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Gender and the Rise of the Global Right

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Agnieszka Graff Ratna Kapur Suzanna Danuta Walters Introduction: Gender and the Rise of the Global Right ig feminist sigh. When we started thinking about this special issue, we B knew it was important. The warning signs of a global rightward turn were pretty obvious. But truth be told, it’s worse than we thought. Every- where you turn—even in locales thought safely social democratic if not so- cialist—some version of right-wing populist, xenophobic, demagogic conser- vatism seems to be on the rise, if not fully in place. And if you have any doubt about the way this rightward turn is anchored in and in many places moti- vated by antifeminist misogyny and toxic masculinity, consider the specter of Judith Butler, burned in effigy for advocating “gender ideology,” in Brazil (Jaschik 2017); the assassination of black, bisexual feminist activist Marielle Franco, following the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Roussef (Phillips 2018; see also Sosa, in this issue); the assassination of Gauri Lankesh, Indian journalist, feminist activist, and outspoken critic of the Hindu Right (Mondal 2017); or the women mowed down in Toronto by a man bent on revenge against women he imagined didn’t give him the time or the sex or the love he believed was his to have (Beauchamp 2018). In this special issue of Signs, the contributors address the complex and powerful relationship between gender and the rise of the global Right. Resis- tance to gender equality is not—as some left-wing commentators seem to believe—just one of many aspects of right-wing value systems, a “cultural” aspect of a phenomenon whose roots lie in economic developments and neo- liberalism. Rather, as the articles in this issue make evident, antagonism to- ward feminism is both a sentiment at the heart of the Right’s value system and a political strategy, a platform for organizing and for recruiting massive support. The new populist Right is a reaction to neoliberalism, yes. But it is also a new stage in the culture wars. Gender conservatism has in recent years become the lingua franca of an otherwise diverse global trend. It is what brings together right-wing activists from otherwise distant walks of life: be- lievers and nonbelievers, nationalists and universalists, populists who demon- ize global capital and traditional Reagan/Thatcher-style conservatives with a neocon love for the market. So, while the new global Right is by no means a unified political movement, there does exist a global antifeminism—a coun- [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019, vol. 44, no. 3] © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2019/4403-0001$10.00 This content downloaded from 140.233.002.214 on July 24, 2019 12:03:30 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 542 y Graff, Kapur, and Walters termovement to transnational feminism, an internally diverse global coalition to roll back gender equality. People who live thousands of miles apart and otherwise have little in common are now sharing the same videos on Reddit and 4Chan and signing the same petitions on platforms like CitizenGo: against gay marriage, against abortion rights, against “gender ideology,” against “political correctness.” Meanwhile, the leaders of this transnational antifem- inist (counter)culture are connected in organizations such as the World Con- gress of Families or the more recent Agenda Europe. The new cohesiveness on the Right has been brewing for some time, as we see in Catholic, Evangel- ical Protestant, and Muslim coalitions against the use of “gender” in human rights treaties (Scott 2013; see also Mary Anne Case and Elizabeth Corre- dor’s articles in this issue); in right-wing assaults on Muslims (particularly veiled women) throughout Europe and North America; and even in the use of gender to promote right-wing agendas, such as responses to violence against women that involve the expansion of the carceral state. Since the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, and arguably before, right-wing forces have been collaborating in what Clifford Bob has called the “Baptist- burka network” (2012, 36; see also Buss and Herman 2001; Butler 2004).1 As evidenced by the contributions in this issue, the centrality of gender to right-wing movements and discourses is a complex transnational phenom- enon that manifests in countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Germany, In- dia, Ireland, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. And while the term “global Right” may be contested, it is intended to capture the anti- feminist, antiminority positions that appear to be in ascendance in different geographical locations, including in liberal democracies. The global Right is political and ideological, and it lends momentum to—though it is by no means synonymous with—recent populist movements. Its politics are deployed in di- verse historical, economic, cultural, and religious contexts. It emerges as a mi- sogynist, racist, antifeminist attack in online social networks, such as the “Red Pill” phenomenon in the United States (see Dignam and Rohlinger); it is ar- ticulated in the antigender ideologies of the Vatican (see articles by Case and Corredor); and it is voiced in the conservative political opposition to, and take- down of, Brazil’s first female president (see Sosa). 1 This said, minorities, women, and queer persons have been mobilizing to claim these same tradition as their own. Muslim women have been breaking laws banning the veil to trigger court challenges in the European Court of Human rights. Muslim women were the drivers behind a constitutional court case striking down the practice of triple talaq (or irrevocable divorce) in In- dia while also opposing the Hindu Right’s efforts to criminalize and punish Muslim men who engage in the practice. Christian lesbians and gays in Uganda have been challenging American Evangelical Christian efforts to criminalize homosexuality there. This complexity also comes through in a number of the contributions in this issue. This content downloaded from 140.233.002.214 on July 24, 2019 12:03:30 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). S I G N S Spring 2019 y 543 While not all of those on the right are religious, it is certainly true that the religious Right has gone global with impressive impetus, maturing in terms of strategies, goals, and funding. In 2013, twenty US and European right- wing religious campaigners began pulling together an agenda of “achievable goals” (Datta 2018, 6). Agenda Europe, as this group calls itself, has since grown to include over one hundred organizations from thirty European countries. The network’s ideas, aims, and ambitions are those of religious ex- tremists, but explicitly religious language is strategically displaced by talk of rights and the seemingly neutral discourse of natural law (Datta 2018, 10). Agenda Europe’s plan includes not only overturning existing laws related to sexuality (LGBT rights) and reproduction (contraception, abortion, all as- sisted reproductive technologies) but also the right to divorce, the use of embryonic stem cells, euthanasia, and organ transplantation. Their strategy, which strongly resembles that of the US antichoice movement as described by Carol Mason in this issue, is to reframe the conflict using the strategies of their opponents. This involves positioning themselves as victims, “defenders of faith struggling against intolerant, cultural revolutionaries, the concept of discrimination and intolerance against Christians, or ‘Christianophobia’” (Datta 2018, 15). Among its strategic recommendations, Agenda Europe’s manifesto explicitly mentions “colonization of human rights”: that is, re- framing ultraconservative religious positions on sex and reproduction to sound like human rights language. The global dimension of this new wave of right-wing strategizing consists not only in the building of transnational networks but also in the way these networks choose their targets: with an ear for the local legal culture but an eye for the larger goals ahead. The global antigender Right imagines itself to be the rival of progressive forces in the United Nations and the European Union; thus, much of its strategy consists in repeating the steps by which fem- inism went international (and institutional) in the seventies and eighties and beyond. Elizabeth Corredor’s essay in this issue aptly discusses these dynam- ics through the lens of countermovement theory. Of course, it is not just religious fundamentalists who elected Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Donald Trump in the United States. The recent triumphs of the populist Right are not exclu- sively a religious phenomenon. Rather, they are an effect of remarkable con- fluence of various strands of the Right. Gender has been key to this process. In the United States, this plays out in a common conviction on the part of the angry white men of the alt-right, many of them atheist, that feminism is destroying humanity. The alt-right has found common cause with Chris- tian fundamentalists in different parts of the world and has mobilized fears and anxieties produced by neoliberal reforms (for an extended version of this This content downloaded from 140.233.002.214 on July 24, 2019 12:03:30 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 544 y Graff, Kapur, and Walters argument, see Korolczuk and Graff 2018). Antifeminism is where Milo Yian- nopoulos can meet Pope Francis. In other words, cynical followers of the alt- right can have a gay leader, and Catholics can have a relatively progressive pope, but there is one place where these trends converge: they see feminism as an enemy.
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