Gender and the Rise of the Global Right

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 conservatism 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 neoliberalism. Rather, as the articles in this issue make evident, antagonism toward 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-

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 antifeminist (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 phenomenon 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 antifeminist, 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 diverse historical, economic, cultural, and religious contexts. It emerges as a misogynist, racist, antifeminist attack in online social networks, such as the “Red Pill” phenomenon in the United States (see Dignam and Rohlinger); it is articulated 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.

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 extremists, 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 feminism 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 exclusively 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

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. Arguably, at one level, resistance to gender equality is a source of the Right’s popularity and credibility among the grass roots. Maligning “corrupt elites” and opposing them to the virtuous masses is the essence of populism. By claiming that the corrupt elites are imposing a “gender agenda” on “the people,” the populist Right has been able to join forces with religious fundamentalists. No wonder pussy grabbing failed to disqualify Trump as a presidential candidate—it was read as a sign of his ordinariness, of being “just like us” and unlike the “liberal elites.” In fact, as Pierce Dignam and Deana Rohlinger’s article in this issue demonstrates, Trump’s misogyny mobilized men active on the “Red Pill” Reddit forum to view themselves as a political movement, not just a cultural one. Populism and misogyny have fed on each other. That is why both are doing so well today. At the same time, the Right uses legal measures—particularly the discourse of rights and law reform—to advance its agenda. In a number of countries, the right wing has sought to occupy and conﬁgure the language of gender equality in ways that perpetuate racist and exclusionary agendas. As Carol Mason’s essay in this issue illustrates, the discourse of rights is used to advance deeply conservative agendas, as in the context of the transnational pro-life movement promoted by Christian organizations. In her discussion of Ire- land, Mason traces how the pro-life lobby skillfully deploys the language of rights, including the right to life or to maternal health, to demonstrate its pro-women credentials, which in turn has helped the Catholic Church to expand health-care facilities for impoverished groups. Similarly, the Hindu Right in India has argued that women in minority religious communities need to be treated just like all other women (read: Hindu women). By the same token, the Vatican has supported campaigns to end violence against women and has encouraged the inclusion of women in positions of authority, while at the same time asserting that women and men are different and promoting a notion of harmony within the family that is based on gender essentialism and denies women’s autonomy (Buss 1998). In this pursuit, right- wing advocacy has been able to utilize and build upon forms of feminist advocacy based on gender essentialism, especially in the area of violence against women, to justify the difference in the treatment of women (Otto 2015, 299). Such interventions have also been implicated in producing racial and cultural exclusions; reinforcing stereotypes; and in turn enabling right-wing, populist, or nationalist positions on gender (Puar 2007; Farris 2017; Kapur 2018).

This complex and nuanced politics on gender is evident in several submis- sions in this issue. Atreyee Sen’s analysis considers how right-wing groups such as the Shiv Sena (Footsoldiers of Shiva) in Mumbai are “empowering” women through self-defense initiatives that include arming poor, underpriv- ileged women workers in urban settings with kitchen knives as a strategy for combating “India’s rape crisis.” This complexity also forms the basis for Josen Masangkay Diaz’s argument on the authoritarian, masculinist, and decolonial ideology of Duterte’s policies. It is an ideology that sanctions gender violence at home while foregrounding and opposing violence against Filipina women elsewhere to aggressively advance Duterte’s vision of national sovereignty and postcolonial autonomy. Gender has since become a central device in international governance, advanced through neoliberal governmentality and the market. In this context, the emergence of the “New Filipina” has not only become a mech- anism for extending feminized labor into the service of the global market, it has also been used to reafﬁrm women’s roles in the service of “the welfare of the human being” and as constituting the “heart and soul” of the Filipino family. There are similarities across the globe in terms of how the Right addresses gender and sexuality—masculinities in particular—and how it deploys fear, violence, and threats to serve its antigender ideology. Its efforts are invariably directed at purging women of sexual agency, degrading sexual diversity, banishing overt expressions of sexuality, and asserting particularly muscular and virile forms of masculinity. These efforts are directed in part at setting up the model of the ideal woman. In the context of Brazil, Joseph Jay Sosa discusses the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the ﬁrst female president, through tropes of the terrorist, the mother, and the killjoy, as they were in- voked by her conservative detractors at different moments of her political career. Where race and religion are involved, the Right is intent on representing the majority race as under threat by minority groups, and on producing narrow, rigid, and immutable interpretations of scripture and mythology in order to oppose feminism, gender diversity, and the recognition of nonnor- mative sexualities. Presumably this strategy is also designed to erase more pluralist understandings of faith that accommodate sexual, gender, and religious diversity. Banu Gökarıksel, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith bring a nuanced discussion of the interrelations between gender and difference. They use the concept of demographic fever dreams, which predicts an apocalyptic event where alterity, either in the form of a lesbian farmer in the rural United States or Muslim “Romeos” luring unsuspecting Hindu women in

