Within the German context, polemic articulations against “gender” began in the mid-2000s and were barely perceivable until approximately 2013. “Anti-genderism” (Anti-Genderismus) has now become a common denominator and a “symbolic glue” (Kováts and Põim 2015) for heterogeneous actors within conservative, (partly far) right-wing and populist sectors. It is also increasingly present in public debate, but it has until now only marginally become an issue within policymaking.
While explicitly catholic actors or networks are part of what I call the “Anti-Genderismus” constellation and although they are fairly well organized at national as well as international levels, Catholicism as such is not particularly visible or particularly constitutive for the entire discursive and practical field of “anti-genderism”. Rather, “anti-genderism” is a bridging signifier for a variety of anti-statal, anti-EU, mainly ethno-nationalist, racist and/or xenophobic, aggressively heteronormative and overall anti-pluralistic constellations which form the core of contemporary neoconservative and right-wing populism in Germany. Furthermore, the concept “Anti-Genderismus” suggests that “gender” is a totalitarian and dangerous ideology. However, the defamation of “gender” is rarely worded as “ideology” or “theory” in Germany but occurs more often through the use of the “-ismus” suffix as in Faschismus, Kommunismus and so on.
The main argument of this chapter is that, in the German context, “anti-genderism” articulates a diffuse but rather broad and increasing rejection of post-essentialist/post-naturalist social dynamics and policies. It triggers and voices strong and far-reaching affects against pluralistic, post-essentialist social inclusion on many levels: for instance citizenship as based on rights and duties rather than on essentialist assumptions regarding the citizen in question (Hark and Genschel 2003; Stychin 2001; Villa 2015; Weeks 1998). In this example, post-essentialist forms of citizenship and inclusion shift from assumed natural essences of the subject as a citizen (woman, foreigner, heterosexual, etc.) towards specific practices and/or roles or positions, for example care, paid work and educational situation.
The characteristic rhetoric of “concerned citizens” (Besorgte Bürger)1 is hence very popular in current right-wing constellations in Germany. Their main concern is (only) partly the loss of privileges for certain groups. The so-called concern also expresses the arguably irrational defence of an overall impression or perhaps concrete experiences of precarity in Germany (Wimbauer, Motakef and Teschlade 2015) and the loss of a certain normality (i.e. former naturalized stabilities based on specific exclusions). To put it in simple words, the increasing loss of “natural” subjects and identities – woman, child, sexuality, body and so on – which were so far the implicit basis for the political sphere is the main reason for an overall populist discourse, which includes but is by no means reducible to anti-genderism. Anti-genderism evokes an idea of certainty, a sense of social unambiguousness that certain groups feel has been lost.
This chapter explores current German articulations of “anti-genderism” in this light. It positions such articulations within broader political dynamics (especially right-wing populism) and interprets the appeal of “anti-genderism” through the notion of a “post-essentialist” social condition. Using this frame, it argues that anti-genderist discourse has in fact correctly understood what “gender” is about. Namely, a notion of gender as not naively determined by an ontological, ahistorical “nature” beyond human practice, but rather gender as complex, socially constituted, intersectional difference, in itself precarious and culturally negotiated individual identity, social structure and symbolic signifier. This seemingly complex notion of “gender” is not a mere academic theory but is deeply rooted in the everyday experiences and long-lasting political and/or subcultural struggles of minoritized people. More so, the increased visibility and political relevance of non-hegemonic, plural and complex gender(ed) persons as well as their cultural and political expressions are “correctly” understood by those who fight them. They use populist rhetoric in order to ridicule them as “academic”, dispensable, artificial, ideological, perverse/sick, dangerous, elitist and so on.
This chapter is organized as follows. First, it presents the general background of policy debates on families, sexuality and migration in Germany since reunification. Then, it discusses the media and religious voices, which introduced the notion of “gender ideology” in the German context. Finally, it analyses the current situation and argues that “gender ideology” should be regarded as a bridge allowing coalition building among otherwise dissenting actors.
After “reunification” in 1989, Germany has experienced a significant de-gendering of family policies, shifting from traditional (West German) “mommy politics” (Marx Ferree 1993, 2012) towards support of care duties beyond biological predefinitions. This has been catalysed and has at the same time enabled increasing employment rates and career options for women and mothers, accompanied by intense public debates. The latter have concentrated on the discriminatory mechanisms of the labour market such as the gender pay gap and employment-related discriminations, adequate measures like quotas and normative issues and moral anxieties regarding motherhood and education. These debates gained a specific momentum in Germany since they necessarily imply the re-articulation of the East/West divide and the examination of the recent past.
