IDS Bulletin

Understanding Gender Backlash: Southern Perspectives

Jerker Edström — 2024-03-05

Far from seeing continued steady progress on gender equality, we are currently witnessing significant backlash against gender and sexual rights. Limited and hard-fought gains for some are being reversed, co-opted, and dismantled – all amplified through new social media and digital technologies.

This issue of the IDS Bulletin addresses the urgent question of how we can better understand the recent swell of anti-gender backlash. Perspectives from Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Lebanon, Uganda, and the UK detail examples of anti-gender backlash in different contexts, and the actors, interests, and tactics involved.

The articles here present critical perspectives for framing and interpreting a global phenomenon not yet well understood. The IDS Bulletin starts by grouping the issues discussed into three themes: voice and tactics; framings and direction; and temporality and structure. The authors explore the features of the recent and current wave of backlash that include increased authoritarianism, religious resurgence, populist hyper-nationalism, and the concurrence of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Along the way the articles also point to connections with parallel debates in development, contributing to nudging this topic out of the ‘gender and development corner’.

The set of complementary viewpoints on the framing and theorising of backlash presented in this issue is also intended to contribute to scholarship by attending to an increasingly recognised gap in research. By presenting new ways of analysing and countering backlash from more diverse settings, this issue of the IDS Bulletin calls for the development of better strategies and tactics for resistance and reclaiming gender justice.

Introduction: Understanding Gender Backlash Across Regions

Jerker Edström — 2024-03-05

Whilst international policy between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s gave some hope for progress on gender equality, events since then – including conflicts, climate change, the pandemic, and an increasingly insecure world – have thrown these hopes into doubt. Far from steady progress on gender equality, we now face backlash against gender and sexual rights. This article introduces our IDS Bulletin which explores understandings of backlash from a primarily global South perspective. Articles from Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Lebanon, Uganda, and the UK detail examples of anti-gender backlash in different contexts, and the actors, interests, and tactics involved. This introduction groups the issues into three themes: voice and tactics, framings and direction, and temporality and structure. It also briefly touches on the tactics gender activists have used in countering backlash. In conclusion, the article calls for an increased analysis of backlash from more diverse settings to develop better strategies for resistance and reclaiming gender justice.

Voice: A Useful Concept for Researching Backlash and Feminist Counter-Actions?

Sohela Nazneen — 2024-03-05

Voice is central to claims-making and contestations around gender equality. This article engages with a diverse set of literature, social and feminist movement theory, and gender and development scholarship, to foreground voice in the analysis of the discursive strategies of backlash actors and the counter‑actions by feminist coalitions. Drawing on rich discussions with feminist academic-activists based in the global South and the UK, the article unpacks the various conceptual and methodological challenges that emerge in researching feminist collective voice in countering backlash, particularly on matters such as intersectionality and building collective feminist voice; intra-movement backlash and fragmentation of voice; capturing subtler forms of expressions of agency; and the cyclical nature of backlash.

Backlash and Counter-Backlash: Safeguarding Access to Legal Abortion in Brazil

Cecília Sardenberg — 2024-03-05

This article addresses the backlash against reproductive rights during Jair Bolsonaro’s government, focusing on access to legal abortions. Although access to abortion is quite restricted in Brazil, under Bolsonaro it was further curtailed through institutionalised spaces of power. This was met by counter-backlash actions, with an intensification of feminist activism in an attempt to secure an agenda of hard-won reproductive rights. To address this struggle for reproductive rights and against restrictions, we focus our analysis on the high-profile media case of an 11-year‑old girl, pregnant after being raped.

