Opposition towards gender equality policies and institutions, discrimination against LGBT+ people, and weakening women’s reproductive rights are often associated with the strengthening of anti-gender politics. The SIBA project investigates anti-gender politics in Finland. It provides a novel understanding of anti-gender politics by analyzing its complex ideational and political-economic foundations.
SIBA provides an in-depth empirical analysis of anti-gender politics in Finland. In doing so, it is indebted to earlier analyses while making two critical contributions. First, rather than seeing anti-gender politics only as illiberal, retrogressive politics, SIBA aims to show how anti-gender politics is deeply connected with neoliberalism. Second, SIBA aims to show how anti-gender politics contribute to ongoing welfare state reform. Analyzing these aspects provides new insight on how anti-gender politics have been incorporated in Finland.
SIBA pays attention to both extreme and socially rejected anti-gender politics and to more silent and acceptable gender conservatism critical to ongoing welfare state reform and to the mainstreaming of anti-gender politics. By investigating broader gendered, racialized, and class-based political-economic foundations of anti-gender politics, SIBA paves the way for resistance against them.
Methodologically, SIBA analyzes the intersection among anti-gender politics, gender equality, and mainstream conservative politics as a case of convergence. This allows an in-depth exploration of the constitutive elements and dynamics of politics.
In addition to advancing academic understanding, the project explores possibilities for resistance and social change in collaboration with policymakers, civil society actors, and feminist organizations.
SIBA aims
1) to map anti-gender politics in Finland and to understand their ideational underpinnings;
2) to analyze political-economic foundations of anti-gender politics
3) to revitalize political imagination in resistance against anti-gender politics.
Funding
Contact persons
Hanna Ylöstalo, hanna.ylostalo [at] tuni.fi