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Knowledge strategies in anti-gender politics

How do anti-gender actors challenge knowledge around inclusivity and anti-reactionary politics? What new knowledge is produced through these challenges?

Anti-gender politics are attacking the knowledge produced by feminists, gender, disability, and critical race scholars. Attacks on knowledge impact feminist resistance and where the opportunities lie for feminism to create inclusive bodies of knowledge to transform society.

Photos: © Michelle Geerardyn

Illustrations: © Valentine Zhang (https://www.instagram.com/valentinezhang/)

Setting and purpose of the session

The session examined how antigender politics produces and circulates knowledge, how this knowledge affects researchers, activists, organizations, and communities, and how it might be challenged without allowing the far right to determine the terms of political debate.

Round 1:

Three guiding questions:

1. What is this anti-gender knowledge about?

2. How does it affect us?

3. How do we challenge it?

A related prompt asked participants to consider who produces this knowledge, what it contains, and where it travels. The format was conversational rather than presentational. Participants were invited to speak from research, activism, lived experience, observation, and feeling.

The gathering began with brief introductions in which each person named something they liked, such as walking in the woods, tea, ice cream, or dogs. This light opening helped establish a human scale before the conversation moved into far right politics, racialization, emotional labour, fear, care, and collective strategy.

The three questions were discussed in two rounds. After a break of about twenty minutes, a second group entered. The earlier discussion was summarized for them, followed by another round of introductions. The second group then responded to the same questions from different experiences and political locations.

1. What is it about? Understanding anti-gender knowledge

Antigender politics as a transnational knowledge project

Participants did not treat antigender politics as a single opinion, campaign, or national phenomenon. It was understood as a transnational process of knowledge production that travels through political institutions, cities, streets, media, social media, research, and organizational life. It narrows broad struggles over gender and social justice into apparently simple disputes about the family, children, sexuality, education, and social order.

One contribution proposed that a necessary starting point is to understand the logics of the far right. This means examining not only the claims it makes, but also how those claims become persuasive, which emotions they mobilize, who is positioned as threatened, and which institutions allow the claims to circulate.

The inseparability of gender, racism, and migration

A major part of the first round concerned the relationship between antigender politics and anti migration politics. A researcher working with racialized women who experience street harassment described a difficult political tension. Participants in that research sometimes practised opacity when speaking about harassment because public accounts of gendered violence could be appropriated to racialize men, intensify anti migration narratives, or present racialized communities as culturally deficient. Another participant working on queer Muslim lives identified a related tension the group agreed that gendered violence must be discussed, but it cannot be separated from racism, migration, religion, sexuality, and the political conditions under which testimony is heard. Treating these as independent issues can allow concern about gender to become a vehicle for racialized governance. Anti-immigration and anti-immigrant discourse weaponizes sexual harassment (femonationalism), preventing racialised women from talking about their experiences of harassment as they do not want to participate in racist discourse. It is important to navigate these entanglements as a whole, instead of a series of single issues.

The discussion therefore resisted two inadequate options. One option is silence, which can leave violence unnamed. The other is a generalized discussion of gender that ignores how stories are racialized and politically used. Participants argued for approaches capable of holding both realities at once.

Knowledge across the street, media, and institutions

Participants noted that antigender knowledge does not remain in formal political speech and it moves between street encounters, social media, news media, intimate relationships, research settings, and institutional debates. Narratives that appear spontaneous at street level may be connected to broader media frames and organized political projects. This circulation makes it difficult to identify a single site where the problem begins or can be solved. The conversation also raised the danger of accepting the binary offered by antigender actors and responding only within their framing, which can trap opponents in a debate whose categories, urgency, and limits have already been set by the far right.

2. How does anti-gender knowledge affect us?

These norms are an either or: you either are in them, or outside of them, but you cannot exist besides them? –> this ties to the heaviness of emotional labour and time we have to invest to exist in spite of this knowledge, as well as to resist it. It takes time to fight the distortion of our arguments.

How antigender politics affects people and organizations

Time, exhaustion, and embodied labour

Participants emphasized that engaging with antigender politics has material and bodily costs. They named the time required to study, respond to, and organize against it, as well as pressure, frustration, sensory strain, and emotional labour. The work is not only analytical nd it can affect the body, concentration, relationships, and the capacity to continue organizing. One intervention explicitly named the affective impact of emotional labour on the body. Another stressed that challenging these movements takes time that is often invisible in institutional accounts of research or activism. This prompted a practical question: how can organizations be supported rather than simply asked to absorb more work?

Polarization and the narrowing of acceptable politics

Participants discussed how polarization can create conditional forms of tolerance. An example was the position that being gay may be accepted privately while teaching about sexuality or gender is rejected. Such positions present themselves as moderate, but they restrict public knowledge, education, and collective rights. They also push people toward increasingly rigid positions by defining progressiveness as acceptable only when it remains invisible or politically harmless.

Fear, uncertainty, and control

The group repeatedly returned to fear!! Antigender politics can capitalize on uncertainty and the feeling that familiar worlds are being destabilized. It offers simple explanations, clear enemies, and the promise of restored control. Messages are often designed to feel personally close to people, especially those experiencing insecurity or loss of certainty, which raised a strategic problem. Challenging the limited certainty available to someone may be experienced as further destabilization. At the same time, leaving that certainty unchallenged allows exclusionary narratives to harden. Participants did not resolve this tension, but they agreed that strategy must attend to who is being addressed, why a message is persuasive, and what needs it appears to meet.

