How Ordinary People Make Sense of Anti-Gender Messages

Project Information

Sense AGENDa

Grant agreement ID: 101025722

DOI

10.3030/101025722

Project terminated on 10 September 2024

EC signature date 25 February 2021

Start date 5 July 2021

End date 22 December 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 239 195,52

EU contribution

€ 239 195,52

Coordinated by

SVEUCILISTE U ZAGREBU FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET
Croatia

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Sense AGENDa (How Ordinary People Make Sense of Anti-Gender Messages)

Reporting period: 2021-07-05 to 2024-07-04

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In many European countries today, topics such as sexuality education, abortion, same-sex marriage and parenting, or transgender rights create divisions and conflicting perspectives. The project Sense AGENDa asks why different citizens have diverse opinions, and sometimes very strong feelings, about the issues of gender and sexuality?

These questions are of crucial societal relevance in the context of the pushbacks or the contractions of gender and sexual rights, resulting from new types of campaigns – anti-gender mobilizations – that couch their opposition in pseudo-democratic and pseudo-scientific language. As a result, gender and sexuality have assumed a central role in the public sphere in many countries, oftentimes also dismantling the old assumptions about the inevitability of gender and sexual equality progress, and creating new societal divisions.

The project Sense AGENDa explores the problem of these new divisions by examining how citizens in Croatia and Belgium - two cases contrasted in anti-gender movements' success and institutionalization of gender and sexuality rights - talk about gender and sexuality. By comparing how different citizens discuss gender and sexuality in the two countries, and how Croatian citizens of different ages evaluate these issues, the project's objectives are to understand how ordinary people evaluate publicly available ideas about gender and sexuality; how their characteristics and identifications shape these evaluations; and how are these evaluations and interpretations situated into different socio-cultural and institutional-legal frameworks.

The conclusions highlight in particular the differences in the context of institutional (dis)trust into which the Croatian and Belgian citizens situate their evaluations and the importance of perceived climates of opinion.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The research was divided into three main stages. The first stage spotlighted gender and sexuality policy developments and debates, with a focus on the Croatian case which served to identify factors contributing to the rise of an anti-gender movement. These results, demonstrating the movement's innovative and adaptive nature, are presented in various current (book chapter and a co-authored article), forthcoming (co-authored chapter) and future publications, on cases of LGBT+ rights, family policy, reproductive rights (abortion) and sexuality education.

The second stage, "Parents discuss", included fieldwork in Croatia and Belgium, with Croatian and Flemish parents of school-aged children. This fieldwork was composed of democratic forums in which parents discussed their opinions and feelings about various gender and sexuality issues while discussing their children's education about various social issues related to relationships and diversity. The third stage of the project, "Citizens discuss", focused on younger (below 30) and older (above 60) Croatian citizens who were asked to participate in in-person focus groups with their friends and acquaintances and individual follow-up interviews which further explored their thoughts and feelings about social issues related to gender and sexuality, such as gender equality or abortion. The fieldwork for these two stages included 19 online focus groups, six in-person focus groups and six individual interviews, with a total of 76 participants (46 with repeated participation) across two countries.

The preliminary results of "Parents discuss" and "Citizens discuss" stages suggest that, in making sense of gender and sexuality issues, people refer to what they think others think about the issue, and they relate their evaluations to the perceptions of their societies and laws. The salience of anti-gender messages in the Croatian case was helped by the context of institutional distrust, exploited by anti-gender campaigns, as the key factor in addition to the perception that others and the country's laws reflect restrictive perspectives on gender and sexuality rights. The preliminary results also indicate a hierarchy of issues, with those more divisive more frequently accompanied by misinformation and misunderstandings. These analyses will be presented in future publications.

The results have been presented at various academic conferences, several talks and a couple of Croatian public events, including a stakeholders' seminar "How to Talk to Parents about Sex Education and Education for Gender Equality". The stakeholders' seminar has also resulted in a report specifying the concerns of the general public related to sexuality education, and recommendations for the Croatian stakeholders on how to respond to these concerns when exploited by anti-gender activists.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project's results and analyses go beyond the state of the art in the studies of anti-gender mobilizations, which cut across fields of political sociology, cultural sociology, and gender and sexuality studies.

First, its analyses of discursive and mobilizational changes and continuities in opposition to gender and sexuality rights challenge 'backlash' as the main mechanism for the rise of anti-gender mobilizations. Further, the 'hierarchy of issues' finding identifies how the strategic articulations of gender and sexuality concerns by the Croatian anti-gender campaigns functioned in the feedback loop with such hierarchies among ordinary citizens.

Second, the comparisons between Croatian and Flemish groups brought attention to how much the articulations of individual views are related to the people's perceptions of what their societies and the people around them are like. These findings demonstrate that one of the mechanisms contributing to the successes of anti-gender mobilizations is the privatization or the publicization of prejudice, which this study theorizes through the concept of (dis)comfort.

These results also further contribute to gender and sexuality studies as they problematize the concept of the (European) East-West divide brought forward by the (public opinion) research interpreting (European) East-West divergences in gender and sexuality attitudes as the differences between progressive and regressive national values. Instead, this study highlights the self-reproducing character of the "East-West" construct and, traces its socio-historical roots also to the post-socialist transformations and the rise of societal distrust, which the anti-gender campaigns exploited.

Finally, the project highlights why gender and sexuality rights are a central concern in the current erosion of democratic norms and institutions, and why they should be prioritized at the national, regional, and EU level. These results, therefore, can be used to better understand why people are vulnerable to anti-gender messages, and they can help lawmakers, policy-makers, and civil society address people's concerns and counteract the articulations of anti-gender campaigns that have been used to push back or constrict gender and sexuality rights. This project also brings attention to how, by polarizing the public on the issues of gender and sexuality, the anti-gender mobilizations create pressure to deprioritize these issues at the political level. As this study shows, such political signals then work to create a public climate of opinion in which the opposition to gender and sexual equality is normalized as a publicly acceptable opinion.

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