Maíra Kubík Mano1 and Cecília M.B. Sardenberg2
In Brazil, since 2013, the struggle between women’s rights and the defence of the patriarchal family has intensified. This struggle follows years of achievements towards gender equality. In 2016, a parliamentary-legal-media coup ousted Brazil’s first woman president, paving the way for a series of neoliberal reforms. The election of far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro as president solidified the process. This regressive slide was partially halted in 2022 on Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s election to the presidency. Amongst disputes and setbacks, Brazil presents a unique scenario for analysing the liberal democracy crisis and the rise to institutional power of the far right. In this article, we reflect on the dynamics of regression, specifically in relation to gender-based political violence and attacks on minorities. The reflection is based on media articles and the results of recent surveys on election results.
Gender, feminism, neoliberalism, sexual division of labour, gender-based political violence, far right.
In this article, we focus on gender-based political violence in Brazil, which we consider an important indicator for measuring the rise of the far right in the country. We begin by asserting that the current democratic crisis is grounded in the social positions occupied by women and men, as well as the socially constructed differentiation based on racialisation within the capitalist system in its neoliberal phase. To support this assertion, we begin with the understanding that: (1) men and women, cis and transgender, racialised, and from different geographical locations, constitute the working class as concrete subjects; (2) sexual and racial divisions of labour, which generate an immeasurable amount of unpaid, underpaid, or precarious work, facilitate the intensification of exploitation, expropriation, and domination of people and nations in the neoliberal phase of capitalism; (3) given a precarity of life and lack of political socialisation, part of the population in vulnerable situations chooses to vote for populist or proto-populist right-wing leaders; (4) at the same time, there is a backlash underway to limit or reduce the minor expansion of rights that groups in marginalised situations have achieved.
We refer to the achievement in rights gained in the past 40 years in Brazil and since the re-democratisation period, as a minor expansion because we believe that these gains have not combined redistribution with recognition. Instead, they have been restricted in a very narrow sense to recognition – such as the right to marriage or adoption by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual (LGBTQIA+) couples – which somehow accommodated itself within the neoliberal order.
We agree with Nancy Fraser that the current crisis of democracy ‘cannot be solved by reforming the political field – that is, by strengthening the “democratic ethos”, reactivating the “constituent power”, unleashing the force of “agonism”, or promoting “democratic iterations” (Fraser 2024: 173). How, after all, can we explain the phenomena that led to the elections of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, or the re-election of Donald Trump in the United States (US)? They won legitimate elections but continued/have continued to operate both inside and outside of democracy, ultimately acting outside of it (Badiou 2017: 4). Therefore, the processes referred to as de-democratisation or post-democracy (Miguel 2019: 14) require an interpretation that situates them within the functioning of gendered and racialised liberal capitalism.
As Fraser reminds us, ‘Financialised capitalism is the era of governance without government – that is, the era of domination without the dissimulation of consent’ (Fraser 2024: 192). It is not the states, but transnational governance structures, such as the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and free trade agreements, that create the rules used worldwide, which are elaborated, verified, and enforced by risk assessment agencies and the entity simply referred to as ‘the market’ in the media. The result of this, Fraser warns, is the ‘emptying of public power at all levels’ (ibid.). At the same time, private interests elevate chief executive officers and bankers to ministerial positions, and corporate marketing dominates electoral campaigns, particularly in an era of social media and fake news, undermining democracy even more (Brown 2018: 293).
However, unlike Fraser, we do not seek a single explanatory theory for the current democratic crisis. But we do find useful the imbrication of elements she points out – care, racism, environmental crisis, and democratic crisis. A single theory, however, would mean relinquishing the understanding that patriarchy is a system that precedes and coexists with capitalism, something that seems to us to offer a tool for analysis (Guillaumin 1992).
To make explicit the connections between patriarchy, racism, neoliberal capitalism, and the democratic crisis, we will analyse incidents of gender-based political violence from 2018 to 2024, including the periods of the administrations of Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. To this end, we will begin with a theoretical discussion on capitalism, patriarchy, and racism/colonialism from a feminist perspective. We will then move to a brief presentation of the democratic crisis in Brazil, and then to a study of recent gender-based political violence in Brazil. Finally, we will seek to identify the correlations and the role of gender issues in the rise to power of the far right.
