The politics of feeling: affective feminist democratic resilience to anti-gender politics in the Spanish parliament

The rise of anti-gender and far-right actors, evidenced in recent elections in the United States or the European Union, threatens the advancement of feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQIA+ politics (Holvikivi et al., 2024; Ayoub & Stoeckl, 2024). Emerging literature addresses the articulation of responses and resistance mechanisms to anti-gender and far-right/racist politics, both in parliamentary (Cullen, 2021; Sengul & McSwiney, 2024; Kantola & Lombardo, 2024) and activist contexts (Szczygielska, 2019; Liu et al., 2024). This paper contributes to this growing field by examining feminist democratic resilience in the Spanish national parliament. In particular, we pay attention to the affective fabric that underpins and shapes everyday parliamentary debates in order to investigate the politics of feeling that structures feminist resilience. While work mapping the affective dimension of politics has been developed (Torcal Loriente & Harteveld, 2024; Borba, 2022; Hemmings, 2022; Pichel-Vázquez & Enguix-Grau, 2023), the application of an affective lens to parliamentary contexts remains underexplored (Kantola and Miller, 2021). In this paper, we see affect as a productive force, “as the ability to affect and to be affected” (Spinoza, 1677/1985), and understand political action as embedded in and productive of affective dynamics (Slaby & Bens, 2019). Affect therefore emerges for us as a political force that helps shape political practices and the making of institutions. We situate affect within its socio-cultural and contextual dimensions, emphasising its deep entanglement in the reproduction of gendered and racial power relations (Wetherell, 2012; Ahmed, 2004; Tolia-Kelly, 2006) as well as in fostering forms of resistance (Díaz Fernández, 2024). In this light, the overarching question of our work is what do affects do in the Spanish parliamentary setting? What affective frames are mobilised to counter anti-gender politics? What affective feminist resilience practices emerge in this context? To address these questions, we draw on primary and secondary data collected during the last parliamentary term in Spain (2019-2023), characterised by a significant presence of anti-gender actors (with 15.2% of seats from the far-right party Vox and 20.5% from the mainstream right-wing party Partido Popular). The data we work with involves an analysis of 12 parliamentary debates on topics central to feminist politics—such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and sexual freedom—and insights from 20 interviews conducted with key progressive and feminist MPs and political staff. To analyse our data, we employ an affective frame analysis methodology following Sauer (2019) to identify affective schemata, attachments and dis-affections within the Spanish parliament. Our findings show the mobilisation of three distinct affective frames to articulate feminist responses in the context of a hostile parliamentary setting: 1) indignation; 2) humour; and 3) rage. The interplay of these frames produces affective feminist democratic resilience through notions of mutual protection and solidarity in the face of a “brutal” and “violent” political environment. By developing an affective analysis of feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics, we contribute an innovative lens to literature exploring feminist democratic resilience in hostile parliamentary contexts.