India into marriage for the purposes of converting them, is presented as a threat, as something that seeks to destroy the social and cultural cohesion of the dominant group through a demographic explosion. The rise of the Right globally, however, is not an unequivocally negative space for women. In fact, some of the key ﬁgures of the global antigender movement—conservative Catholic advocates Gabriele Kuby and Margue- rite Peeters, for instance—are women. Gender conservatism is, above all, an antimodern discourse, feeding on a sense of loss and nostalgia for a more peaceful, harmonious time. At times the notion of return to tradition opens spaces for women who feel they have been rendered invalid or illegitimate by secular, urban elites who have set up gender in opposition to religion or faith. In Turkey, which adopted a strict model of separation between religion and the state from the time of Kamal Attatürk, the government has since opened up space for practitioners of faith, especially under the premier- ship of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As Gökarıksel, Neubert, and Smith discuss, in Erdogăn’s Islamist Turkey, the veil is no longer an obstacle for access to education, public space, or employment. At the same time, the authors focus on the imposition of a more austere, homogenous Sunni Islamic code and the reduction of women to victims in need of protection from the state or a male guardian. Political agency on the part of women—on display when they poured into the streets responding to Erdoğan’s call to the people to stop the 2016 coup attempt mounted by secular elements within the Turkish Armed Forces—has gone largely unrecognized. The complex relationship between gender and religious conservatism is raised by Sonja Luehrmann, who discusses how women in Russia are seeking abortion advice from counselors aligned with or belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church. Using an anthropological feminist lens, Luehrmann traces the negotiations within these interactions and demonstrates how women ar- rive at decisions that at one level may strengthen the church’s position on abortion while also strengthening alternative familial arrangements that are based on intergenerational ties between women. To say that the Right em- powers women may sound absurd, but empowerment is precisely what the women involved in right-wing movements claim to feel: a sense of strength, dignity, and mission drawn from participation in a collective action. The concept of women’s empowerment has thus been successfully hijacked by right- wing movements and ideologies and has drawn many women to the Right. Sen’s piece similarly draws attention to how right-wing groups in India cultivate an urban paranoia that tags the other—namely migrants, Muslims, and asylum seekers—as rapists to fashion a populist politics around Hindu and poor women’s empowerment. The use of self-defense techniques, such as carrying a kitchen knife in the public arena, transects with feminist concerns

