Gender’ as Symbolic Glue for Right-Wing Actors in Europe

In recent years right-wing populists/extremists and right-wing Catholic as well as conservative actors have been building new alliances in several European countries around the notion of ‘gender-theory’ or ‘gender-ideology’.  These groups construct ‘gender’ as a totalitarian ideology, which aims to create a new, ‘gender-less’ human, thereby attacking the institution of the family and European societies as a whole. This reading of ‘gender’, which has been developed by the Vatican from the 1990s onwards, is instrumental to forming coalitions across the right-wing political spectrum.  Edma Ajonavic, Stefanie Mayer, and Birgit Sauer deliver a speech called, ‘Gender’ as Symbolic Glue for Right-Wing Actors in Europe’ at the 2nd International Marxist Feminist Conference in Vienna in 2016.