Laetitia Caumes on the need for transnational European feminist alliances.
In 1974, the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said to Claudine Monteil : “Admittedly, Claudine, we have won, but only temporarily. All it will take is a political, economic or religious crisis for women’s rights – our rights – to be called into question. You must remain vigilant throughout your life.”1A 49 years later, this sadly still rings true. Although undeniable progress has been made all over Europe, womens’ and LGBTQIA+ peoples’ rights are constantly at risk of being overturned. Feminist activists and actors consistently have to be on the lookout and fight to safeguard them.
In France, these last 49 years have allowed for the implementation of numerous feminist policies: the legalisation of same-sex marriage (2013), the implementation of a street harassment law (2018), and the access to Medically Assisted Procreation (MAP) for lesbian couples and single women (2021). In Europe, 19 countries have legalised same-sex marriage. As the Gender Equality Index (2023) underlines, there is an upward convergence in gender equality, meaning that there is an “increasing equality between women and men in the EU.” But this Index also highlights that multiple gender inequalities persist: unpaid care work inequalities, gender-based violence, gender segregation in education and the labor market, gender gaps in income, etc. These persisting inequalities are ignored by numerous voices claiming that Europe has achieved a “post-feminist” and “post-patriarchal” era, in which social equality has been reached and where further mobilizations are unnecessary (if not framed as threats). These voices have had considerable influence and power in the last decade.
This observation, shared by multiple feminist actors, is at the root of the FIERCE project, an ongoing project funded by the European Union taking place in eight different countries in Europe: Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey. FIERCE stands for “Feminist Movements Revitalizing Democracy in Europe ‘’ and it is a participatory research project, a transnational experiment. Its aim is to develop in-depth understanding of feminist and
anti-feminist and anti-gender movements, activities and discourses as well as their impact on the institutional arena and on policy outcomes over the last decade. As aforementioned, multiple issues need to be taken into consideration when talking about gender inequalities and that is why this project has defined five key areas : the labour market; health and reproductive rights; LGBTQIA+ rights; migration and gender-based violence. To collect data, this project relies on case studies, coding of national debates and controversies and on the creation of laboratories with local feminist actors in each national context. These national co-creation laboratories are also accompanied by transnational laboratories that foster spaces of transnational feminist discussions and action.
Actors of the backlash have turned feminists and LGBTQIA+ activists into their scapegoat, holding them responsible for all current social, political and cultural issues.
The anti-gender backlash
Cross-cutting the data from each national context leads to the conclusion that feminist actors all over Europe face what has been described as “a backlash” or a “backsliding”. These concepts have been used in the Gender Equality Index (2023), the report by the European Union Agency For Fundamental Rights (2017) or the EU Commission Engagement (2019). This backlash is defined as a resistance to progressive social change; a regression on acquired rights or as the maintenance of a non-egalitarian status quo. If we consider – as is done here – that gender equality is indicative of the situation of fundamental rights and values – such as democracy for example – then attacks against it need to be analyzed as a warning of the deterioration of such values. The concept of “backlash” was first popularized by the American feminist Susan Faludi to describe the way in which the feminist wave of the 1970s was followed by a conservative counter-wave that aimed at hindering this progress and the egalitarian public policies it had resulted in. In the 2018 study “Backlash in Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Rights” commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the FEMM Committee, it is specified that “backsliding is used in political science to describe a reversal in transitions to liberal democracies, whereas backlash is used in feminist journalism and academia to describe a reversal of progress with implementing feminist equality policies and related language.” Actors of the backlash have turned feminists and LGBTQIA+ activists into their scapegoat, holding them responsible for all current social, political and cultural issues. Judith Butler sums it up as follows: “the principal aim of the movement is to reverse progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI and feminist movements. Indeed, in attacking “gender” they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents; they oppose protections for women against rape and domestic violence; and they deny the legal and social rights of trans people along with a full
array of legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment and killing.” These setbacks in rights had led to a global endangerment of previous achievements, especially when it comes to bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. A recent example of this would be Italy’s right-wing government ordering “state agencies to cease registration of children born to same-sex couples” and pushing it further by ordering “the cancellation and re-issuance of 33 birth certificates of lesbian couples’ children, endangering access to medical care and education.”
