Mapping So-Called 'Anti-Gender' Discourses in Parliamentary And Media Spaces Across The 'Eastern' And 'Western' Geopolitical Imaginations of 'Europe'.

Description

Abstract (English)

Anti-feminist and anti-LGBTIQ+ mobilisations have taken roots transnationally, denying individuals autonomy, rights to bodily integrity or self-determination, and attacking selected groups of people (e.g. trans* people, people doing abortion) in order to pursue dehumanising and exclusionary agendas. In the ongoing battle against them, national and international queer-feminist insurgencies have been developing spaces of resistances and fightback. ‘Identity politics’, one way or another, is thus a space of tensions and dis-comforts of politics, where actors, issues, and strategies constantly manoeuvre and reposition themselves to aggregate or ease the arising frictions. Symbolic and real geo-temporalities of political loci have been a significant contributing factor in these processes.

This presentation will empirically draw on the research findings from the RESIST Project (https://theresistproject.eu) on the parliamentary and media ‘anti-gender’ debates in the UK, PL, HU, CH, and the European Parliament to engage with the following issues:

• how ‘dis-comfort’ features as an element of the ‘anti-gender’ politics in Polish and transnational contexts;
• porous and un-comfortable thresholds across media and parliaments as places of (trans)national politics;
• syncretic benefits and obstacles emerging from those ‘threshold of dis-comforts’ that re-create imaginary geopolitics of ‘the ‘east’ and ‘west’ in the ‘anti-gender’ (scholarly, political, activist) debates;
• thinking forward about recommendations and next steps needed in our fight against inequalities and for the better, queer-feminist futures.

Keywords:

‘anti-gender’, LGBTIQ+ equalities, parliamentary and media discourses, queer-feminist resistances, threshold politics.