Marxist-feminists have long argued that although capitalism did not create patriarchy, it has thrived on it. In most (if not all) instances, the gender divide has ensured that women and men experience the process of capitalist development differently, and thus respond to it in different ways (Sardenberg 1997). The sexual division of labour in the household and the ideologies of gender implicit in family morality have played a determining role in the way and form in which women and men are incorporated and/or recruited into social production (Beechey 1979). At the same time, the gender divide in the labour market feeds back into the dynamics of household organisation and gender relations in the domestic sphere (Connelly and Macdonald 1986; Luxton 1986).
Such articulation led Lisa Vogel (2013) to propose an integrative analysis of women’s oppression and the capitalist mode of production. Although this proposal did not provoke much interest when first published, it drew attention as the crisis of capitalism and the new drives of neoliberalism and its engagement with the far right made the effects of patriarchy more visible. Along with Vogel (2013), other feminists (Federici 2018, 2019; Arruzza 2015; Bhattacharya 2019) highlighted what has since become known as the ‘theory of social reproduction’, constructing an analysis of how capitalism transformed gender relations and the family (Machado and Mano 2023). Others, such as Jules Falquet (2022), Helena Hirata (2022), and Danièle Kergoat (2012), who contribute to an important debate on migration, precarious work, and care, were influenced by the French materialist feminism school of thought, known for making a systematic separation between capitalism and patriarchal relations. They have made important contributions to our thinking about how social relations interweave and sustain each other. Through different ways, these authors show that the alliance of capitalism and patriarchy remains as strong as ever.
In this regard, Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser (2019) observe that despite the existence of the subordination of women long before the emergence of capitalism, capitalism established a modern form of sexism, based on new institutional structures. It separated ‘the production of people from the obtaining of profit’, attributing to women the first and subordinating it to the second. In so doing, they argue, ‘Capitalism reinvented the oppression of women and, at the same time, turned the world upside down’ (ibid.). In her most recent work, Nancy Fraser observes that, with the state and corporate disinvestment caused by neoliberalism, a new dualised organisation of social reproduction has emerged, ‘marketized for those who can afford to pay for it and privatized for those who cannot, as some people in the second category provide care work in exchange for (low) wages for those in the first category’ (Fraser 2024: 111).
As the crisis of capitalism widens, neoliberalism, a development linked to the spread and domination of finance capitalism, has deepened the situation, with its growing ties with authoritarian regimes. For Verónica Gago (2021), this is particularly evident in Latin America, where neoliberalism arrived hand in hand with authoritarian regimes – brutal dictatorships beginning with the military coup in Brazil in the 1960s, followed by Chile and Argentina. Gago observes that this seeming alliance between neoliberalism and authoritarian regimes is not a novelty as some analysts have proposed – at least, not in the Southern Cone. Yet, over the past four decades, neoliberalism has undergone mutations based on the struggles it has faced, mostly from social movements. For Gago, if neoliberalism now needs to be allied to conservative, backward forces, such as those that control the Brazilian national and regional houses of representatives, ‘It is because the destabilisation of patriarchal and racist authorities put at risk the accumulation of capital’ (Gago 2021: 197, our translation from the Brazilian Portuguese).
Gago further argues that, if the factory and the heteropatriarchal family can no longer impose discipline, and ‘once control is challenged by transfeminist and ecological ways of managing interdependence in times of existential precariousness – which includes fighting for public services and salary increases, housing and debt relief, and not just recognising care, the counteroffensive is redoubled’ (Gago 2021: 197, our translation from the Brazilian Portuguese). It is not surprising then that a moral panic is initiated to curtail progress towards gender and racial equality against fear of a threat or supposed threat from deviants; that is, people who threaten a society’s culture, moral values, or way of life (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009: 2).