Furthermore, feminist actors such as female politicians and researchers have endured personal attacks hindering their participation in democratic processes. Entire research fields such as gender studies or post-/decolonial studies are being targeted by campaigns framing them as “misguided forms of ideology that do not respect the basic principles of the research profession”. On the 2nd of January 2023, members of the parliamentary group of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) raised 14 questions to the Federal Government concerning the “evaluation of gender studies”. Their questions concern the impact that gender studies have on “the design of laws, national action plans and equality initiatives of the Federal Government”. This hasn’t been covered in German – nor international – news.
These attacks on feminist policies or feminist knowledge production have also found powerful outlets online and digital tools have been used to target individuals all around Europe.
Cyber harassment
These attacks on feminist policies or feminist knowledge production have also found powerful outlets online and digital tools have been used to target individuals all around Europe. Digital tools have been host to a great deal of violences: cyber harassment, cybersexism, masculinist raids, etc, trying to discredit womens’ and gender minorities’ voices. In France, numerous activist initiatives, collectives and associations were born out of this such as #StopFisha and Féministes
contre le Cyberharcèlement. These associations try to raise awareness on the ongoing cybersexism and the life-long consequences that cyberbullying can have on victims. “Fisha” is a French slang for “affiche” which means “exposing”. During the first lock-down France witnessed the rise of countless “Fisha-accounts” on numerous social media platforms (especially Snapchat and Telegram). These accounts disseminated intimate content from young women, mostly minors, without their consent. As #StopFisha describes “the names of the victims (were) pinned to the images, along with their age, address, school and telephone number. (…) Very quickly, hundreds of accounts were created, by region, department, town or neighborhood. In addition to the dissemination of these sexual images, the young women were harassed and threatened when they asked for the content to be deleted. Video recordings of rapes and sexual assaults (were) also posted on these accounts.” Feminist activists in France have been fighting for these accounts to be reported and deleted and for broader cyber-security measures to take into account questions of gender and sexuality. This issue can not be tackled at the national level only, since the Internet goes beyond borders and national law. These issues need to be addressed internationally.
Analyzing and understanding where this anti-feminist and anti-gender backlash comes from is crucial in order to find ways to counter it and protect feminist activists and actors. It is also important to understand that this backlash cannot be understood solely as a response to feminist wins. As the researcher David Paternotte, who has extensively researched anti-gender movements in Europe, emphasizes, this phenomenon is part of a broader conservative wave. The “backlash” should be understood less as a response to feminist activism and more as a distinct phenomenon involving the pushing of a femonationalist agenda against gender equality by the far right. Femonationalism is a concept coined by Sara R. Farris, a sociologist. In In the Name of Women’s Rights. The Rise of Femonationalism (2017) she defines femonationalism as the “exploitation and co-optation of feminist themes by anti-Islam and xenophobic campaigns”. That same year, in 2017, during the Annual Colloquium on Fundamental Rights, participants “expressed concern at the growing wave of mobilization around the world against gender equality. Several populist and extremist movements have been targeting women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights in their attacks.”
This anti-feminist backlash is part of an intensifying campaign across Europe against the so-called “gender ideology”. The FIERCE project underlines that this new wave of conservative mobilization has served to further spread old conservative ideas, rhetorics that already had a pre-defined agenda. Therefore, anti-gender ideologies need to be analyzed in connection with broader political, economic, cultural and social issues since “gender” is merely a symbolic glue used to further a nationalist, essentialist and xenophobic agenda. As Judith Butler puts it “gender comes to stand for, or is linked with, all kinds of imagined “infiltrations” of the national body – migrants, imports, the disruption of local economics through the effects of globalization. Thus “gender” becomes a phantom, (…) such a phantasm of destructive power can only be subdued through desperate appeals to nationalism, anti-intellectualism, censorship, expulsion, and more strongly fortified borders.” Anti-gender movements contribute to contemporary authoritarian processes of de-democratization that target not only gender and equality but also the concept and practice of democracy.