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 547 around women’s mobility in the modern urban public sphere. Through such techniques, the Right is able to position itself as a popular guardian of Hindu women. These women are attributed with autonomy, agency, and a collective sense of empowerment, engaged in fighting violence against women, a central component of feminist politics. The global Right also crafts and appeals to a virulent hypermasculinity that plays out differently in different historical and political contexts as well as different forums. As Dignam and Rohlinger demonstrate in the context of the alt-right’s Red Pill movement in the United States, a toxic masculinity is mobilized into political action to defend male supremacy, which includes a notion of racial superiority, from the “threat” posed by feminists. Adher- ents push back against charges that men are responsible for perpetuating gender inequality, arguing instead that feminism has diminished men’s social, political, and economic opportunities, resulting in their oppression. What was once perceived as a personal philosophy is galvanized into a force for political change. And this change has been viscerally demonstrated in the elec- tion of Donald Trump, a “real” man who brags about sexual assault. Similarly, Gökarıksel, Neubert, and Smith demonstrate how the experi- ence of vulnerability by dominant groups, through the perceived threat posed by the racial, religious, or sexual other, contributes to the ascendency of strong- man masculinities and the retrenchment of racial and nationalist ideologies in Turkey, India, and the United States. In the same way, as Diaz illustrates, Duterte’s toxic, visceral, and ferociously violent masculinity in the Philippines represents drug pushers as racialized adversaries, even as he employs anticolonial, anti-Western rhetoric. The latter was employed not only in the rape and murder of Jacqueline Hamill, an Australian missionary killed in Davao in 2016, but also in Duterte’s expression of regret that he did not have his turn with her first. In the same spirit, Duterte indicates that militant women who are fighting against his regime should be taught a lesson by being shot in the vagina to render them “useless” as women. Global right-wing agendas also rely on a labyrinth of networks, including social media and more militant, aggressive, and misogynistic populist movements, to develop and pursue their brand of gender politics. They intervene and work with dominant gender, sexual, and cultural norms to produce a nationalist, antifeminist, gender/heteronormative, xenophobic, and antiminority majoritarianism. There is an ideological intersection between these more militant elements of the Right and those who seek to increase their presence gradually and through rationalist discourse. Sen’s discussion illustrates this intersection, where the Right manages women’s sense of anxiety and paranoia (or “urbanoia,” as she terms it) by generating a retributive model of justice and armed activism that has a veneer of feminist concerns related to sexual

violence and women’s work in the city. This strategy can be regarded as a “legitimate paranoia” that emerges from poor women’s daily experiences of sexual vulnerability and harassment. This intersection is also illustrated in Mason’s contribution on antiabortion activism. Antiabortion campaigns such as Abolish Human Abortion in the United States unapologetically deploy racial and religious references, including abortion-as-black genocide or abortion-as-Holocaust to suggest that the plight of aborted fetuses is akin to the historical legacies of slavery and anti-Semitism. This framing justifies violence against the alleged culprits and is intended both to win over African Americans and simultaneously to target women of color, who are cast as perpetrators of abortion and facilitators of anti-American values. On the Right, the commitment to gender conservatism is solid and the strategies increasingly sophisticated: the Right has not only put gender (“family values”) at the center of its political agenda, it has managed to enlist women as key fighters against gender equality. Meanwhile, pundits on the liberal Left are having second thoughts about women’s rights. They tend to dis- miss feminism as a distraction or warn that it is a liability, part of “culture” and marginal to “real” politics. Articles in this issue should make them think again. As Mason demonstrates, the emerging pro-woman rhetoric in antiabortion politics in Ireland, Russia, and the United States—and its protection- ist approach toward gender—has moved beyond the confines of abortion. Significantly, it has been used to foster the larger transnational politics of the Right. Mason points to how pro-woman rhetoric is deployed to secure cultural and political gains for the Right, including resistance to efforts by the transgender and LGBTQ community to complicate understandings of women and womanhood. The pushback from the Right is intended not only to reinstate the gender binary but also to produce an apocalyptic panic over the looming threat posed by “predators preying specifically on white women and girls” (Mason, in this issue). The Right specializes in foregrounding women as victims and foregrounding the racial identity—the whiteness—of the victim. Whiteness, as well as gender, is represented as needing protection. And as Luehrmann and Mason both point out, in the context of antiabortion counseling in Russia, the church, antiabortion groups, and state-run health centers collaborate to pursue a pronatalist, pro-woman nationalism. Its impact can be witnessed in the speed with which a largely atheist, nonreligious, proabortion country has been transformed, partly through right-wing resolve, into a religious, antiabortion, “white-first” society. This discussion demonstrates how, in transnational terms, the Right has become a significant player in gender politics. It resists the denaturalizing,

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 549 deconstructive analysis of gender and sex in critical, feminist, and queer schol- arship and directs its efforts toward reinstating dominant essentialized gender and sexual norms. These efforts are often coupled with assertions of racial, ethnic, or religious majoritarianism. There is no one formula in responding to this right-wing ideological creep, but one thing is for certain: feminist and other progressive groups need to seriously engage with this phenomenon. The compilation of articles for this special issue is one such effort. As the editors of this collection, each of us has witnessed the rise of the global Right within the context of the intellectual and geographical spaces we inhabit. As a way of contextualizing and engaging the arguments set out in this collection, we discuss them in relation to our respective contexts.

