Anti-Gender Mobilizations with an Ethno-Nationalistic Hangover

In their recent study, Corrêa, Paternotte, and House claim that anti-gender mobilizations cannot be reduced to a backlash phenomenon. They warn against a mechanistic and unilinear understanding of history that portrays feminist and queer struggles as won—everywhere and in the same or, at least, similar way—to which the empire strikes back, as it did many a time before. Instead of being simply reactive or reactionary, anti-gender politics is productive of a new political order of which gender is one, but excessively important cornerstone (Corrêa et al., 2023 ; see also Paternotte, 2020 ). As Butler claims in their Who’s Afraid of Gender? , ‘gender’ is a battlefield in a larger restoration project that ‘seeks to shore up authoritarian regimes as rightful forms of paternalism, the dream come true’—a dream that will put an end to ‘the implacable anxiety and fear that afflict so many people experiencing climate destruction firsthand, or ubiquitous violence and brutal war, expanding police powers, or intensifying economic precarity’ (Butler, 2024 , 15).