Feminists and LGBTQIA+ people are often seen as ‘deviants’ threatening the heteropatriarchal family, as they question its hierarchical organisation, suggesting that it is not a ‘divine creation’ but a patriarchal invention that curtails people’s freedom and identities, particularly gender identities. In his inaugural speech made in the National Congress in January 2019, Jair Bolsonaro proclaimed to ‘unite the people, cherish the family, respect the religions and our Judeo-Christian tradition, combat gender ideology while preserving our values. Brazil will once again be a country free of ideological bonds’ (Notícias 2019). As soon as he assumed government, he destroyed the women’s rights bureaus, creating the Women’s, Familyand Human Rights Ministry instead, to be headed by Damares Alves, a female evangelical pastor. In one of Alves’ first speeches, she followed Bolsonaro in proclaiming that, from then on, ‘Girls wear pink, and boys wear blue’ (Globo News 2019), thus instilling traditional gender distinctions in her administration (Sardenberg, Mano and Sacchet 2023).
In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi (1991) begins her arguments citing various instances in which American women were said to be ‘unhappy’ and ‘frustrated’, finding blame in feminism. She reminds us that government officers of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush – the epitome of conservative neoliberalism in the US in the previous century – happily endorsed such blame. Their spokesperson, Faith Whittlesey, ‘in the only official White House discourse on the status of American women, defined feminism as a real straitjacket to women’ (Faludi 1991: 11). Faludi stresses that the level of ‘backlash’ against women and feminism was such during that period that the head of the Commission on Pornography in the US made the absurd comment that women themselves were to blame for the rising numbers of rapes. The commission concluded that since there were more women going to college and entering the labour market, they themselves created more opportunities for being raped.
More recently, neoliberalism and neoconservatism have been walking hand in hand with religious fundamentalism, particularly neo-Pentecostal sects, as represented in Margaret Atwood’s (1985) The Handmaid’s Tale, which focuses on feminism and patriarchy in a dystopian society called Gilead. In this tale, women are seen primarily as men-dominated reproducers, a real-life threat which hangs over women’s heads as access to legal abortions have become much more restricted in countries such as the US, Hungary, and Poland, and restrictions are constantly mooted by Brazilian congressmen.
Increasing curtailment of sexual and reproductive rights, along with a rise in gender-based violence against women and people who identify as LGBTQIA+, seem to have intensified in a context of neoliberalism and the rise of the far right, despite some important gains for women in terms of the legalisation of abortion in Latin American countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay. But these gains have only been achieved with the immense struggle of women’s movements, an assertion that has led Gago (2021) to stress the crucial relevance of social movements in combating neoliberalism and neoconservatism.
It must be stressed, however, that the matrix of class domination, agitated by capitalism, intersects with sexism and racism, particularly in a situation of colonialism, such as has been the case in Latin America. As Maria Lugones (2014) reminded us, the ‘coloniality of gender’ operates with that of racism, a perspective long before proposed by Brazilian anthropologist Lélia González (1988a, 1988b) who raised the notion of ‘Amefricanism’. In contemporary societies, capitalism, sexism, racism, ageism, and lesbianism/homophobia, among other matrices of oppression, do not act independently (Sardenberg 2015). On the contrary, they are symbiotic (Saffioti 1992), acting as matrices of oppression that reinforce each other (Collins 1989), forging intersecting systems of stratification and oppression (Crenshaw 2002).
We maintain that these matrices of oppression intersect more intensively in a neoliberal context, with the rise of the far right, as has been observed in Brazil in relation to gender and racially based political violence since the 2016 coup. The assassination of city council woman Marielle Franco, discussed in Section 4, is emblematic of this violence.
Before moving on to the case study, in this section we briefly present the recent context of Brazilian institutional politics. In the 2010s, democratic regimes in Western and Westernised countries like Brazil (Ianni 2011) experienced the challenges of mass movements taking to the streets, such as the indignados (‘outraged’) in Puerta del Sol in Spain, Occupy Wall Street in the US, and the June 2013 protests in Brazil. The limits of the inclusive capacity of liberal democracy were called into question. Initially, protesters demanded transformation of the political structure and were ‘against the exclusive, oligarchic, and consensual governance of an alliance of technocratic, political, and economic elites determined to defend the neoliberal order at all costs’ (Swyngedouw and Wilson 2014: 1).
In Brazil, the mobilisation began with demands over the increasing cost of public transportation in São Paulo, but quickly became multifaceted. We agree with Singer who attributes this change to the diverse composition of the protesters: middle-class youth and young people from the ‘new proletariat’ – workers who gained formal employment during the ‘Lula years’ (2003–11) but who suffered from low wages, high staff turnover, and poor working conditions (Singer 2013: 27).