The negative stereotype of the working mother as a “bad mother” who neglects her children and endangers the moral integrity of the entire future of the nation is still very relevant, especially in western Germany. In this light, childcare and other care chores delegated towards the outside of the (biological) family tend to be demonized as “socialist ideology”, hurtful for children and their needs. The normative ideal of mother-as-natural-femininity is still strong, while at the same time it has become empirically obsolete. Working mothers2 (as any parent) still face a systematic lack of professional, accessible and flexible care infrastructure, and they still face a relatively strong amount of distrust, negative stigma and concrete discrimination. This complex normative dynamic is at the heart of “anti-genderist” articulations.
Germany has also experienced increasing legal equality for gay and lesbian citizens. After almost a century of protests and political activism against criminalization of male homosexuality (§175), Germany has abolished discriminatory legislation and signed relevant international treaties. Same-sex marriage is not formally possible due to the heteronormative interpretations of conservative political majorities and several court decisions regarding the “special protection of marriage and family” as fixed in German Constitution. Yet same-sex partnerships are legalized since 2001, and they include the same rights and duties as “marriage” except from the crucial difference of adoption, which is not accessible to non-married couples.
Beyond legal achievements regarding gay rights and inclusion, Germany has experienced increasing visibility and cultural relevance of LGBTTI* people, as well as raising demands for recognition and rights. As the chapter argues later on related changes in educational curricula such as sex education in high schools, which are an obvious reflection of these changes, have spurred much controversy and served as a main mobilization issue for anti-genderist articulations.
Finally, it is important to notice the shift from decades of rhetoric of denial regarding immigration and multiculturalism towards the recognition of Germany as a multi-ethnic and diverse society. This rhetoric and partly (only) symbolic shift has prompted controversial debates in the last years, especially focusing on migration from Turkey as well as on Islam as part of German society. Germany has heard high-profile politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying that “multiculturalism has utterly failed”,3 and it has experienced several extremely intensive public debates on whether such a thing as a “German Culture” exists and should be “reclaimed”. These debates were fuelled by polemic interventions, especially best-selling books from Eurosceptic xenophobe authors.
Even when taking seriously such partly ethno-nationalist positions and acknowledging their political relevance, it is rather surprising that Germany has a visible, relevant right-wing, anti-migrant, racist and islamophobic political party only since 2015 (the Alternative für Deutschland, AfD, formally founded in 2013, but far more moderate in its beginnings). Again, when compared to the whole of Europe, this delay might seem logic and fair given Germany’s history of fascism, racism and anti-Semitism. Furthermore, without going into details, it is important to note that Germany has begun to develop a post-essentialist and post-ethnic political sensibility regarding itself, that is its “demos”. The notion and formal recognition of “German” does no longer necessarily imply “German blood” or any notion of ethnic, racial, biological or otherwise homogeneity. This chapter precisely deals with groups that fiercely oppose such post-essentialist notions of Germaneness (and/or gender, sexuality, etc.).
These historically rather dramatic shifts and dynamics within German politics and culture have highlighted and partly implemented a politically relevant notion of social categories as socially constructed and in flux. More specifically, there has been a mainstreaming of gender as socially variable, not determined by nature in a naïve manner, complex and yet omnirelevant. This is, on the one hand, a long-term echo of intensive feminist and other emancipatory social movements. On the other hand, this new awareness of the social construction and omnirelevance of gender requires constant reflexivity and negotiation by actors, citizens and institutions alike (“modernization as reflexivity”; Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994). It has become a complex, precarious process.
