Politics of knowledge in anti-gender mobilizations in the context of problematic legacies of European democracies

It is well documented that anti-gender actors are actively engaging (and sometimes succeeding) in epistemic struggles that devalue scientific expert knowledge and/or propose alternative forms of gender knowledges (Datta 2018; Graff & Korolczuk 2022; Kuhar & Paternotte 2017; Verloo 2018). In this paper we examine the struggles over feminist knowledge and gender expertise in the seven countries included in the CCINDLE project (Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, UK) and the EU during the last decade. In our paper, we apply a broad understanding of what constitutes anti-gender campaigns, as these actors promote not only essentialist understandings of gender, identity and sexuality, but also employ femonationalist arguments in the debates on gender equality, constructing racialized categories of people through ‘othering’ and dehumanization. The current paper examines the ways in which gender knowledge promoted by feminist activists, scholars and experts has been challenged in Europe during the last decade. Using existing literature, we examine the relationship between anti-gender campaigns and de-democratization, discussing strategies and tactics used by anti-gender actors concerning knowledge and expertise, such as attacking feminist scholars and/or attacking/banning gender studies and critical race studies, withdrawing financial support, changing regulations concerning professional advancement, changing curricula, producing (counter)knowledge. We show how this trend is facilitated by the problematic legacies of European democracies, which include capitalism/neoliberalism, colonialism, fascism, organized religion, post-socialism, as well as the flaws of (liberal) representative democracy, which in turn have generated and employed politics of knowledge that were often exclusionary and unjust.