Elżbieta Korolczuk is a sociologist, commentator and activist. She works at Södertörn University in Stockholm and lectures at the Center for American Studies at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on gender, social movements and civil society (including anti-gender and populist movements).
She is the author of numerous academic articles and books, including, with Agnieszka Graff, Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment (Routledge, 2021).
Voxeurop: Debates about gender, feminism and sexual and reproductive health play a central role in European politics and society today. What’s happening and how do you see it developing in the future?
Elżbieta Korolczuk: Yes, there are at least three trends at play.
The first trend is the rise of right-wing populist parties, which often work in partnership with anti-gender movements – what Agnieszka Graf and I call “opportunistic synergies” in our book Anti-Gender Politics in a Populist Era.
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Right-wing populist parties often do not have a strong ideological project: they address issues of gender, sexuality and reproduction in order to spread fear, deepen polarization, mobilize voters and create strong divisions between “us” and “them”.
The second trend is the so-called “femo-nationalist” discourse, which can be found in Sweden, Germany and many other countries. In many European countries, gender issues are very much intertwined with issues of race and immigration. Right-wing parties are not overtly racist or Islamophobic, but they refer to gender equality in order to construct a racist or Islamophobic position. The message is: “We are not racist, we just want to protect women from sexual violence by black and brown men from Africa and the Middle East!”
Claiming to want to protect “their” women from rape by invaders, these right-wing parties build a very strong divide between white, “gender-equality” Europe and immigrants from Africa and the Middle East who are barbarians who pose a threat to women and the LGBTQ community. This helps them to gain voter support, deepen social divisions and mobilize people by spreading moral panic and fear.
The third factor is the changing party political landscape globally. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart published a book called “Cultural Backlash,” which shows that the usual left-right division no longer applies in party politics due to several issues, such as the fact that the economy is no longer clearly constructed as a right- or left-wing project. Cultural issues therefore become the most important political divide. For example, a study analyzing German voters found that anxieties about the gender order (the decline of traditional masculinity and gender dualism) are much more prevalent among AfD (far-right) voters, both male and female. Similarly, in Poland, young men who vote far-right fear “gender ideology” much more than the rest of the population.
These three trends are making gender one of the key issues in today’s political struggles.
What is Russia’s role in this scenario?
Russia’s role can be analyzed from two perspectives. The first concerns Russia’s organizational and financial support for gender conservative groups and activists in Europe. For example, according to Neil Dutta’s report on the funding of anti-gender politics in Europe, Russia spent $188.2 million (out of a total of $707 million) on supporting anti-gender groups between 2009 and 2018. And this is only a small part of the traceable funds. Russia has been a source of funding for such movements in Europe for quite some time now, and the study also documents cooperation between Russian activists and the American Religious Right.
Between 2009 and 2018, Russia spent $188.2 million on supporting anti-gender groups.
Of course, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a significant number of politicians and civil society groups have stopped talking about Russia as a beacon of hope for the West in terms of moral rehabilitation, but I don’t think they have actually changed their ideological position. Rather, they seem to be trying to avoid criticism of their ties with Russia.
Russia has long had lofty ambitions to become a counterweight to the Western liberal order, especially in the European context, and has realized this in many of the former Soviet republics. From this perspective, the Ukraine war is the next logical step in Russia’s plan to save the West from its own decadence and moral decline. Scholars Petr Kratochvil and Mira O’Sullivan have shown that opposition to gender equality and sexual rights was a key element of Russian propaganda justifying the attack. We have moved from a culture war to an actual war.
It is interesting to compare the LGBTQIA+ issues in Ukraine and Georgia from this perspective…
In Ukraine, support for LGBTQ rights, and gender equality in a broader sense, is growing because it helps to build a clear divide between two very different countries: Ukraine and Russia. So now in Ukraine, even right-wing groups agree that politicians should introduce gender equality measures or protect minority rights, because it shows that “we are not like Russia” and “we are not under Russian influence.”
