Editorial: Facing contemporary antifeminism: a call for intersectionality

Abstract

We live in a paradoxical political moment: feminist movements across the globe have achieved landmark legal and institutional advances over the past several decades, yet mobilizations against feminism and gender equality and justice are simultaneously intensifying, diversifying, and going transnational. Anti-gender campaigns led mostly but not exclusively by far-right populist parties, reactionary religious movements and online misogyny networks no longer operate at the political margins. They have entered parliaments and governments, shaped laws, and influenced public policy all over the world. The question confronting those interested in gender, social movements and political science is no longer whether antifeminism is a serious political force but how to analyse it with adequate complexity, and how feminist theory and practice should respond to it.

This Research Topic was conceived precisely out of that urgency. Its animating conviction is straightforward: antifeminism cannot be understood in single-axis terms. It is not merely a backlash against women's rights, nor simply a product of far-right extremism, nor reducible to toxic masculinity, though it implicates all three. Contemporary antifeminism is an ideologically intersectional phenomenon entangled with racism, nationalism, neocapitalism, religious orthodoxy, classism, ableism, and cis-heteronormativity in ways that both amplify its reach and obscure its workings. Meeting it requires analytical tools of comparable complexity. The seven articles gathered in this Research Topic make precisely that case, from multiple disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts.