Antifeminist Backlash

Resistance to efforts to advance gender equality is a common feature of social life, whether in workplaces and other organisations or elsewhere. In this article, we review the typical character, dynamics of and contexts for resistance to gender equality measures. Resistance is an inevitable, although undesirable, response to efforts at progressive social change. Backlash and resistance to gender equality take common forms including: denial of the problem, disavowal of responsibility, inaction, appeasement, co-option and repression. Resistance may be individual or collective, formal or informal. Pushback against gender equality measures comes more often from members of the privileged group (men) than the disadvantaged group (women). Resistance is a predictable expression of the defence of institutionalised privilege, but it is also shaped by widespread discourses on "sex roles" and "post-feminism," the methods adopted to advance gender equality and the contexts in which they take place. Understanding the character and dynamics of resistance and backlash is vital for preventing and reducing them.

The rise of patriarchal populist leaders over the past decade has fortified a long-standing campaign by conservative governments and advocacy groups to undermine women's international human rights. Their efforts have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women's and girls' equality and health. Through our textual analysis of UN records, governmental and nongovernmental publications, media coverage of disputes over language, and background interviews with activists, we identify and delineate the significance of this 'norm spoiling' strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. We find that women's rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language: controlling what women's rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States' 'global gag rule'; altering the meaning of women's rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom; and deleting foundational words, such as 'gender' and 'sexual and reproductive health and rights', from international agreements. The role of language in today's patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders' speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women's rights.

A year after the #MeToo movement erupted, antifeminism started to retort. The idea behind the backlash was that 'the men who have been accused are the heroes' (Tolentino, 2018). Twitter was one of the public spaces where this confrontation occurred; the #HimToo backlash gathered steam in 2018 (Asimov, 2018) and expanded into 2019. Focussing on the reactions against #Cuéntalo Twitter campaign-the Spanish equivalent to #MeToo-, this article examines how the antifeminist backlash proliferates, offering a view of the dynamics driving it. The authors choose an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach that integrates graph theory and CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis), thus connecting social media formulations with offline discourses, and proposing new ways of studying social movements. To examine the backlash's characteristics, this study utilises Congosto's typology of Twitter profiles (Congosto, 2018). Findings suggest that both approaches are complementary and necessary, for while graph analysis enables the distinction of antifeminist communities on Twitter and their behaviour and characteristics, CDA allows investigators to uncover their discursive strategies and favoured themes. [es] Nuevos enfoques en la propagación de la reacción antifeminista en Twitter Resumen. Un año después del estallido del movimiento #MeToo, el antifeminismo comenzó a reaccionar. La idea detrás de esta resistencia era que 'los hombres que han sido acusados son los héroes' (Tolentino, 2018). Twitter fue uno de los espacios públicos en los que ocurrió esta confrontación; la reacción de #HimToo cobró impulso en 2018 (Asimov, 2018) y se expandió hasta 2019. Centrándose en las reacciones contra la campaña de Twitter #Cuéntalo, el equivalente español de #MeToo, este artículo examina cómo prolifera la reacción antifeminista, ofreciendo una perspective nueva de las dinámicas y fuerzas que lo impulsan. Las autoras utilizan un enfoque interdisciplinario que integra la teoría de grafos y el CDA (Análisis Crítico del Discurso), conectando las formulaciones de las redes sociales con los discursos offline y proponiendo unn novedoso método para estudiar los movimientos sociales. Para examinar las características de la reacción antifeminista, este estudio utiliza la tipología de perfiles de Twitter de Congosto (Congosto, 2018). Los resultados sugieren que ambos enfoques son complementarios y necesarios: mientras que el análisis gráfico permite identificar y clasificar la comunidad antifeminista en Twitter, el CDA ofrece a las investigadoras la posibilidad de descubrir sus estrategias discursivas y temas favoritos.

This paper focuses on the public debate in Poland and Italy concerning the right to abortion in the contemporary rise of populist neo-conservative forces in Europe and of a global feminist movement. In both countries, the historical Catholic interference into women's reproductive rights and self-determination has been enforced by the renewed alliance of right-wing governments and pro-life groups to converge into a transnational “anti-gender war”. This represents a real backlash against women’s achievements over the last decades in terms of reproductive and sexual citizenship, which appears to be the battlefield for redefinition of western citizenship in times of global crisis. Although different genealogies, we identified a common framing of neo-conservative discourse, and of feminist claims and practices, as that of feminist strikes and social mutualism. In this perspective, we consider these practices as a normativity from below, arguing that feminist movement is addressing a new paradigm of citizenship.