Around 2006–2007, several publications from explicitly conservative mainstream authors and journalists such as Volker Zastrow (from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung/Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung), René Pfister (from Spiegel; Pfister 2006) and Bettina Röhl (e.g. Cicero Magazine 2005) started to target gender. These were either books (Zastrow 2006) or repeatedly singular articles focusing on the EU gender mainstreaming policy. These publications were published within culturally bourgeois-conservative mainstream contexts, either in newspapers such as Die Zeit, FAZ, Cicero and Die Welt or within the context of a neoconservative consumer and lifestyle media (Siri 2015) as, for example, represented by interior design or food catalogues such as Manufactum.4
A salient feature of these singular, but systematically conservative, publications was a strong libertarian stance, in general, and a strong anti-EU attitude in particular. They depicted “gender mainstreaming” as a totalitarian ideology, comparing it to communism, fascism or state-socialism, the latter resonating particularly strong in Germany due to its specific past (GDR). The argument in such texts suggested that “gender” as in gender mainstreaming represents an anti-natural and therefore non-commonsensical understanding of men and women. It further claimed that this notion is actually radical feminist and – thus – necessarily utterly sexist (against men). Then it presented gender/gender mainstreaming as highly particular, non-democratic, that is a radical ideology masked as an EU policy. This enabled such texts to present the EU – “Brussels” – as a deeply anti-democratic top-down bureaucratic “monster” run by radical lobbyists, brainwashing “normal people” of common sense or at least forcing them into silently accepting imposed measures. As Bettina Röhl, a well-known conservative journalist, wrote in the monthly political magazine Cicero:
Gender mainstreaming actually means a complete rebuilding of society. Gender mainstreaming is a kind of totalitarian communism in regard to sexuality and gender-relations. In GM, the real world is implicitly understood as patriarchy (which should be eliminated), and both, woman and society are to be forced to accept the blessings of matriarchy. Women are to work and to occupy powerful positions, that is to be leaders in politics, economy, and culture. Men are sent to the kitchen or are otherwise to remain in those segments with 100% men anyhow, such as mining, military diving or firefighter. Children into early day-care, girls to the GM-subsidized empowerment programs, and boys to the GM-reeducation school where they are forced to study the historical crimes committed by men on women. And what about the family? Abolished! This is, ultimately, the concrete image represented in the core principals of gender mainstreaming…. But how many have actually really been thinking and discussing these issues? How many women have been supporting and electing other women, not at all knowing that their ultimate (but well-kept secret) goal was to genderize, and thus rebuild the entire world? Does the majority of women really want to give up the education of their children? Do all women want to pursue a career, work a money job? Does the majority of women want their sons be systematically discriminated against as a penitence for historic injustices, be they real or alleged? Meanwhile, monetary flows are manipulated under the catchword Genderbudgeting into supporting the obscure strategies. (Röhl 2005; Translation PIV)
This quote contains the main elements found in nearly all early (up to mid-2000s) anti-genderist writings within German journalism and mass media: the assumption of an anti-commonsense and ideological – radical, particular – conspiracy, heavily funded by anti-democratic and over-bureaucratic EU, catering “our” tax money to dubious lobbyist ideas and groups. While these tropes are common throughout many European contexts, the strong negative reference to children’s day care and to compulsory work for women might be specific to some national contexts, for example Germany.
Both issues carry strong historical associations to former socialist/GDR policies, evoking a dictatorial regime based on an anti-humanist, repressive and illiberal ideology. Further, the notion of “forced labour” for women still has an audible negative and alien sound, given the dominance of “mommy politics” (Marx Ferree 1993) in (West) Germany since the Bismarck era. Such politics were intensified by the Nazi regime and have been strongly promoted and legally and economically encouraged in West Germany up to recently. As laid out in the first section of this chapter, for many Germans, working mothers do therefore not embody an appropriate social model.
This, again, has implications for the sociological analysis of anti-genderism. The assumption that “gender” forces women (and men) out of their traditional roles and destructs the “natural” family appears therefore not so much a religious argument, but rather a strong secular common belief shared by an important share of German society.5 This traditional family and gender model has been hegemonic and practically relevant in (West) Germany since the late 19th century. As in many other regional and national contexts, second-wave feminist movements fought for economic, political and cultural inclusion by challenging this model and by demanding the right to paid labour, equal pay, anti-discrimination legislation, marriage reform and so on. The new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s played a crucial role in reforming this model and ultimately changing notions and empirical realities for women, men and families in Germany.
It is by no means a coincidence that, within the German context, anti-authoritarian projects were an important legacy of emancipatory social movements. Psychoanalysis, “free love”, communal living forms, anti-authoritarian pedagogy and so on were developed and experimented to expunge the demons of authoritarianism and Nazism. “68s” (Left students, feminist, greens, anti-authoritarians, pacifists) are considered by many as responsible for questioning the hegemonic gender and family model so effective in Germany, including its not so marginal Nazi heritage.