The Lula years (2003–11) deserve analysis: this relates to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first presidency, which coincided with a period of economic growth and support to the poor and extremely poor via income transfer policies such as the Bolsa Família programme. However, it also marked the culmination of the transformismo (‘transformism’) process of the Workers’ Party (PT), in Gramscian terms (Secco 2012). In other words, Brazil’s largest left-wing party was subsumed by those who already held the country’s hegemony. For PT leaders, Lula’s winning of the 2002 election depended on a broad alliance with sectors of the national bourgeoisie and with parties from the centre, centre-right, and right, including religious groups.
At the same time, significant advances were made for minority groups under the PT governments, which leads us to characterise the rise of the far right as a backlash. The term, coined by Susan Faludi, refers to ‘an attempt to roll back the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement had managed to achieve for women’ (Faludi 1991: 11). The advances in Brazil regarding gender matters included the creation, in 2003, of the National Secretariat for Policies for Women, with ministerial status (Sardenberg et al. 2023); the promulgation, in 2006, of the Maria da Penha Law to combat domestic violence; and the legalisation of abortion in cases of foetal anencephaly, through a decision by the Federal Supreme Court in 2012. In response, conservative sectors, particularly those linked to the Catholic Church and evangelical churches, began using the pejorative term ‘gender ideology’ against feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements, mobilising moral panic.
Prior to the multifaceted 2013 protests, Singer recalls that the rising cost of living was a significant factor: ‘The acceleration of the cost of living for middle-class sectors in the months leading up to the protests could partly explain the dissatisfaction that was eventually expressed in the streets in June’ (2013: 34). Moreover, a few months earlier, PT leaders had been tried and convicted on corruption charges. The issue of corruption, once a banner of the left, was then seized by right-wing groups who took to the streets during this period, catalysing an anti-PT discourse, whether from former voters who claimed to be disappointed or from the revival of anti-communism. There was also the impending arrival of three major international sporting events: the FIFA Confederations Cup (2013), the FIFA World Cup (2014), and the Olympics (2016), involving considerable public investment. Protesters questioned public spending on these events at the expense of health care and education. Demands historically linked to the left, such as increased public investment in schools and strengthening the national health-care system, were used against a centre-left government through a discourse of disdain for the political system.
In 2014, the presidential election was fiercely disputed, but Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s political successor, managed to secure re-election for a second term. The opposition candidate, positioned on the right of the political spectrum, immediately questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process – a tactic later used by Donald Trump in 2020 and by Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters in 2022. The adverse international scenario that followed the 2008 financial crisis, coupled with an unstable domestic policy, then led to two years of negative growth, something not seen in Brazil since the 1929 crisis (Balassiano 2017: 2).
When the impeachment process against Dilma Rousseff began in December 2015 in the Chamber of Deputies, the justification was alleged economic mismanagement. However, when federal deputies approved the impeachment motion on 17 April 2016, most speeches no longer mentioned the economy but instead focused on a defence of the ‘traditional family’, a form of organising relationships that has historically been disadvantageous for women (Biroli 2018: 80). One of the most striking votes against Rousseff was that made by then federal deputy Jair Bolsonaro, who claimed to be honouring Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a recognised torturer from the military dictatorship period (Brasil de Fato 2018). Rousseff herself was arrested and tortured in 1970.
Following the impeachment, Vice-President Michel Temer, from a centre-right party, appointed a predominantly white male cabinet. In 2018, Bolsonaro was elected president after Lula was prevented from running due to a controversial legal process, which was later annulled by the Federal Supreme Court. Bolsonaro’s campaign, deeply misogynistic and racist, and organised around a nostalgia for the military dictatorship and hatred of the left, provided hints of what was to follow. Resistance to his election was led by women, who took to the streets of major Brazilian cities under the banner Ele Não (‘Not Him’).
In this scenario of growing social and political turmoil in Brazil, black people, women, and people who identify as LGBTQIA+ have been particularly targeted, with those involved in social movements and formal politics even more so. This was the case for Marielle Franco, a poor, black lesbian woman, who was serving as elected counsel in Rio de Janeiro. She was murdered, along with her driver, in March 2018, in an attack by hired hitmen paid by two politicians, Franco’s colleague at the city council and a member of the National Congress. The head investigator, himself involved in the murder plot, tried to cover it up (Globo News 2024).