Poland: Gendering right-wing populism For anyone interested in the rise of the populist Right and its complex links to the global antigender movement, Poland is a dream research site. The 2015 electoral triumph of Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party was a shock to the liberal Left (and to many on the moderate Right), just as Trump’svic- tory was to progressive Americans. Since then, many commentators have tried to understand the root causes of populism’s victory. Many agree that neoliberal governance, economic precarity, and the resulting resentment of masses of people are to blame; others continue to defend these policies and blame only “nationalism.” Neither camp has paid attention to the role played by gender issues, which are generally believed to be “cultural” rather than political matters, or dismissed as mere “identity politics.” Paradoxically, the Right has been far more clear on why and how gender issues matter politically and far more effective than the Left at using them to their advantage. In Poland, the Right mobilized successfully around gender and has continued to roll back women’s rights since its victory. Gender has rightly been described as the “symbolic glue” bringing populism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism together (Grzebalska and Pető 2017, 165). The triumph of the populist Right and its lasting popularity in Poland has clearly been caused by a combination of cultural and economic factors. One can see it, in broad terms, as a reaction to neoliberalism: not just the harsh- ness and speed of market reforms of the 1990s but also the arrogance of the country’s elites during the transition to capitalism—the refusal to ease or even acknowledge the human costs of systemic transformation. To bring gender into the picture, we must follow Nancy Fraser (2009) and others in acknowl- edging the gendered dimension of neoliberalism and the weakness of mainstream feminism in opposing it. In Eastern Europe, Fraser’s argument rings especially true. We did not just dismantle the welfare state inherited from state

socialism—we destroyed it. The process was a gendered one because the transition to a market economy involved rolling back social provisions in the realm of care. The burden of child rearing—and of caring for the elderly, the sick, and people with disabilities—became invisible labor performed, of course, mostly by women. Frustration with this state of affairs and the promise of a universal child subsidy program were important causes of Kac- zyński’s right-wing victory. As the articles included in this volume demonstrate, gender conservatism is not just racism’s younger sibling and not just a “cultural” aspect of the rise of the Right. Hostility to feminism has become the way millions of people worldwide respond to the very real inequalities and fears produced by neoliberalism and globalization. In a 2014 speech, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called his project “illiberal democracy” (Simon 2014), and in the fall of 2015, upon learn- ing of his party’s electoral victory, Kaczyński promised to build “a Budapest in Warsaw.” Following the example of Orbán’s Fidesz Party, Kaczyński’s Law and Justice Party took control of the public media, paralyzed the Con- stitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court, and proceeded to take over institutions of culture and education, including universities. The essence of populist authoritarianism is that the ruling party presents itself as the only legitimate representation of “the people” (also referred to as “the sover- eign”—a word that precludes pluralism), while the opposition is presented as the people’s enemy, a corrupt and arrogant elite. A New York Times com- mentator described this new system as “competitive authoritarianism, a form of European single-party rule that retains a veneer of democracy while skew- ing the contest sufﬁciently to ensure it is likely to yield only one result” (Co- hen 2018). In both Poland and Hungary the antiliberal counterrevolution has led to the establishment of majoritarian nationalism. Today, little is left of liberal democracy, or its core institutions (tripartite system of government with independent courts, freedom of speech, and independent media) and values (pluralism, diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, LGBT rights, gender equality). The Polish war on gender of 2012–14 paved the way to these developments. It is now clear that powerful links exist between Eastern European illiber- alism and the transnational antigender movement (see Korolczuk and Graff 2018; and Case’s and Corredor’s articles in this issue). As Weronika Grze- balska and Andrea Pető (2017) demonstrate, there is a synergy on several levels: ideology, values, rhetoric, and political imagination but also strategy and social policy. When the Right attacks “the establishment,” when it de- monizes the EU, when it describes the West as a seat of corruption and moral decay, it does so in heavily gendered terms. Feminists, LGBTQ activists, and