Georgia has chosen a completely different path. It has been trying to negotiate and navigate its intimacy with Russia while keeping the door open to the European Union. But the religious influence of the Orthodox Church is much more prominent in Georgia, which is a key factor in the whole scenario. In the end, the Georgian authorities, i.e. the ruling party, have essentially chosen the authoritarian path. The LGBTQ issue is one obvious manifestation of this, but there are also related issues, such as the way Georgia is adopting solutions created by Russia to limit the independence of civil society organizations.
What is the relationship between the far-right and women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and sexual freedom? In the West, far-right movements (and leaders like Jordan Bardella in France) often claim to support women’s rights.
My current research in the CCINDLE Horizon project focuses on Sweden, where we see conceptions of gender equality and gender shifting as the right adopts many terms and concepts originating from feminist, progressive and left-wing movements.
In Poland and Hungary, right-wing forces are openly anti-feminist and seek to marginalize feminism and ban gender theory and gender studies. In the Western context, right-wing forces claim to be defenders of gender equality and especially women’s rights.
So how gender equality is defined and which groups of women are included or excluded as equals is now at issue. For example, Michael Rubestad, a member of the Sweden Democrats, the far-right party and the second largest party in the Swedish parliament, claims to be a feminist. The Sweden Democrats profess to be the “right” type of feminist and truly defend women’s rights, in contrast to feminist activists who support transgender and immigrant rights.
Similarly, in many countries there are “gender-critical feminists” who argue that feminism is misguided and that “gender ideology” is a threat to biological women and girls. In the UK and Italy, these activists helped to block the introduction of new laws that would have given transgender and non-binary people more protection. So today, these struggles are not just between feminists and anti-gender activists, but also within feminism itself.
This raises questions about the role of feminism in political and social change.
As feminists, we must ask ourselves what type of gender equality we have promoted and enacted. Existing gender equality laws often most benefit white, middle-class women. Such laws are rarely truly intersectional and help prevent discrimination on the basis of class, race, or ability. We have largely failed to include minority and working-class women in gender equality measures, or even in the feminist movement itself.
The right has adopted many terms and concepts derived from feminist, progressive and left-wing movements.
And this backfired. It’s not just that the far right is the “bad guy” and they’re using our language to hide their real racism. The problem is also in the way gender equality is often introduced, and how it ignores things like citizenship status, economic status, etc. So I think we have to be really careful about how we practice and define gender equality.
So how can we counter the anti-gender hijacking of the gender equality narrative?
When we encounter right-wing activists who claim to be fighting for gender equality, the question we should always ask is: equality for whom? Does the gender equality they are fighting for include all women? In the Polish situation, it is very clear who is being excluded. And it is not just immigrant women or women who want to have the right to decide what to do with their bodies. Single mothers, for example, are not an exception. There have been many reforms introducing cash benefits for families with children, but support systems for single mothers have not been reformed for the last 20 years.
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The “gender equality” that the right wing claims to fight for has a very exclusive orientation, so we must always ask who is included and who is excluded from any new laws they propose, because it is clear that their idea of gender equality excludes many minority groups.
What about reproductive rights and sexual freedom?
In some countries, social opposition to abortion rights remains strong. This is usually due to the power of religious institutions that are against reproductive rights. These forces tend to be openly anti-abortion and anti-reproductive rights, and Poland is a perfect example. But it’s interesting to look at Sweden, for example, where the Sweden Democrats and the Christian Democrats came together a few years ago to push through some small changes that would have rolled back women’s reproductive rights and access to health care.
For example, they supported introducing freedom of conscience clauses into the health care system, but this backfired because abortion is not an issue in a country like Sweden and it is very hard to get support to restrict access to abortion.
Now they’ve made a complete turnaround and claim to be supporters of reproductive rights, even going so far as to propose that the right to abortion be enshrined in the Swedish constitution. It will be interesting to see how they adapt to these issues. This is a phenomenon that can also be seen in the United States, where, for example, the Republican Party supports marriage equality but opposes abortion rights.
This shows the flexibility of anti-gender movements. For example, when marriage equality becomes widely accepted in one country, they move on to another issue, now transgender rights. They move from issue to issue, testing what possibilities they have for mobilizing people, including those who were not interested before. The transgender issue is particularly problematic right now because it is dividing the feminist movement. The right is very smart in choosing its targets, and we need to be at least equally smart about how we fight for women’s rights.
