Sexing the Blue Tide: The Backlash against sexual and gender justice in Latin America

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The recent rise of center-right and neoliberal governments has seen cuts in social spending, while also serving as a fertile ground for the dissemination of a vibrant, increasingly coordinated and effective, anti-gender activism. By promoting moral campaigns such as “don’t mess with my kids (con mis hijos no te metas),” their preferred policy focus has been on overturning comprehensive sexuality education, and  sexual, reproductive and LGBTQ rights. As we have seen in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, public attacks directed at feminist and LGBTQ activists portray their demands as the “new cultural face of Marxism,” or “as an agenda linked to Communism”. Building on the emerging body of Latin American scholarship and selected national case studies, this presentation will provide a set of key insights to understand the current dynamics of backlash against gender and sexual justice in Latin America and how best to prevent it.

The presentation will be structured in two parts. The first will look at recent history to assess whether the term ‘backlash’ is the best concept to describe anti-gender movements. It will argue that the uneven legacy of past progressive administrations under the Pink Tide for feminists and LGBTQ activists is an important explanatory factor in understanding today’s distinctive patterns of opposition to gender and sexual justice in the region. The second part will then review the current impact of conservative counter-movements on specific policies. It will argue that ‘anti-gender’ movements are widening their reach to new policy areas that have not historically been the focus of conservative or religious opposition. To illustrate this trend, I will highlight how the ‘gender ideology’ framing of demands and protest repertoires has been shared, recycled and utilized to effectively erode broad popular support for the peace agreements in Colombia and to dismantle political support for a gender parity bill in Paraguay. Therefore, in the current context, the transnational cross- fertilization and circulation of ideas and toolkits among these counter-movement activists means that novel spheres of feminist politics are increasingly within their reach.