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 551 human rights NGOs that support them are positioned as enemies of “the people” (who are imagined as naturally and authentically gender conservative). Women’s rights groups are presented as foreign-steered projects if not simply foreign agents, an import from the decadent West. Trump’s “America ﬁrst,” Orbán’s “Hungary ﬁrst,” Kaczyński’s “there is only one Poland”—these calls for national revival and unity invariably include appeals to “traditional family values”: a sturdy masculinity, a maternal femininity, heterosexuality as the only acceptable norm, and a model of par- enting based on paternal authority and discipline. As a comparatively homo- geneous society in terms of ethnicity and race, post-1989 Poland generated a national chauvinism that is more gendered than most as well as a strongly po- liticized homophobia (Graff 2009, 2010). The so-called war against gender was a continuation of earlier discourses and tactics, but its intensity was stag- gering and its political consequences are rarely acknowledged. Antigender sermons in Polish churches, antigender TV shows, alarmist publications about children in danger of “sexualization,” antigender petitions circulated by concerned parents, marches, rallies, and pickets—all this contributed to the political polarization and a general atmosphere of anxiety and suspicion that subsequently made authoritarianism seem desirable. Antigenderism was a moral panic that provided a common enemy to various strands of the Right and a new powerful language to nationalist sentiment (Graff 2014; Grze- balska 2015; Graff and Korolczuk 2017). In 2014–15 the campaigns against “genderism” were partly displaced by and partly merged with panic over Europe’s refugee crisis. It was the ability to combine the two themes that paved the way for the Law and Justice Party electoral victory in 2015. Within a relatively short period, public debate aban- doned the givens of European political liberalism (free speech, independent judiciary, human rights) and a new common sense became dominant. Given the danger posed by “genderism,” it was no longer necessary to pay lip service to equality between genders; once refugees were reimagined as danger- ous barbarians, racism became acceptable. “Genderists” along with refugees (now referred to as “invaders” and “terrorists”) were demonized as enemies of the nation, an international conspiracy threatening Polish culture and the safety of Polish families. Moral panic around gender combined seamlessly with “enemies at the gates” rhetoric. It was about more than a threat of “our women” being raped by racialized hypermasculine others, though this theme was present as well, especially following the sexual assaults in Cologne during the 2015–16 New Year’s Eve celebrations. Genderism was presented as a plot to “soften” Polish men and make them unable to defend the country. There was also the theme of demographic catastrophe: with Polish men going

“soft” and Polish women becoming feminists, Poland would soon be depop- ulated. Thus, Kaczyński’s party won the elections as the one force offering safety against the twin foreign-bred dangers. Since then, politicians who had been involved in demonizing “gender ideology” have been amply rewarded by the new regime, while the struggle against gender has become an ofﬁcial state policy, especially in the realm of education. Kaczyński’s regime shifted the entire political culture to the far right. Voices previously viewed as a lunatic fringe are now just right of the new mainstream; right-wing extremists are seen marching in the streets as “patriots,” while Catholic fundamentalists are now writing our laws. Anti- Semitism, which had all but disappeared during the post-1989 transition, is back in public debate. This year, Poland took the second to last place among European countries in the ILGA Europe ranking, which measures the extent of respect for human rights and level of equality for LGBTQ minorities (ILGA 2018). But LGBTQ rights are not just something the Right opposes and seeks to roll back; as with reproductive rights, the stakes are higher than the legal status of a given group. It is a matter of life and death—in fact, a matter of our civilization’s future. The religious Right—not unlike contemporary feminist and queer studies—views gender and sexuality as intricately linked; the difference is that the Right refers to both as “gender” (see Case 2011 and Case’s essay, in this issue). In the summer of 2016 and then again in the spring of 2018, Poland witnessed two efforts to introduce a complete ban on abortion, a further tight- ening of an already extremely restrictive law. If passed, the ban would force women to give birth to terminally ill babies who would die soon after birth; doctors would stop offering prenatal testing in fear of being accused of enabling abortion. The Catholic fundamentalist groups behind these efforts are well connected to Agenda Europe, a European coalition of right-wing groups (Datta 2018) as well to a broader transnational network whose hub is Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), founded in Brazil. Ordo Iuris, the legal group behind the ban, is a daughter organization of TFP. To these networks, Poland is merely a strategic outpost, a promising testing ground for what is meant as a global campaign. The aim is to eradicate what they call a “civilization of death”—that is, women’s and minority rights. If gender is the “symbolic glue” (Kováts and Põim 2015) for illiberal populism, a symbol of everything that is wrong with globalization, a metaphor for injustice, an enemy ﬁgure to mobilize against (Grzebalska and Pető 2017), it has also become a site of mobilization for those resisting the illiberal turn. The scale and intensity of resistance to the proposed abortion ban exceeded anyone’s expectations. Tens of thousands took to the streets—a new, furious, and truly massive wave of feminism, known as the Black Protest. The anger