The problem of reactive strategy

A strong concern in the first round was that progressive and feminist actors may remain trapped in reaction. Participants asked why so much energy is spent answering the far right rather than centering emancipatory agendas, languages, and worlds. Constant reaction can normalize far right vocabulary, repeat its binaries, and allow it to decide which questions are urgent. The issue was not framed as a call to ignore harmful claims. Rather, participants distinguished necessary response from political dependency; A movement can respond to immediate harm while still refusing to let its adversaries define the horizon of possibility. The desired shift was from protection through endless reaction toward protection connected to imagination, solidarity, and the creation of alternative institutions.

3. How can we challenge it?

Care as a contested political language

Care emerged as both part of the problem and a possible response. Antigender actors frequently claim to care for children, families, communities, morality, or social stability. The language of care can therefore conceal hierarchy, control, exclusion, and fear; A claim to care does not necessarily indicate a caring practice.

Participants nevertheless rejected the idea that emancipatory movements should abandon care because it has been appropriated. Care was described as belonging to feminist, antiracist, queer, and collective struggles too. The task is not to surrender the concept, but to distinguish performed care from material arrangements that actually sustain people. This discussion anticipated the final concept of care infrastructure and the phrase shifts attention away from individual virtue and toward the organization of housing, labour, family life, education, health, safety, and mutual support. It asks what structures make care possible, who provides it, who is depleted by it, and who is excluded from receiving it.

Round 2: moving from reaction toward collective possibility

Imagination without alienation

The second round developed the question of proactive strategy. Participants called for political imagination, but also asked how new imaginaries might be created without alienating people who are uncertain, unconvinced, or located differently. Even emancipatory visions can reproduce othering when they assume that everyone already shares the same language, analysis, or confidence. The group identified elitist language and moral superiority as obstacles. Using specialized political language may demonstrate analytical precision within activist or academic spaces, while making the discussion inaccessible elsewhere. Participants called for approaches that can remain politically clear without treating disagreement, uncertainty, or lack of vocabulary as evidence of moral failure.

Compassion, generosity, and power

Compassion and generosity were proposed as strategic resources, but not as substitutes for conflict or analysis. Participants stressed the need to sit with tension, including the tension between seeing how fear is produced and resisting the politics built through that fear. Compassion becomes politically useful only when combined with an understanding of power and accountability; the distinction matters because calls for kindness can depoliticise violence, while uncompromising political language can isolate people and reproduce moral hierarchy. The discussion sought a position that refuses both sentimental avoidance and punitive superiority.

Coalition building and working across difference

Coalition building was described as the capacity to become politically large enough to work together without pretending that differences do not exist. Participants emphasized solidarity, shared work, and the need for multiple strategies rather than a single method imposed on every context. Lived experience was presented as a source of understanding. One participant reflected that during the COVID period forms of labour that had long existed, including emotional labour, became publicly recognizable. This example suggested that collective crises can reveal work and dependency that dominant frameworks usually hide.

Joy, discomfort, and living otherwise

Joy became one of the most generative themes in the second round nd participants described joy in working together and in collective movement. Joy was not presented as cheerfulness, personal wellness, or the denial of pain. It referred to the political force of relationships, shared activity, and the experience of building a life that is not fully organized by fascist or exclusionary terms. One participant complicated the language of joy by stating that they were not always joyful and were willing to remain in discomfort while continuing the work. This prevented joy from becoming another demand placed on exhausted people. Joyful politics, in this account, allows grief, anger, uncertainty, and discomfort to remain present. The group linked joy to showing that the alternative is already here and social movements are not only instruments for producing a future world. They are also present forms of relation, community, and collective life. The political task is therefore partly to make existing alternatives visible, inhabitable, and durable.

Victimhood, democracy, and the need for power analysis

Participants observed a double use of victimhood. People targeted by antigender politics are victims of concrete violence and exclusion. At the same time, far right actors portray themselves as victims of woke politics, feminism, migration, or social change. This reversal can redirect attention away from institutional power and toward competing claims of injury. The discussion also questioned how democracy has been narrowed into simplified accounts of majority preference, free speech, or electoral choice. Participants argued that a more serious discussion of power is needed. Without power analysis, opposing sides can appear equivalent even when they have very different access to institutions, media, resources, and the capacity to define social reality.

Collective synthesis

At the end of the second round, the group tried to select three terms that could hold together the discussion. The process itself involved negotiation. Several related concepts appeared on the flipcharts, including imagination, protection without reaction, generosity, solidarity, compassion, experience, coalition building, community, care, and the avoidance of alienation.

Political consciousness

Political consciousness referred to understanding the logics of the far right, the production of fear and victimhood, and the links between antigender politics, racism, migration, hierarchy, privilege, and institutional power. It also meant recognizing how language and knowledge become normalized across different settings.

Joyful communities

Joyful communities referred to coalition building, collective movement, lived experience, and the capacity to practise other ways of living in the present. The emphasis was not on permanent happiness, but on forms of community that make resistance sustainable and give people a material experience of another social world.

Care infrastructure

The third term moved from generosity toward care infrastructure. This shift was significant. Generosity can describe an individual disposition, while infrastructure directs attention to systems, institutions, labour, and shared responsibility. Participants asked how care could be organized beyond the limits of the nuclear family, and how existing family forms could be transformed without simply condemning the people who depend on them.

The question that captured this part of the conversation was: How do we organize care in a world that destroys? The wording connected care to survival, abolition, reconstruction, and the creation of durable social arrangements.