Resistance to anti-gender politics: The role of coalitions and affects

Project Information

CORESIST

Grant agreement ID: 101066305

DOI

10.3030/101066305

Project closed

EC signature date 29 July 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2024

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 175 920,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CORESIST (Resistance to anti-gender politics: The role of coalitions and affects)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The CORESIST project has focused on comprehending resistance to anti-gender politics and the role of coalitions, specifically by examining this process from a comparative perspective. The study compared France and Romania, two different countries in terms of political architecture, political opportunity structure, the institutionalization of gender equality at governmental level, but also regarding the historical development of their respective social movements for gender equality, LGBTQIA+ an women’s rights, sexual and reproductive rights. Through comprehensive research activities, CORESIST provided an account of the way resistance to anti-gender politics by mapping the actors who form resistance to anti-gender politics in each country, the relationships between them, their goals and strategies. Through this endeavour, a deeper understanding of the relationship between different social movement actors, feminist and gender studies researchers and political allies was achieved.
An essential component of the research was to identify in what ways the foregrounding of coalitions between actors contribute to strengthening and/or weakening of the resistance to anti-gender politics. CORESIST showed that while strategic coalitions strengthen resistance to anti-gender politics on the short run by pooling resources and skills, deep coalitions fortify resistance on the long run by stemming from activists’ engagement in complex communication and crossings towards different militant worlds enhancing profound ties between them. While in Romania resistance to anti-gender politics seems to be organized transversally – across different issues targeted, in France resistance seems to be organized sectorally.
Furthermore, CORESIST identified the challenges and tensions related to coalition-making such as: (1) oppressive behaviour within movements (especially racism and transphobia), (2) dissensions over autonomy (activists dilemma about collaborating or not with official institutions, governmental bodies, supranational entities), (3) the shortage of resources and the project-based work (which often led to empty coalitional structures, that nevertheless in some cases were reactivated when needed). Lastly the ER explored how did the different actors who form resistance to anti-gender politics articulate the relationship between the various issues targeted by anti-gender politics (sexual and reproductive rights; LGBTQI rights; children’s rights; gender; laws and policies against hate speech and discrimination). The project showed that while some sexual and reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+, feminist, anti-racist activists emphasize the collective history of reproductive oppression to articulate the link between their respective fights, the tension that stems from implicit exclusionary processes within movements reflect the difficulty to conciliate the necessity to concomitantly mobilise together and separately, to move beyond single-issue politics.

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

CORESIST research was carried out through different stages:
1. Conceptual and theoretical building: developing a coalitional model of resistance that goes beyond strategic coalitions, oriented towards the antagonist, to include deep coalitions between actors excluded from power and status and empirically testing it. The model bridges social movement studies with decolonial theory
2. Methodological building and training: developing a protocol for the episodic narrative interviews and the activist calendar; building guidelines for the collection and sampling of pre-existing data, including visual data; template for visual data analysis
3. Fieldwork in France and Romania: Identification of possible respondents, contact and negotiation with them (including signature of a detailed consent form), physical meeting(s) to record the interview. Collecting data stemming from episodic narrative interviews (23 interviews were collected in France and 24 interviews were collected in Romania), participant observation at selected events and documents (archive work to collect textual and visual pre-existing data from around the episodes of contention identified previously and that also guided the episodic narrative interviews).
4. Analysis of the data: the 62-hour long recordings were transcribed with Nvivo. A data base was built and organized in Nvivo that compiled data from interviews, documents, participant observation. As such both textual and visual composed the dataset that was further analyzed with the help of the same qualitative research software.
5. Scientific publication and dissemination of the project’s findings: Results were disseminated at international conferences and scientific seminars, leading to two peer-reviewed articles and three chapters in edited books. An international conference was organized within CORESIST at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), gathering scholars a mix of scholars (established academics, early to mid-career researchers and PhD students) working on resistance to anti-gender movements in several countries in Europe. The conference led to an edited book.
6. Public engagement and communication: contributions to society and public debates were delivered through roundtables that involved activists and policymakers and expertise provided for civil society organizations and governmental bodies. Additionally, magazine publications and audio-visual interventions were part of the public communication strategy.
7. Training activities and project (including data) management: training activities were pursued in different areas: (1) theory (decolonial theories); (2) methodology (episodic narrative interviews; activist calendar; digital sampling; visual analysis), (3) ethics; (4) career development; (5) data management (GDPR).

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)

CORESIST project contributed to the evolving field of resistance against anti-gender politics, as well as to the more established domain of coalition studies. The published research enriched the field of social movements with an interdisciplinary approach that incorporated decolonial studies. This project also contributed to the consolidation of episodic narrative interviews in the field of social movement studies.
Key achievements include:
- Developing a coalitional model that goes beyond strategic coalitions oriented towards the antagonist to include deep coalitions between actors excluded from power and status and empirically testing it
- Defining and explaining resistance to anti-gender politics as encompassing both upstream and reactive efforts within a network of activists, experts, and policymakers, often organized into coalitions, and oriented both outward toward antagonists and inward toward the consolidation of the field of progressive movements.
- Applying ideas of complex communication, travelling and crossings, as well as salient encounters to social movement studies and demonstrating how they constitute important pillars for coalition building and long-term resistance
- Building a new conceptualisation of coalitions that goes beyond straightforward ideological opposition to underpin future research that would also encompass conservative actors and alliances.

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