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 553 behind this mobilization was not just about abortion rights; women were responding to what they perceived as indignity, cruelty, and hatred on the part of the right-wing regime and the rigidity of the Catholic Church. For the ﬁrst time in Polish history, church buildings have been attacked. Personal accounts written by participants testify to a massive shift in public sentiment, in the way women perceive themselves and their role in society (Great Coa- lition 2017). Yes, Poland is still a predominantly Roman Catholic country; sure, the church has had enormous inﬂuence on politics during the transition period, and few people are ready to question its legitimacy as political actor. But something has changed. Ironically, Kaczyński’s gift to Poland is the birth of a massive and radical feminist movement.

Agnieszka Graff American Studies Center University of Warsaw

Gender and the rise of the (religious) Right in India Since the early 1990s, India has witnessed the rise of the Hindu Right, a right-wing nationalist movement that has publicly declared its intention to reconstitute secular India as a Hindu state. This pursuit is percolating into every aspect of life—from how Indians dress to what they eat, how they worship and where they worship, whom they love and how they love. Its mission is articulated through the ideology of Hindutva, as distinct from Hinduism, which seeks to establish the superiority of Hindus as a race, united by bonds of fealty to the motherland and also common blood—Hindu patriots, invariably resisting the tyranny of the foreign Muslim (Savarkar 1989: 3–4, 115–16; Jafferlot 1996). More recently, the Hindu Right has claimed that a policy of appeasement or special treatment for Muslims and other religious minorities in India has perpetuated the oppression of Hindus. It calls for a pushback through the assertion of an aggressive, virile Hindu masculinity; the incorporation of Hindu women into the nationalist and ideological project; and the targeting of Muslims, in particular Muslim men who are said to threaten the Hindu identity of the nation and the safety of Hindu women. The Hindu Right is intent on dictating its idea of the Hindu nation in the management, surveillance, regulation, and disciplining of the everyday lives of its citizenry. And it pursues its vision partly through three different avatars of the Hindu woman. First, the Hindu woman remains the embodiment of Indian cultural values, where gender is located exclusively within a heteronormative familial framework and is based upon an outdated notion of Indian