Coming back to the aforementioned authors from the early to mid-2000s, I suggest that the demonization of gender mainstreaming should be more broadly understood as part of an “anti-68” rhetoric. While there are arguably more dimensions, the moral panic around the eventual erosion of the traditional family actually serves the broader discourse demonizing “68” as a threat to social order, shared values and the moral integrity of German society. This specific moral panic – German Angst might be the correct wording – is not so much a religious or otherwise institutionalized issue but shows a rather diffuse, albeit widespread scepticism regarding a post-essentialist, clearly liberal contemporary society, based on pluralist choices and fluid identities.
In this light, it might be interesting to know that Bettina Röhl is one of Ulrike Meinhof’s daughters. One of the most prominent radical Left journalists, Meinhof was a Far-Left terrorist in the 1970s and became later an almost mystic figure, still partly idolized by sectors of the German radical Left. B. Röhl has often written against “68’ers” and their toxic influence on German society. As suggested by this biographical example, current anti-genderist and overall neoconservative populist articulations should be understood as an attempt to dispose of “Leftist” – reflexive, pluralizing, post-essentialist, liberalizing – movements in recent German history.
Gabriele Kuby is a sociologist by training who, after converting to Catholicism by the end of the 1990s, has widely published on gender and sexuality issues: according to her own website, 13 books and a huge amount of newspaper articles as well as many digital entries in blogs and so on. She is a well-known speaker at conservative, catholic meetings and congresses, especially within the international networks of self-declared Pro Life activism.6
Interestingly, Kuby is far less known in Germany than in other European contexts. Barely any German would know her name, as she is not seen on TV or elsewhere in mass media, and her contributions to the German blogosphere are less accessible than those from other authors on “Anti-Genderism”. One interpretation of this perhaps surprising fact is that decidedly catholic or religious framings are not intelligible in German public debates, unless they are voiced by official church personnel, that is explicitly framed as institutional Church statements. Moreover, as discussed later, anti-religious stances are an increasingly important element of anti-genderist dynamics in Germany.
Kuby’s writings are consistent with many (ultra-)Catholic or fundamentalist Christian stances. She combats the alleged totalitarian ideology of “gender and LGBTTI* demands”,7 which would seek to destroy the natural, divine, dignified order (of things and people). Within this context, “gender” is understood as the radical relativism of any norm related to individuals, to sexuality and/or any form of interpersonal relations as in couples, families, friendships and so on. It is wilfully misinterpreted as an individual, situational voluntaristic choice of lifestyle, that is as a sort of “stylish makeup for the day”. Sexual and reproductive choice is framed as anti-natural and as a threat to even a minimum of social order. In sum, gender is a code for “moral degeneration” (Kuby 2015, 10). And, as Kuby states in various writings and oral presentations, this ultra-libertarian notion of gender is then – paradoxically – enforced on all people, especially on “innocent children”. The point is, as Kuby argues, that pro-choice and gender or LGBTIQ “lobbyism” creates “new taboos”:
They [the new taboos] gain their validity through social exclusion and gradual criminalization, specifically in the domain that all cultures protect with strict standards: the domain of sexuality. A reversal has taken place. Today the dissolution of moral standards is being enforced, and opposition is being punished with exclusion and legal sanctions. (Kuby 2015, 10)
This argument is not only part of the standard repertoire within Catholic/Christian attacks of gender and LGBTIQ articulations but is also highly relevant within the German context. The rhetoric of “new taboos” and “new social exclusion” triggers a relatively widespread and diffuse fear of (too much) political correctness (Spaemann 2015, 1). Many commentators, authors, journalists and even academics have indeed voiced this moral panic regarding a totalitarian, supposedly omnipresent repression against norms, opinions or choices, which appear as traditional. The panic regarding censorship and normative marginalization, which is related to the EU (“Brussels”), connects various and heterogeneous voices of German “anti-genderism” while increasing its resonance in public debate. When authors like Gabriele Kuby or Birgit Kelle use this kind of heroic-speaking-truth-from-the-margins, they can easily merge into a broader discourse.8
These two distinct, albeit partly similar currents – specific neoconservative journalists and authors on the one hand, and specific Catholic laypersons on the other – merged and became widely visible in 2007, when Eva Hermann, a then prominent news anchorwoman and presenter of public television presented her book Das Prinzip Arche Noah. Warum wir die Familie retten müssen (The Arche Noah Principle – Why we need to save the family). The book reads as a fierce conservative catholic fight-back against pluralist family politics. In one interview, Eva Hermann voiced a partly positive appraisal of the Nazi-Regime (praising Nazi family policies and their views of motherhood) and caused a national scandal. She lost her job and became a heroic figure of anti-feminism, anti-gender perspectives and conservative Catholicism. She had previously written several pieces and a rather well-selling book taking decidedly “anti-genderist” and anti-feminist positions.
