarily in Eastern Europe or in (Catholic) countries such as Italy or Ireland. Largely successful demonstrations (Paternotte 2017a) such as the French Manif pour Tous came therefore as a surprise and forced these observers to amend their grand narrative.

Furthermore, when they exist, the accounts of such mobilizations are generally bound by state boundaries, presenting these mobilizations as uniquely national. Falling into the trap of methodological nationalism (Raison politiques 2014), they explain these campaigns by focusing on national factors and interpret them as national phenomena. This was particularly visible in the French case, where an abundant amount of research has been published since 2014. Indeed, despite a few exceptions, French mobilizations against same-sex marriage are generally understood as another French exception, overlooking the similarities with forms of resistance elsewhere, as well as their anteriority in countries like Spain, Italy, Croatia or Slovenia (Paternotte 2015). Elzbieta Korolczuk denounces a similar limitation in the coverage of Polish debates, concluding that “there is evidence however that recent mobilisation against ‘genderisation’, ‘gender ideology’ or the ‘gender lobby’ is not only a local trend” (Korolczuk 2014, 5).

Finally, while there is a growing literature on religion, gender and sexuality in Europe, it tends to focus on Islam, asking whether it can be combined with an embrace of gender and sexuality equality. Moreover, these accounts tend not to cover religious movements but focus either on individual faith experiences or on religious authorities. One must also take notice of a public policy literature on “morality politics”, but this often does not disentangle the various religious actors in play and often merely considers religion as a hindrance to more permissive policies without engaging with religion as an object of study (e.g. Engeli, Green-Pedersen and Thorup Larsen 2012; Knill, Adam and Hurka 2015; Knill, Preidel and Nebel 2014). Similarly, the fast-developing scholarship on gender, sexuality and populism (e.g. Lazaridis and Campani 2016; Scrinzi 2014; Spierings, Zaslove, Mugge and de Lange 2015) chiefly focuses on populist radical right-wing parties and their appeal to public opinion, and engages with civil society organizations to a much lesser extent (Aslanidis 2016).

Against these various shortcomings, this book focuses on campaigns and movements against gender in Europe and insists on the transnational nature of these discourses and strategies. It argues that these mobilizations share common theoretical roots in what is called “gender ideology” or – in some countries – “gender theory” and/or “anti-genderism”. At the same time, while emphasizing cross-border similarities, it examines local and national processes of reception and looks at the specific forms taken by these movements on the ground, as well as at the reasons why they did not develop in other contexts.

In this introductory chapter we first look at “gender ideology” as a specific discourse and expose its origins and its main tenets. Then, we examine it as a strategy and discuss how the movements in question both intersect with debates within the Catholic Church and with the recent wave of right-wing populism in Europe. Finally, we explain the structure of the book and account for the selection of the national case studies.

“GENDER IDEOLOGY” AS A DISCOURSE

“Gender ideology is destructive, obscurantist, anti-social, anti-popular as much as it is anti-natural”.⁶ This intriguing quote can be found in a brochure on “gender ideology” which can be freely downloaded on the website of La Manif pour Tous, the movement which opposed same-sex marriage in France in 2012–2013. The brochure aims to warn the French against the overlooked dangers of gender, which – as indicated by this quote – would represent a major threat for European societies.

Contrary to the suggestion of some observers, this discourse does not constitute a French exception. An extensive body of thought has been elaborated over the years, and a common theoretical framework can be identified, although different arguments are stressed in different countries. It is crucial to bear in mind that “gender ideology” does not designate gender studies, but is a term initially created to oppose women’s and LGBT rights activism as well as the scholarship deconstructing essentialist and naturalistic assumptions about gender and sexuality. Erasing fierce controversies within gender and sexuality studies and the complex interplay between activism and the academy, it regards gender as the ideological matrix of a set of abhorred ethical and social reforms, namely sexual and reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and adoption, new reproductive technologies, sex education, gender mainstreaming, protection against gender violence and others. Ignoring the history of the notion, “gender ideology” authors rely heavily on John Money’s problematic experiments and erroneously consider Judith Butler as the mother of “gender ideology”. Curiously, they put together Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Monique Wittig, Germain Greer, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Wilhelm Reich, sometimes even Herbert Marcuse, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Engels. In brief, “gender ideology” offers an interpretative frame, which opposes the adoption of these reforms, and attributes them to different sorts of actors under an alleged gender conspiracy (Montfort 2011; Peeters 2013; Scala 2011; Trillo-Figueroa 2009).

According to these authors, “gender ideology” threatens most societies, especially in the West, and endangers mankind. Gender would indeed lead to an anthropological revolution because it negates sexual differences and gender complementarity, “thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family” (Pope Francis 2016, 56). As Marguerite Peeters, one of the most translated theorists of “gender ideology”, argues:

Analysis will show that, on behalf of a citizen and secular interpretation of equality, solely understood in terms of power and rights, the revolutionary process of gender undermines – culturally, politically and legally – the constitutive identity of man and woman as persons: their identity as spouses, their wonderful complementarity and unity in love, their specific vocation and educational role, masculinity and femininity, marriage and the family, the anthropological structure of any human being, built on a given, received and shared love. (Peeters 2013, 9)

The development of this ideology would stem from the propagation of hedonism, laicism, relativism and individualism in Western societies, as well as from misconceptions of feminism. It intersects with Jean-Paul II’s “culture of death”, the ideology which lies behind acts such as abortion, contraception and euthanasia and would be opposed to the “culture of life” promoted by the Church (Grzebalska and Soós 2016; Vaggione 2012). This leads Peeters to conclude that gender “belongs to a process of negation typical of the mystery of evil, which has engaged humanity, since its origins and all along its history, in a triple perversion: a disordered search for power, pleasure and knowledge as ends in themselves” (Peeters 2013, 73).

This project is said to be particularly threatening to children, who would be indoctrinated from very early age in schools, often without their parents’ awareness. Gender would also have severe consequences on their development, not the least by blurring anthropological references concerning the sexes. As part of a critique of “sexual permissiveness” and the legacy of May 68, “gender ideology” is sometimes accused of encouraging the hypersexualization of children as well as paedophilia.

Anti-gender campaigns can also be read as a project of alternative knowledge production, which aims to dismantle ...