Community and anticommunity in the anti-gender movement : allowances of coalition

Abstract

In the last two decades, the anti gender movement has had a significant impact in laws, policies and collective mentality in multiple countries. It has curtailed important advances of feminist and queer basis, but also related with (through shared political base, actors and discourse) diverse matters of civic life and human rights (such as worker s’ rights, environmental protection and even war). It is the purpose of this study to contribute to the development/furthering of coalitionary liberatory activism in response to this conservative mobilisation. In this research, the main issue contemplated is that of how matters of identity and subjectivity come into play to make the formation of a heterogeneous community around the anti-gender movement possible, durable, and arguably successful. Guided by a critical discourse analysis approach, a selection of pronouncements made by key Brazilian anti-gender proponents in 2019-2020 was examined. The main focus was on the conceptualisations of the self and the Other conveyed, which are displayed to the reader through thematic analysis. The conclusion reached is that subjectification processes in the anti-gender movement operate in the frame of a master model (Plumwood, 1993).