De-democratization and opposition to gender equality politics in Europe

Abstract

This special issue investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the profound challenge of democratic backsliding that European societies and polities are faced with, by means of addressing the intersections of de-democratization processes with gender and other inequalities. We contend that contemporary gender politics cannot be fully understood and conceptualized without understanding its relationship to processes of de-democratization. A key concept for capturing the contentious nature of gender is that of “opposition to gender equality” that Verloo (2018, 6) defines as “any activity in which a perspective of opposing feminist politics and gender+ equality policy is articulated in a way that can be expected to influence or is actually influencing politics or policymaking at any stage.” Opposition to gender equality is not a new phenomenon. However, in the context of current “anti-gender” politics (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017), Verloo’s definition of opposition makes it possible to express who the oppositional actors are and what these actors actually do, their “activities,” to oppose not only gender equality policies but feminist politics as a whole (see Kantola and Lombardo 2020).