Dissertation project: "The Unique Selling Point of Femininity": Motherhood Constructions in Anti-Gender Movements

The complexity of motherhood

Motherhood is a contested political field (O'Reilly, 2020): Who is included in the concept and how mothers relate to their children and society more broadly has varied across time and space. Parenthood is rarely considered in gender-neutral terms; we often take for granted the discourse of gendered parenthood (Mackenzie, 2019). Motherhood is a relational concept involving norms, expectations, and regulations regarding mother-child, mother-father/partner, and mother-state among others. Motherhood discourses have been used to regulate, mobilize, demobilize, or challenge the status quo. Feminist scholarship on motherhood shows that its meanings and effects should not be taken for granted or essentialized, but rather investigated in specific contexts. With my dissertation, I analyze motherhood in the context of anti-gender mobilizations.

Anti-gender movements

Opposition against feminist politics is on the rise globally. Some of this opposition is particularly concerned about the impact of gender research on society. Much of the knowledge on gender produced at universities, in feminist studies as well as in biology or neuroscience, has disproven common beliefs about the gender binary that organizes many aspects of our everyday lives in the Global North. However, conservative, fundamentalist, and far-right actors have opposed politics that aim to reduce or dismantle gender-based injustice that is based in this binary.

Claiming that 'gender ideology' was threatening the basis of society - the family - these actors have protested on the streets, in media reporting, and in parliaments.

Scholarship has emphasized that gender works as "symbolic glue", aligning groups with very different worldviews. The fear that gender theory de-naturalizes social concepts and thus de-naturalizes inequalities unites them. As Kuhar and Paternotte (2017) show, in the last two decades these anti-gender campaigns have built transnational alliances and developed discursive strategies to discredit feminist knowledge and politics.

Anti-gender motherhood(s)

Although more and more researchers are studying anti-gender mobilizations and related phenomena, there is little research so far on the topic of parenthood, and motherhood in particular. Existing studies have pointed out the movements' preoccupation with preserving the heterosexual marriage and family, especially in Christian contexts. Recently, Graff and Korolzcuk (2022) have pointed to the centrality of parenthood in anti-gender mobilization. A limited number of studies has furthermore investigated mothers as anti-gender actors (e.g., Italy's prime minister Giorgia Meloni (Indelicato and Magalhães Lopes, 2024)).

I intend to add to this literature by investigating these working questions:

1. How do anti-gender actors construct motherhood as a discourse?
   - When and how does this discourse (de)mobilize and (de)politicize motherhood?
   - What is the relationship between motherhood and anti-gender ideology?
   - How are "good" and "bad" mothers constructed in these discourses?
2. How do anti-gender activists who are mothers construct their political identities? How do they experience motherhood as activists?
3. Does the socio-political context affect these anti-gender motherhood constructions and experiences?

References

Graff, A., & Korolczuk, E. (2022). _Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment_. Routledge.

Indelicato, M. E., & Magalhães Lopes, M. (2024). Understanding populist far-right anti-immigration and anti-gender stances beyond the paradigm of gender as ‘a symbolic glue’: Giorgia Meloni’s modern motherhood, neo-Catholicism, and reproductive racism. _European Journal of Women’s Studies_, _31_(1), 6-20.

Kuhar, R., & Paternotte, D. (Eds.). (2017). _Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equality_. Rowman & Littlefield.

Mackenzie, J. (2019). _Language, Gender and Parenthood Online: Negotiating Motherhood in Mumsnet Talk_. Routledge.

O’Reilly, A. (2020). Maternal theory: Patriarchal motherhood and empowered mothering. In L. O’Brien Hallstein, A. O’Reilly, & M. V. Giles (Eds.), *The Routledge Companion to Motherhood* (pp. 19–35). Routledge.