In order to understand the German context, it is also important to pay attention to the Protestant Church. Although the relevance of Catholicism and Protestantism differ regionally, both Churches are equally important at national level and play an equal role in public debates. Protestant actors – be their official representatives of the Church or lay groups – have however a longer and rather marked tradition of public intervention, as shown in debates around ethical issues such as disability rights, euthanasia, biomedicine and reproduction.
Despite the overall liberal and even progressive stance of the official Protestant Church, there are fundamentalist and conservative currents and organizations within German Protestantism (Thiessen 2015). These groups, partly networked with Evangelical groups in Europe and the United States, advocate against sexual and reproductive freedom and – foremost – the support offered to such freedom by the German State. They promote home-schooling as a way to weaken public (state driven) interference in what they consider “private” matters.
Yet the most important issue within fundamentalist Protestantism is the family. Since the official Protestant Church in Germany has taken a marked progressive stance on families (Rat der EKD 2013; Thiessen 2015) – clearly opting for a constructivist, post-essentialist, non-biologically nor identity-based notion of plural families, which all deserve equal respect, support and religious acceptance as long as they are based on mutual respect, nonviolence and long-term commitment to each other – there has been increasing discontent within conservative Protestant sectors. As within Catholicism, “genderism” is seen as one of the main reasons of moral and normative decline. “Genderism” is viewed as responsible for the marginalization of common sense, the loss of moral standards in sexual matters, the illegitimate relativism regarding marriage and family forms. It should be emphasized, however, that Protestant anti-gender discourses clearly acknowledge gender equality defined as equality between the sexes. Besides few and barely relevant exceptions, they are clearly opposed to the idea that the Bible itself stipulates the subordination of women (Thiessen 2015, 157). In this light, the very notion of gender is depreciated as a purely ideological, non-commonsensical and non-natural “exaggeration”. It is understood as a post-natural, post-essentialist notion of socially and historically constructed – that is, socially self-made – reality. This allows connections with other “anti-genderist” constellations.
Another actor is Beatrix von Storch,9 who is the vice-president of the newly founded, right-wing, nationalist, anti-migratory, partly racist, revanchist and anti-EU party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and a member of the European Parliament since 2012 (having recently joined the EFDD group after being expulsed from the conservative fraction ECR). Von Storch has founded and leads several networks, such as the Zivile Koalition e.V.,10 which, among other issues, advocates against same-sex marriage. Although the official agenda of this group focuses on anti-EU and tax reduction issues, von Storch has repeatedly organized and spoken at demonstrations against liberal and pluralist sexual education in schools as well as against (women’s) reproductive rights. She crucially connects particular religious (Protestant) anti-gender groups to an increasingly relevant populist, anti-migratory right-wing party in Germany.
Mobilization against gender, sexual diversity and plural kinship and family forms has recently increased to reach the streets in substantial numbers. Germany has also experienced a rather sudden rise and electoral success of a new populist, right-wing, nationalist, anti-migratory and anti-EU party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), since 2014. Anti-genderism has hence become a facet of organized politics and a (eventual) topic within some regional parliaments. Following the analysis by Kováts and Põim (2015), “anti-genderism” works as a net or bridge – a “symbolic glue” – between a variety of separate, different and yet related persons, groups and networks. Thus, in order to understand the empirical situation in Germany, the chapter sketches distinct arguments underpinning “anti-genderism” discourses.11
As already seen within early anti-gender discourses, the assumption that anything related to gender is automatically ideological and coercive is a core element of this discourse. Virtually any document from any context – be it religious, academic, from organized party politics or from individual blogs and comments or really anywhere – either explicitly states or implicitly assumes that the very notion of gender necessarily leads to or reflects totalitarianism. As Klein claims, “Gender studies overstretch their self-concept as multidisciplinary into a semi theological pretension. Accordingly, all other academic disciplines, especially those relevant for high school teachers, are expected to incorporate and teach gender studies” (Klein 2016).
In this quote from a short article in the online daily NZZ (Swiss-based and conservative liberal), this senior evolutionary biologist and chair of the German association for Didactics in Biology rants against “Gender Studies” and advocates gender studies to be expelled from academia and cut off from any public funding. Beyond many wilfully wrong arguments, gender studies are typically framed as a “quasi theological ideology”.
This trope appears in numerous usages of “gender”. Virtually all networks and platforms mobilizing against more pluralistic and non-heteronormative (and less biologistic), sexual education at schools systematically equal gender with “genderism”, that is with “gender ideology”. These are the kind of discursive shifts that can also be observed in well-established, intellectual mass media with regard to gender. Without further ado, gender is more and more factually equated with totalitarian and irrational ideology.
The suggestion that gender is necessarily ideological is intensified by the allegation that gender is a totalitarian form of policy, imposed on “us” by “them”: us Germans, us taxpayers, us voters, us commonsense and normal people, them nonsensical academic and irrational lobbyists, them up there, them detached from reality, them elites. This dichotomous rhetoric is a characteristic feature of “anti-genderism” discourse, especially in populist and/or nationalist and anti-pluralism political movements and parties. It is most strongly visible in anti-EU rhetoric by groups like PEGIDA or AfD. In these cases, “anti-genderism” serves as a focal point for all sorts of affects against the EU, which is depicted as non- or even anti-democratic, overly bureaucratic and a waste of money.
The main target of such rhetoric is the EU, ultimately regarded as run by lobbyists who make politics for their own sake and censor other voices. Gender mainstreaming is then perceived as a magic signifier containing all the evils associated with the EU. The AfD “demands total transparency regarding all EU funds so far directed to enforce supposed equality measures” and to “stop non-democratic gender mainstreaming” within the EU and in Germany. It further pleas for ending “ideologically driven public interventions regarding sex roles as they have been implemented by ‘red-green’ (parties) should not be part of public politics” (AfD Program 2016).
As already mentioned, the German situation, in general, and its political discourse in particular, is still strongly marked by the East/West divide. Paradoxically, the framing of gender as totalitarian ideology works both ways, as pointed out by Heft (2015). On the one hand, gender – especially as defined in gender mainstreaming – is often equated with the GDR and the Stasi, as well as with communism and/or socialism: “Gender mainstreaming is to the ‘gender theory’ what a Left (socialist) state party was or is to the Communist Manifest. Thus, gender aims at more, it wants to create the new man” (Klonovsky, quoted by Heft 2015, 183).
When framed in relation to anxieties about the “East”, gender becomes synonymous with the ideology of a dictatorial regime, especially with its inherent colonization of the private (the family and the intimacy of sexuality) by the public and the State. Many documents mention the violent Stalinist and/or Maoist doctrines of re-education – the nightmarish “new Soviet man”. Furthermore, at least for some, this kind of framing sounds like fascism. Expressions such as “Feminazis” or “Gender Faschismus” are not at all uncommon in certain contexts, especially in social media.
On the other hand, East German versions of anti-genderism claim that the very notion of gender is a Western, American (that is non-German) construct. Although not hegemonic, this rhetoric is also present in former West Germany. This form of anti-Americanism is a core element of the ideology pertinent of right-wing populist organizations, networks and parties all over, including Germany. This rhetoric is also an important bridge between otherwise not strongly connected contexts and elements of “anti-genderism” (Diner 1996; Knappertsbusch 2016).
The German moral panic around gender is condensed in the alarmist rhetoric regarding its supposedly inherent incitation to paedophilia and the sexualization of children. Gender is systematically mistaken by self-declared anti-genderists as automatically meaning atrocities like child abuse, lack of any moral or normative standards and the destruction of taboos. The post-essentialist or post-naturalist implications of gender are misread as a wilful destruction of any morality. More generally, liberal and critical stances on gender and sexuality are equated with the complete disintegration of any social and cultural order based on a minimum of morality.