In the 2024 municipal-level general elections, women, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, and black people ran for office in considerable numbers. However, at all levels of government, they still represent a small minority. In 2022, a quotas law was passed, establishing that women should comprise 30 per cent of the candidates in party lists for National Congress (Câmara dos Deputados 2022). However, women and other minorities lack access to TV campaign spots and campaign funding, figuring only as fake candidacies without any real possibility of being elected.
The current legislature, one of the most conservative in modern times, is known for its misogynistic practices, such as threatening to do away with sexual and reproductive rights, as well as with existing legislation to amplify women’s and black people’s presence in legislative bodies. Recently, six women representatives from two left-wing parties were targeted. They faced having their mandate revoked after they shouted at right-wing male parliamentarians when they were speaking in parliament in favour of a policy that aims to restrict indigenous peoples’ access to land (Law of Marco Temporal). The women were forced to ask for support via social media, and through this managed to raise awareness about violence against women in politics and about the specific legislation (Globo News 2023).
Violence against women in politics and civil society activists increased during Bolsonaro’s government, which fostered a discourse of hatred that promoted widespread violence against members of the opposition, particularly those that were part of non-hegemonic social groups.3 Indeed, racist political violence, homophobic political violence, and intersectional political violence occurred during the 2020 elections (Matos 2021), with black women being the most vulnerable (Instituto Marielle Franco 2021). The study by the Instituto Marielle Franco found that all black women candidates had suffered some type of political violence, and 78.1 per cent of the candidates interviewed had experienced online violence. In terms of institutional violence, 32 per cent of respondents had received considerably less funding from their parties than their male counterparts. In addition, 52 per cent of the black women in the survey revealed that they had suffered racist political violence, both during and after the elections (ibid.).
The findings of these studies provided support for the passage of Law 14.192, approved in August 2021, which criminalised gender-based political violence against women (Presidência da República 2021). Between the law’s instigation and November 2022 (when national elections were held), the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office recorded 112 proceedings. Seven cases were registered every 30 days, involving behaviour intended to humiliate, embarrass, threaten, or harm a candidate or representative due to her being a woman, both cis and trans (Conselho Nacional de Justiça 2022).
In the 2022 elections, there was an 18 per cent increase in the number of women in the Federal Chamber, as 91 female deputies were elected, compared to 77 in 2018. However, of a total of 513 parliamentarians, only 17.7 per cent are women. In the Senate, which has a total of 81 seats, women lost two seats and occupied only ten (12.3 per cent) as of 2023. Among the 26 states and the federal district, only Rio Grande do Norte and Pernambuco elected women as governors.
The percentage of female candidates in the 2024 municipal elections was the same as in 2020: 34 per cent. However, the 2024 elections were the first in which gender identity was recorded in the candidates’ registration; 967 candidates declared themselves transgender, representing 0.2 per cent of the candidates running for mayor, deputy mayor, and city councillor (Folha de São Paulo 2024).
A study conducted by the Terra de Direitos and Justiça Global organisations on political violence between 2022 and 2024 mapped 714 cases reported in the news: 182 murders and attacks against political agents, 311 threats, 86 assaults, and 95 other offences (Terra de Direitos 2024). (A similar survey focusing on the period from January to October 2024, a local electoral year, showed that politically based violence in Brazil had reached its highest levels ever, with a total of 558 reported incidents, including murder, in just that period (Barbon 2024).) Although violence intensifies during election periods, it happens throughout the year.
The same survey disclosed that, despite being underrepresented in the political arena, women, both cis and trans, comprised 38 per cent of the victims. Women suffered mostly emotional and psychological offences, and were attacked mainly on social media, whereas men were victimised mostly in the open, especially during campaign activities, where they suffered physical attacks. Black people comprised 44 per cent of those attacked, a very high rate considering their low representation as candidates (ibid.).