FIERCE aims at transforming national claims made by local feminists into concrete tangible tools and actions.
Building Transnational Power
These processes can be identified at the European level and that is where the uniqueness of the FIERCE project lies, in its transnational approach. While taking into account the specific features of each national context, its history, its national political landscape and its different structures of opportunity, it also attests to the relevance of identifying commonalities between countries and the rhetoric and discourse that activists face in these different contexts. This is especially relevant since anti-gender and anti-feminist networks have been forging strong transnational links. They forge alliances such as AGENDA Europe or sign declarations such as the Geneva Consensus, uniting against the right to abortion. Neil Datta in a report for the European Parliamentary Forum (EPF) published in 2021 entitled “Tip of the Iceberg: Religious Extremist Funders against Human Rights for Sexuality & Reproductive Health in Europe’’ exposes the extent of funding for anti-gender movements in Europe. The findings are appalling: “Thus, the religious extremists’ USD 707 million to fuel anti-gender activism in Europe, representing a four-fold increase over a decade, is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the funding likely flowing into such a regressive agenda. However, the real tip of the iceberg is the much wider overlapping political and economic projects accompanying the religious extremist normative project which undermines human rights while eroding the foundations of regulated market economies and liberal, pluralist democracy.” These transnational networks have the means to truly influence political agendas and their strike force is huge even if the voices they carry are mostly those of a loud minority. These networks are powerful and very well-financed, which could easily send feminist activists into despair, especially when faced with this asymmetry in the resources available to propagate feminist, anti-fascist and intersectional ideas. But they don’t despair. Most of them certainly do not have millions of dollars, they often lack access to specific venues, equipment and time, they build their campaigns with the help of volunteers who are committed but exhausted, unpaid or under-payed. And yet they carry on. And it is vital that this work continues to be carried out nationally, transnationally and internationally.
FIERCE aims at transforming national claims made by local feminists into concrete tangible tools and actions: feminist festivals, self-defense manuals for activists, exhibitions, guides aimed at journalists, etc. The project will also address European institutions with concrete policy recommendations to guarantee the protection of feminist actors, to require monitoring of European fundings (ensuring that women and gender minority rights NGOs and organizations benefit from them), among many other recommendations. FIERCE is about highlighting that feminist mobilizations all across Europe are playing a significant role in the fight against the rise of anti-gender and anti-feminist movements. This project also calls for feminists to create alliances. As Judith Butler puts it: “this is no time for any of the targets of this movement to be turning against one another”. The anti-gender movement “threatens violence against those, including migrants, who have become cast as demonic forces and whose suppression or expulsion promises to restore a national order under duress”. Therefore it calls for a unified resistance by all of those deemed as a threat to white nationalist, cis-normative and heteropatriarchal systems.
Laetitia Caumes has a background in Gender Studies and French-German Literature and Studies and French-German Literature and Culture Studies. She grew up in Rabat, Culture Studies. She grew up in Rabat, Morocco and in Vienna, Austria before Morocco and in Vienna, Austria before moving to Paris in 2016 and living between moving to Paris in 2016 and living between Paris and Berlin since then. She has been Paris and Berlin since then. She has been involved in the ecofeminist collective involved in the ecofeminist collective Voix Voix Déterres Déterres and has been part of the European and has been part of the European Alternatives Team as a research assistant Alternatives Team as a research assistant on multiple feminist and pedagogical on multiple feminist and pedagogical projects since May 2023. projects since May 2023.
FIERCE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101061748. Views and opinions expressed
are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor European
Research Executive Agency can be held responsible for them.