‘It’s a Family Matter’: Inaction and Denial of Domestic Violence

Maheen Sultan — 2024-03-05

This article provides a grounded example of backlash in action surrounding the implementation of the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act 2010 in Bangladesh. While formulation and enactment of the law marked significant achievements, its implementation has been weak. Unlike conventional analyses that concentrate on backlash in gender equality policy formulation, this study focuses on the obstacles encountered during the implementation phase. Through in‑depth interviews with advocates and stakeholders responsible for implementation, the article examines their attitudes and interests concerning the law and women’s rights to life, dignity, and bodily integrity. Prevailing gender norms perpetuate the trivialisation of domestic violence, framing it as a personal issue of minimal importance. Consequently, service providers tend to delegitimise and deprioritise it. This article investigates the strategies and tactics of deliberate inaction employed by backlash proponents, which is different from lack of capacity, and explores the counter‑strategies deployed by advocates aiming to ensure the Act’s effective implementation.

Public University Students’ Experiences of Anti-Feminist Backlash in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Adeepto Intisar Ahmed — 2024-03-05

Public university campuses in Bangladesh have been historically significant sites of negotiating with social and political orders. Based on in-depth interviews with male and female students from three public universities in Dhaka, conducted between 2022 and 2023, this article identifies the ways in which formal and informal structures of power on campus reproduce patriarchal norms and gendered inequities. The students’ narratives shed light on how the culture of residential halls, and practices of policing and surveillance, interact with patriarchal norms to limit women’s agency and mobility. They also show the ways in which masculine practices which draw from hypersexual views on women and glorify violence become enabled and sustained by institutional power dynamics, wherein harassment and policing become instruments to negotiate power. The article provides new insights into the ways in which patriarchal power dynamics and gender norms promoted and practised within an institutional space create drivers of anti‑feminist backlash.

The Centaur’s Kick: Backlash as Disruptive Upgrades to Patriarchal Orders

Jerker Edström — 2024-03-05

Backlash is not always pushing back against progress for women, but how is it still patriarchal? Sliced into three sections – on confluence, contestations, and cartographies – this article draws on a thesis about backlash as the exploitation of insecurity wrought by apparent crises to re/shape social orders, through re-fixing symbolic sites, namely the body, family, and nation. It begins by describing a confluence of types of actors and projects silencing feminist voice. Contesting gendered backlash narratives about the three sites are then explored, followed by a more theoretical section reflecting on cartographies of resonant concurrence and contradictions in backlash. Reflecting on masculinities, identification, and levels of hegemonic power, the argument is that the fixing of sites re/naturalises three deep-level patriarchal logics – phallogocentric binary (body), hierarchical (family), and categorical closed-systems (nation) principles – which helps us theorise the evolution of patriarchal hegemonies. This may inform more strategic countering of backlash.

Disrupting Anxious Masculinity: Fraternity as Resistance

Abhijit Das — 2024-03-05

Within the experience of our work in India, context and positionality determine what we perceive as backlash against gender justice. An important underlying cause of backlash today is the widespread crisis of masculinities, where subaltern masculinities are evolving differently in response to the aggressive nationalist Hindutva masculinity. Gender and development strategies have failed to recognise or address this. This article analyses grounded examples from our action research towards generating new knowledge on how two collectives are negotiating backlash. These include the community-based transgender organisation Kolkata Rista and Humqadam, a platform comprising male activists in Uttar Pradesh working with men on gender equality. Applying the framework of ontological insecurity, this article explores ways for discovering common ground in situations where polarisation destroys the space for debate and discussion. Reflecting on the political practice of fraternity, the article examines how social movements can shift strategies when faced with exclusionary discourses.

Virulent Hindutva, Vigilante State: Situating Backlash and its Implications for Women’s Rights in India

Shraddha Chigateri — 2024-03-05

India is facing a period of seismic backlash against feminist and progressive politics and the pace of change, particularly over the last ten years, has been breakneck with serious consequences for women’s equality and human rights. Drawing on an examination of the reversals and pushbacks against women’s rights in three areas – the citizenship rights of Muslim women, the rights of domestic workers, and the impacts of restrictions on foreign funding on women’s rights organising – this article seeks to contribute not just to an understanding of the nature of the backlash faced by women’s rights in India, but also to the wider debates on backlash from global South feminist perspectives.