According to Gisele Barbieri, one of the coordinators of the survey, ‘Political violence has become a real instrument to maintain and obtain political privileges in Brazil, but there is a lack of response from the state. Given this naturalisation, cases have been growing’ (ibid., our translation from the original in Brazilian Portuguese). She also observed that the increase in incidents of political violence is related to the proliferation of ‘fake news, threats and virtual offences without regulation and the expansion of organised crime’, be it in campaign financing or intimidation of public agents.
Although we agree with Barbieri’s observations, we believe that they should be considered only as the superficial causes of gender-based political violence. We need to dig deeper to understand why so much has been spent in confronting gender-based violence, and yet it persists.
In this final section, we seek to reflect, in light of the study on gender-based political violence, on the interconnections between patriarchy, racism, neoliberal capitalism, and the crisis of democracy, as suggested by Nancy Fraser. The combination of structural elements – the matrices of oppression – with conjunctural elements – economic crisis alongside intensified exploitation and, consequently, the precarity of life – has produced a crisis scenario. While the elections of the PT between 2002 and 2014 represented the transformismo (Secco 2012) of Brazil’s largest left-wing organisation, the 2016 coup demonstrated that, for full implementation of a neoliberal agenda – with labour reforms, pension reforms, and a ceiling on public spending – the ruling class considered it more effective to regain direct control over state apparatus. In this regard, as Fraser asserts, the centrality of the state to neoliberalism becomes evident since accumulation requires public authorities to ensure property rights, enforce contracts, and resolve disputes; to decide who is a legal citizen with rights; and to prevent and manage crises, and suffocate eventual rebellions (Fraser 2024: 179).
Just two years after the deposition of Dilma Rousseff, however, Brazil’s ruling class failed to produce, on its own, an organic intellectual capable of assuming the role of president of the Republic and instead allied itself with Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former military officer from the lower ranks of the National Congress. In his campaign, Bolsonaro allied with financial capital by entrusting the country’s economic policy to Paulo Guedes, a representative of the Chicago School of Economics who had served as an economist under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, a notorious laboratory for neoliberalism in the Americas. Pinochet’s experience had already demonstrated that neoliberalism does not require liberal democratic regimes.
At the same time, Bolsonaro was not re-elected in 2022 and on the same ballot, there has been an increase in the participation of women, black people, indigenous people, and LGBTQIA+ individuals in institutional politics. For the first time, trans women have been elected to parliament, mostly by left-wing parties, advocating for causes not only related to recognition struggles but also to redistributive agendas. A recent example was the bill presented by Federal Deputy Erika Hilton, a black trans woman and socialist, calling for a reduction in working hours.
It is at this moment of conflict between advances and backlash that there has been a resurgence of gender-based political violence. Simultaneously, the law on gender-based political violence was approved by the same conservative National Congress, which includes pastor deputies and anti-feminist women.
Gender-based political violence serves the current moment of neoliberal crisis because: (1) it keeps reproductive labour ‘in its place’; that is, as free and/or precarious labour; and (2) it allows the dismantling and/or underfunding of public care policies. The expansion of neoliberalism, irregular working hours, entrepreneurship, and other formulas of over-responsibilising workers exacerbate the care issue. In Brazil, where domestic and care work is deeply shaped by race, there is a clear intersection with racism. As Lélia González states, the domestic worker ‘is nothing more than the permitted maid, the one who provides goods and services, that is, the pack mule who carries her own family and others’ on her back’ (González 1984: 229). Gender-based political violence, then, is a way of attempting to silence those who, by accessing institutional representation, seek ways to reduce exploitation through the creation of laws and government projects. This could lead to a chilling effect, discouraging the candidacy of new representatives and making elected representatives give up institutional politics.
The ideological persuasion that has legitimised gender-based political violence is carried out through the rise of the far right. The material vulnerability caused by intensifying the precarity of life, combined with feelings of social disintegration resulting from the exacerbation of individualism – also promoted by neoliberalism – and hopelessness in the face of the climate crisis, leads people to turn to religion more frequently. In some churches, particularly neo-Pentecostal ones, traditional gender roles rooted in patriarchy are reinforced. There is an idealisation of a future that seeks to return to an idealised past, where patriarchy is the form of social organisation. Moral panic functions as a powerful adhesive of persuasion, combining anti-feminism, anti-leftism, and racism.
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