womanhood—a cultural archetype and historical assumption that all Indian women should be the model of the chaste, self-sacrificing, and subservient Hindu wife (Sarkar 2003). Second, the Hindu woman is cast as a victim in the communal rhetoric of the Hindu Right, vulnerable to the predations of minority—primarily Muslim—men. In this communal framing, Muslim women are similarly cast as victims of what the Hindu Right claims is an inher- ently oppressive faith that produces violent men. These women are to be res- cued by the (Hindu) male savior primarily to demonstrate the gender credentials of the Hindu Right, and they are to be treated the same as Hindu women (not, it seems, the same as Hindu men). In this pursuit, the Hindu Right successfully deploys the discourse of gender equality to call upon Muslim women to enjoy the same rights and be treated the same as Hindu women. And third, the agenda of the Hindu Right has been partly shaped by the participation of women in the movement’s women’s wings. The incorporation of female militancy into the Right’s political discourse and practice is elaborated upon in Sen’s contribution to this volume, which places violent resistance by un- derprivileged, marginalized women responding to threats of sexual violence in the urban public space at the heart of its gender-empowerment strategies. Such strategies produce a gendered politics of urban paranoia that relies on casting the other as the cause of women’s pain and fear. In the process, the Hindu Right advances its agenda of targeting and demonizing Muslim men in the context of addressing violence against women, specifically Hindu women, by men, specifically Muslim men. This strategy reinforces the broader right- wing agenda of deploying Hindu women in defense of the Hindu nationalist project, which seeks to either subordinate or expunge the Muslim from the body of the Hindu nation (Sarkar and Butalia 1995; Ghosh 2002; Sen 2007). The idealized figure of the Hindu woman is trained in martial arts and deployed to defend the nation against the threat posed by the Muslim other. In this avatar, the Hindu woman participates in ensuring that the entire Muslim (and Christian) community remains in perpetual fear of incarceration, elim- ination, sexual violation, and punishment because of the perceived threat they pose to the conception of a Hindu nation and Hindu identity, despite their formal legal status as citizens of India. At the same time, the Hindu Right builds on already powerful construc- tions of a muscular masculinity in Indian society, one that feels simultaneously entitled and under siege (Banerjee 2005; Anand 2007; Chakraborty 2011). Young men are groomed to have a sense of entitlement, which breeds a culture of male privilege and virility that asserts itself against any threat—including from women who do not cower or display their vulnerability. The Hindu Right builds on this privilege utilizing it: first to communalize sexual violence, through which the responsibility for violence against women is seen to lie

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 555 within the Muslim community, specifically Muslim men; and second through the feminization of violence against women, through which violence against women in the family is regarded as the responsibility of women. In both in- stances, Hindu men are absolved of any blame for violence either inside or outside of the family (Kapur and Cossman 1996; Chowdhry 2000). The emergence of the Hindu Right has been partly linked to India’s colonial past and the efforts on the part of anticolonial nationalists to establish the country’s identity as distinct from the West, as well as from the Muslim other. This goal has been partly articulated in the efforts of cultural nationalists to align the nation’s identity with a totalizing, exclusive, and narrow understanding of tradition and custom defined largely in and through Indian womanhood, where women’s role as mothers of the realm is integral. Sig- nificantly, in debates over what constitutes authentic tradition and culture, women’s voices have been largely absent (Mani 1998). In the contemporary moment, the debates on culture have continued to trouble interventions on violence against women, as highlighted by Salina Abji, Anna Korteweg, and Lawrence Williams. Drawing explicitly on feminist theoretical debates on culture, they discuss how the legacies of the colonial encounter require a more complex understanding of the role of culture in addressing violence against women in immigrant communities, and they draw a distinction between totalizing narratives on culture and culture-as-meaning making based on situ- ated understandings. This model of cultural nationalism, based on the restoration and mainte- nance of a deeply conservative notion of Indian womanhood and the supremacy of the Hindu (male) over all others is being pursued with renewed vigor in the context of the opening up of the market accompanied by prolif- erating discourses of sexual desire, expression, and agency (Oza 2006). More- over, emboldened by the success of right-wing ideology in other parts of the globe that includes a growing Islamophobia in Europe as well as America, the targeting of Muslim men in India has become more virulent and publicly embraced, while leaders of the Hindu Right continue to polish their gender credentials by simultaneously projecting themselves as saviors of Muslim women. In the early 1990s, the Hindu Right was a countermovement that operated primarily through vigilance and violence. The formation of militant Hindu women’s wings was an integral part of this countermovement. Gradually the Hindu Right used the very tools of progressive and democratic politics—including gender and sexuality as well as law reform and rights discourse—to successfully advance its majoritarian Hindu nationalist campaign and provide an alternative to feminist politics on gender. The use of “gender ideology” in right-wing politics as an alternative to feminist movements is examined by

Elizabeth Corredor, who calls for a more meaningful feminist analysis to understand the use of gender and sexuality in right-wing discourses. The fact that the Hindu Right now occupies the center stage of liberal democratic politics indicates the perseverance of these movements and how they cannot be regarded as aberrational or fringe occurrences. Within the course of a few decades the Hindu Right has come to govern and regulate the everyday lives of the marginalized, including women and sexual and religious minorities. Mary Ann Case echoes this warning, arguing that the recent im- portation of the language of “gender ideology” into the United States is partly, and paradoxically, the result of the successes of gender and sexual rights advocacy on same-sex marriage and trans rights, which have in turn triggered global alignments in opposition to “gender ideology.” What is clear is that the Right’s opposition to the rights of women and sexual minorities to participate in public life and to be understood as fully human has become a hostile and lethal threat to feminism’s hard-fought battles. Any pushback needs to be informed by a more complete understanding of the complex relationship between gender and the global Right, which is the endeavor of this special issue.

