Who Is Liberating Whom?: Liberations and Oppressions in the Anti-Gender Politics of Central and Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Since the 2010s, a right-wing faction known as the anti-gender movement, which opposes gender and sexual equality policies and the concept of gender itself, has been growing transnationally. Central and Eastern European anti-gender equality actors exploit historically well-established fears of demographic decline and national disappearance to curtail or eliminate reproductive freedoms and push for constitutional amendments that limit marriage to heterosexual couples. Not only have the Polish, Hungarian, and Slovak governments implemented laws and policies opposing gender and sexual equality policies, they have gone so far as to replace gender equality actors in government agencies with anti-gender actors in order to institutionalize a hostile state. Anti-gender actors in Belarus, the Czech Republic, and Georgia have also become part of institutionalized politics due to their effective lobbying or authoritarian nature of the state. The participants in this roundtable investigate what constitutes the hostile state and explore how anti-gender organizations have subverted the ideals of liberation rhetoric and co-opted decolonial discourses, by shifting from their previously inflammatory messages to messages that attempt to connect their groups to narrative frames of liberation.

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Hana Waisserova, U of Nebraska - Lincoln

Roundtable Members

• Vera Beloshitzkaya, U of Salzburg (Austria)

• Katalin Fabian, Lafayette College

• Simona Fojtova, Transylvania U

• Ariel Otruba, Virginia Tech

• Alexandria Wilson-McDonald, Otterbein U