Gender Equality vs ‘Morality’: The Erosion of Gender Agendas in Kenya

Phil Erick Otieno — 2024-03-05

This article seeks to interpret the recent erosion of gender equality agendas in Kenya through a lens of anti‑gender pushback, or patriarchal backlash. Since 2013, Kenyan governments have increasingly been appealing to citizens’ emotions through apparently ‘sound’ discourse, citing simple de‑contextualised narratives that resonate with many people, such as ‘family values’ and ‘Kenyan moral codes’. Gender equality – and policies and praxis to advance this – is increasingly framed as ‘non-African’, with laws, policies, and practices focused upon gender justice depicted as destructive of the ‘African family’, underscored by a particular framing of religion and morality. By including a broader understanding of the diverse manifestations of backlash within the Kenyan context, this article focuses on how notions of morality are mobilised by a range of implicated actors – government, politicians, media, and repressive religious forces – to undermine policies, laws, and discourse that seek to further gender justice in Kenya.

Unravelling and Countering Backlash: Uganda’s Sexual Offences Legislation

Amon Ashaba Mwiine — 2024-03-05

Considerable progress has been seen in Ugandan women’s collective advocacy for their rights since independence. Notably, women activists’ efforts in the early 1990s culminated in the institutionalisation of gender equality in Uganda’s constitution and a subsequent resurgence of the women’s movement. Despite these efforts, certain egalitarian and inclusive policy reforms have been postponed, stripped of clauses that question patriarchal power, watered down, bureaucratically frustrated, or outrightly rejected. This article draws on ongoing contestations around the stalled Sexual Offences Bill, 2019 to address the following questions: How do we understand the current and recent swell of anti-feminist backlash? What motivates backlash against gender equity reforms? And what will it take to counter these oppositional forces? The article reveals overt and covert forms of backlash in the sexual offences legislative process, the ways in which gender justice actors countered these, and the implications for understanding and countering backlash in Uganda and beyond.

Queering Gender Backlash

Tessa Lewin — 2024-03-05

This article ‘queers’ the concept of gender backlash – troubling some of its assumptions and drawing attention to the centrality of heteronormativity to an anti-gender worldview. It argues that backlash is both episodic and continuous, and that the focus on ‘gender’ in anti-gender politics tends to eclipse the affective importance of sexuality in backlash politics. It argues, also, for a less binary approach to (counter-backlash) activism – that recognises survival as a form of resistance. Finally, it suggests the potential of leveraging intersectionalities to forge counter‑backlash solidarities.

Deconstructing Anti-Feminist Backlash: The Lebanese Context

Nay El Rahi — 2024-03-05

The matrix of deep-rooted social, political, sectarian, and patriarchal structures in Lebanon necessitates the introduction of a nuanced understanding of ‘backlash’ that veers away from definitions of the notion that apply mostly in Western contexts. This article proposes a contextualised definition of backlash for Lebanon and frames it by unpacking the structural flaws found in the very way Lebanese society is constructed, and in power relations within the country’s familial structures. It also discusses the different forms of anti-feminist backlash observed in the country over the past few years, focusing on three axes: systemic violence, tactical backlash, and atomised backlash. Explored through case studies ranging from the hostile sectarian system against women in politics to radical religious groups, this article explores how backlash in this context diverges from the conceptualisations of backlash in existing literature.

Glossary

Jerker Edström — 2024-03-05

This is the Glossary for IDS Bulletin 55.1: ‘Understanding Gender Backlash: Southern Perspectives’

Notes on Contributors

Jerker Edström — 2024-03-05

This is the Notes on Contributors for IDS Bulletin 55.1: 'Understanding Gender Backlash: Southern Perspectives'.

Jerker Edström, Jenny Edwards, Tessa Lewin, Rosie McGee, Sohela Nazneen and Chloe Skinner

IDS Bulletin Editor — 2024-03-05