Скачать или смотреть Stefanie Mayer/Edma Ajanovic/Birgit Sauer: Gender as Symbolic Glue for Right-Wing Actors

Recorded at: Second International Marxist-Feminist Conference, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
On: 7th October 2016
Panel: Marxist-Feminist Analyses of Racism

The Conference was organised by the feminist section of InkriT (Berlin Institute of Critical Theory) http://www.inkrit.de, transform! europe http://www.transform-network.net, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation https://www.rosalux.de/ and many others.

https://marxfemblog.wordpress.com/

Abstract:
Edma Ajanovic, Stefanie Mayer, Birgit Sauer

‘Gender’ as Symbolic Glue for Right-Wing Actors in Europe

In recent years right-wing populists/extremists and right-wing Catholic as well as conservative actors have been building new alliances in several European countries around the notion of ‘gender-theory’ or ‘gender-ideology’. These groups construct ‘gender’ as a totalitarian ideology, which aims to create a new, ‘gender-less’ human, thereby attacking the institution of the family and European societies as a whole. This reading of ‘gender’, which has been developed by the Vatican from the 1990s onwards, is instrumental to forming coalitions across the right-wing political spectrum. The term ‘gender-ideology’ constructs a discursive node, which links issues of equality for LGBTIQ, women’s emancipation, gender mainstreaming and academic gender studies to resistance against sexual education in schools and kindergartens or against gender-sensitive pedagogy more broadly. ‘Gender-ideology’ in this sense functions as an empty signifier as defined by Laclau and Mouffe. It enables the creation of chains of equivalences that link different concerns and re-articulates them in one (seemingly) coherent discourse. The success of this discourse in raising support for conservative movements among different parts of the population can at least partly be explained by its populist character, i.e. by its creation of a double antagonism targeting elites as well as ‘others’, who are constructed as antagonists of ‘the people’. Albeit shaped differently by diverging national, regional and local contexts, still basic premises and argumentative logics can be discerned which span the different European and national arenas of ‘anti-genderism’.

After developing this European context our paper will present results of empirical research undertaken in Austria, where we analysed ‘gender ideology’ by means of a critical frame analysis. We will focus on dominant argumentative patterns to show how ‘gender ideology’ functions as a discursive node that bridges differences between actors and interlinks disparate strands of discourse and diverse political concerns. Through an analysis of the role ascribed to Islam we can show the flexibility of right-wing and religious constructions of gender relations and the connections between ‘gender ideology’ and broader right-wing populist and extremist discourses. Through this interweaving of social, demographic and cultural fears existential threats to ‘the people’ are constructed and partially blamed on feminist and queer theories and politics.

Edma Ajanovic is an external lecturer at the University of Vienna. She completed her PhD in Political Science in June 2016. Her main research topics are racism, right-wing populism as well as gendered aspects of migration.

Stefanie Mayer completed her PhD in Political Science in February 2016. Her main research topics are feminist theories and politics and critical investigations of racism, right-wing extremism and right-wing populism.

Birgit Sauer is a professor of Political Science at University of Vienna. Her research includes feminist state and democracy theory, gender and governance, and politics and emotion.