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Summary
"Grasping Patriarchal Backlash" explains the current tide for patriachal backlash against women's rights, their actors and how backlash politics develop.
Why read
This brief is essential to understand the patriachal nature of current backlash in order to build a cohesive movement to counter it, strategically engaging researchers, activists, policymakers and donors in development.
Description
Nearly three decades ago the UN World Conference on Women at Beijing appeared to be uniting the international community around the most progressive platform for women’s rights in history. Instead of steady advancement, we have seen uneven progress, backsliding, co-option, and a recent rising tide of patriarchal backlash.
The global phenomenon of ‘backlash’ is characterised by resurgent misogyny, homo/transphobia, and attacks on sexual and reproductive rights. It is articulated through new forms of patriarchal politics associated with racialised hyper-nationalist agendas, traditionalism, authoritarianism, and alterations to civic space that have become all too familiar both in the global North and South. A wide range of actors and articulations are involved and influenced by underlying drivers and dynamics. A clearer view of the patriarchal nature of current backlash is a prerequisite for building a cohesive movement to counter it, strategically engaging researchers, activists, policymakers and donors in development.
The key messages of this brief are:
- The current tide of patriarchal backlash is no mere reaction to progress for women’s
rights, but rather a complex array of proactive political forces responding to threats and opportunities wrought by multiple global crises. - Anxieties about crises and dark futures are exploited for divisive ‘othering’, forcing
binary choices, and to mobilise support and identification with backlash politics. - Whilst about ‘more than gender’, backlash is still patriarchal and ‘gendered’, and
racialised and classed. Gender is itself politicised to create divisive narratives about
‘bodies’, ‘families’ and ‘nations’, to ‘fix’ these sites down and create order amidst crises. - Fraught with contradictions, backlash is: nostalgic and nihilistic, framed as local
(against the global/foreign) but transnationally connected, and as united (against
‘gender ideology’) whilst occluding contradictory interests of different supporters. - Comprehending backlash better is a prerequisite for the critical awareness required foruniting to counter it effectively; for waking up – becoming smarter and reclaiming being ‘woke’!