Ratna Kapur School of Law Queen Mary University of London

Feminism and the Trumpocalypse As I write this, I am living in Madrid, trying to escape a bit from the scary sadness of the United States. But there is no escape, because the neopopulist misogynists are seemingly everywhere. Much ink has been spilled (and much hair torn out in anguish) trying to keep up with the endless madness and deep indignity of the Trump administration. I’m not sure what more there is to say. Like many feminists, I’ve weighed in on it, most particularly around the postelection old-left pieties that saw in Trump’s victory a misplaced but still legitimate cry of pain from displaced and dislocated white men (Walters 2017, 2018). To which I can only say: Cry me a river dudes. Sorry, but I play for team feminism. Or, as Janelle Monae says, “I’m a girl’s girl” (in Wortham 2018). But perhaps this is one of the key questions—at least for Americans—as to how to understand “gender and the rise of the global Right.” In one corner of this ring, we have earnest leftists in their tattered red shorts. They seem to yell a lot, but their yelling isn’t shrill or screechy (like those pesky

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 557 women) but impassioned and authentic. Those folks who voted for Trump and still support him (as of this writing his support among Republicans remains in the high eighties) aren’t really racist and misogynist and xenophobic, they insist. We lefties need to feel their pain, connect to the heartland (which is never on the coasts), stop all this distracting talk of pussies and gender and harassment and profiling and ...rage. And in the other corner— who is there? Well, the movement is there. Black Lives Matter and the Wom- en’s March and #MeToo and #TimesUp and the youth of March for our Lives and the people—mostly women and people of color—who are leading and organizing and imagining the resistance. Needless to say, our shorts aren’t solid red but boldly multicolored, stitched together, and held up by some audacious suspenders. And we’re not punching down, I can tell you that. Maybe it’s time to say, as Robin Morgan did back in the day, “goodbye to all that.”“Let’s run it down,” she told us, oh those many years ago. “White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today” (1970, 7). Now, I know it’s hopefully old-fashioned to mention this. Essentialist and downright mean. But also, you know, accurate. And in this postfact era of willful ignorance, a little data goes a long way. Oh sure, the right-wing insurgence is sometimes led by people of color (Naren- dra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte) and white women (Marine Le Pen), but let’sbe real here: most of this mess is authored and anchored by white heterosexual men. And yes, white women voted in droves for Trump. Surprised? Not so much. Since when has white women’s allegiance to white men not been a real problem for growing a vibrant feminism? And it might be helpful to break down those numbers and not conflate white women with feminism:I’dput good money on it that most of the white women voting for Trump would hardly define themselves as feminist. I’d also bet that they were mostly heterosexual and Christian. Let’s run it down indeed. Let’s be clear: the war on women and queers and people of color has never stopped. But this new iteration might demand new thinking and new forms of resistance. First and foremost, I think, is to refuse the persistent attempts (yet again) to make gender and race sideshows to the supposedly more com- pelling main-stage performance of white male angst. If you can’t see that the rise of Trump is all about racism and sexism and that these aren’t some narrow “cultural” issues that are somehow trumped by rising income inequality (as if that weren’t raced and gendered) ...well, then maybe you are part of the problem. Time’s up on the brosocialists and the mansplain- ing dudes. And maybe it is time to unabashedly and aggressively assert the leadership of women, people of color, and youth in the resistance to Trump and Trumpism. We are all leaning in like nobody’s business. Perhaps it is time

(long past time) for white men to lean the hell out. To step back and be ... quiet. We got this.

Suzanna Danuta Walters Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Northeastern University

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