Course

We start with explaining the origins, definitions, and political uses of the term ‘anti-gender’ politics, including scholarly debates and critiques.

Building on the previous discussion, this topic foregrounds how activists and affected communities across Europe experience, interpret, and make sense of anti-gender dynamics in their own political and social contexts.

In this topic, you will explore how ‘anti-gender’ actors use media to generate fear and outrage around changing norms of gender and sexuality. You’ll learn how emotional tactics - such as sensational headlines, decontextualised images, and alarmist language - frame feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and reproductive rights as the existential threats to traditional family, nation, or morality. You’ll analyse how these tactics create ‘moral panic’ and mobilise support for restrictive policies under the guise of protecting children, families, or cultural identity.

In this topic, you will examine how sustained negative media coverage impacts public perceptions of feminist, queer, and trans movements. You'll consider how media frames these groups – as dangerous, illegitimate, or foreign – and how such narratives contribute to hostility, marginalisation, funding difficulties, or policy backlash. This topic also highlights how selective visibility and misrepresentation affect the legitimacy and safety of queer, feminist, and trans movements.

In this lesson, we explore how ‘anti‑gender’ movements shape their messages to fit different political and cultural contexts. Rather than using one fixed story, they draw on familiar themes—such as protecting children, defending free speech, or resisting outside influence—and adjust them to match local fears, values, and debates. We look at why these messages can be so effective, focusing on how they appeal to emotions rather than consistency.

This lesson traces how ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations move from rhetoric to structure. It examines how governments, media actors, and local institutions translate ideological hostility into concrete actions: restrictive laws, censorship, defunding, surveillance of civil society, policing of public spaces, and subtle forms of bureaucratic exclusion. You will see how these mechanisms interact, forming an infrastructure of discrimination that affects everyday life.

This lesson focuses on how structural hostility becomes personal, embodied harm. Through testimonies across all RESIST contexts, you will explore the continuum of violence, from online smear campaigns and doxxing to physical attacks, threats, and the resulting atmosphere of fear. This topic emphasises how digital and offline violence reinforce each other, cultivating hypervigilance and self-restriction.

This lesson examines the emotional, psychological, and intersectional effects of ‘anti-gender’ politics. It explores how chronic hostility, stigma, and erasure produce exhaustion, trauma, demobilization, self-censorship, and loss of community. It also considers how individuals navigate burnout, fear, and isolation while continuing forms of everyday resistance and mutual care.

This lesson analyses how intersecting inequalities intensify vulnerability to ‘anti-gender’ mobilisation. Drawing on intersectionality as both an analytic category and a practical approach, we show how race, migration status, class/economic status, disability, and legal precarity shape exposure to violence and access to safety. It also highlights intersectional forms of resilience and care that arise in response to ‘anti-gender’ violence.

In many contexts, ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations ; create conditions that drive people to leave. Rising hostility, shrinking civic space, criminalisation, targeted repression, and violent attacks have compelled queer, trans, feminist, and LGBTIQ+ people to seek safety elsewhere. At the same time, anti-gender rhetoric shapes border and asylum regimes, influencing who is recognised as deserving of protection — and under what conditions.

For many queer, trans, and feminist people, exile begins as an urgent step away from repression. Yet the moment of arrival rarely brings immediate safety or belonging. People seeking asylum and people without legal right to stay are subject to encampment, detention, and deportation. The border is not only a physical demarcation but follows people with criminalised and precarious migration statutes in all aspects of their lives. This topic explores the material and emotional realities of exile: how displacement shapes work, community, and mental health. 

This topic explores aspects of survival and political resistance that are often intangible—emotional support, informal care, and everyday acts of solidarity—but we will anchor these in concrete examples to try and grasp them. We learn how care, friendship, and solidarity networks sustain life in exile and become the infrastructure of political agency. In contexts where institutions fail, these acts of mutual support are not simply emotional responses - they are political practices that make survival possible.

This topic introduces the wide range of grassroots strategies that queer, trans, and feminist activists use to counter anti-gender narratives and policies. Resistance can be overt – visible protests, legal advocacy, and public campaigns – or quieter, grounded in everyday practices of care, digital security, and safe-space creation. What unites these approaches is a commitment to collective survival, even in contexts where civic space is shrinking.

In this topic, you will explore how care and mutual aid function as crucial infrastructures of resistance against ‘anti-gender’ mobilisation. Care is more than emotional support: it sustains movements, mitigates burnout, strengthens collective resilience, and challenges the hierarchies on which anti-gender attacks depend.

In this topic, we focus on the cultural and affective strategies that challenge anti-gender narratives through meaning-making, symbolism, playfulness, and imagination.

In this topic you will discover how knowledge is shared within and across organisations and what the main challenges to collaboration and networking are. You will also explore the intergenerational tensions present in queer and feminist movements and the testimonies of people’s longing for meaningful intergenerational exchanges based on care and mentoring.

This topic focuses on joy as the emotional and cultural energy that fuels collective agency. Care protects; joy amplifies. Together they create the conditions for endurance and imagination.