Keeping Out the Trojan Horse: Re-Politicizing Gender in the Context of the Istanbul Convention

In this paper we propose to analyze debates around the ratification of the Istanbul Convention and their impact on the politics and policies addressing violence against women focusing on four Central and Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary and Poland) and the European Union. By openly challenging gender rights and gender equality objectives, attacks on gender disrupt some of the previous tendencies and pose a series of challenges to the status quo. They affect the quality of debates and lead to a gendering of the debates. As such, these attacks not only shift frames but may align political actors that previously stayed away from gender equality related debates. Attacks also directly involve defenders of gender equality, mainly women’s rights actors who were rarely, if ever, exposed to such direct attacks, or in some cases even persecution. Strategies of unifying voice, of building more extensive coalitions and improving the inclusiveness and appeal of the movement towards a wider constituency are possible responses. Attacks may align pro-gender equality coalitions in unprecedented ways, and lead to a reframing of their claims both in more radical ways, and possibly in more inclusive ways in response to the hostile context in which they operate. But in a highly politicized context debates about who can be allies, what are divisive lines, or what compromises a necessary unified voice implies within feminism can also emerge prominently. This way gender equality may turn into a transformative political project, more than in the previous years of gender mainstreaming when a technocratic, expertise driven approach often dominated. This duality of backlash versus revitalization of the feminist project stands in the focus of our attention in this paper.