These equations are particularly present in Christian contexts, which traditionally maintain a suppressed and distanced relation to sexuality. Within these contexts, heterosexual married sexuality serving reproduction is the only “good”, the only authentic, acceptable and legitimate form of sexuality – whereas any other forms are more or less strong aberrations and represent non-natural, illegitimate, pathological or ideological/artificial practices.
Beyond explicitly Christian, especially Catholic contexts, anti-genderists make strong use of the paedophilia trope in order to reach a broad audience. For instance, extreme Right hooligans and neo-nazi groups regularly demand the restoration of the “death penalty for child molesters”. As Schmincke (2015) and Kämpf (2015) point out, references to children and the self-declared mission of protecting them are extremely potent. They appeal to everybody and make a claim nobody will ever deny: the protection of innocence, pureness and vulnerability. The child serves as focal point in such claims, as it is clearly visible in the images and wordings used by organizations such as “Worried Parents”.12
As argued earlier, this specific trope – the fear of paedophilia and perversion – should not only be understood as a moral panic regarding the inevitable liberal and reflexive dynamics of modernization processes, but also, and more specifically for the German context, as a (subconscious) intent of undoing the recent past. Indeed, such references are systematically connected to earlier liberalization policies, to sexual liberation and anti-authoritarian movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and to the Green Party. In a more or less historically accurate way, the social experiments and practices of the time (alternative childcare, communal living, free education, free love, etc.)13 are presented as violent aberrations by dogmatic ideology-driven “perverts”. The German Green Party is particularly haunted by such defamatory media narratives, which are intensified by a mishandling of recently surfaced documents proving a downplaying and misleading trivialization of paedophilia in the early days of the party.14 Finally, protecting children’s innocence helps present anti-genderist articulations as the necessary defence of common sense and the restoration of an endangered natural order.
The attacks against gender studies as a field of academic research are another salient issue. This trope is increasingly mobilized in the media and resonates widely in Germany: In the last two to three years, prominent articles have appeared in well-established and widely read liberal and conservative newspapers. These articles claim that gender studies are not scientific, but a sort of ideological, or religious belief, since the very notion of gender would deny any scientific evidence (as in biology, medicine, chemistry or evolutionary theory). On this basis, gender studies are accused of being a new form of creationism. This is for instance the case of Kutschera, a senior tenured biology professor from a German university, who accuses the entire field of not only articulating a new form of creationism, but also of literally being a “cancer tumor” within an otherwise healthy academic body (Himmelrath 2015).
This argument relies on an overtly narrow, positivist and exclusively experimental notion of scientific knowledge. When taking a closer look, the accusation of gender studies as non-scientific relies on a rather commonsensical, hegemonic and naïve notion of biology as ontology. The notion of “nature” as easily discernible from any social practice and cultural interpretation or from any historic condition relies on the common sense idea that natural entities (such as the gene, the hormones or a neuron) determine all social dynamics (Martenstein 2013; Weber 2016).
In short, this accusation reproduces well-known ideological oversimplifications and epistemological primitivism, which have been refuted by scientific studies for decades and do not only matter to gender studies. It is interesting but not surprising to acknowledge how the scientifically outdated nature/nurture-dichotomy (Ainsworth 2015; Baron Cohen 2013) is once again reactivated. The function of this dichotomous framing is obvious: It suggests a stable normative orientation beyond the contingencies, uncertainties and pluralisms of contemporary society. The naturalization of certain socially highly relevant differences such as gender, race or sexuality is evoked once again as an antidote to “liquid modernity” (Zygmunt Bauman) and its pluralizing, post-essentialist discontents (Max Weber). This particular function merges perfectly with the overarching tropes in current right-wing populist, nationalist and partly openly racist dynamics.
The attack on gender studies includes other features, which resemble some of the attacks described earlier: the alleged tremendous waste of public money (“our taxes”) for ideological nonsense when universities are chronically underfunded, the underestimated influence gender studies exert on German academia as a whole and on young students in particular, the boom of gender studies due to successful political lobbying and the according crowding out of small, but important, academic disciplines. In sum, gender studies are depicted as an omnipresent and omnipotent ideological danger for German academia, fuelled by politics, wasting enormous amounts of money and endangering the quality of higher education. Which is all, needless to say, simply not true. Chairs or professorships with a part- or full dedication to gender studies currently make approx. 0,4% of all professorships in Germany. More data can be found at http://www.database.mvbz.org/database.php. Furthermore, there is no explicit funding structure for Gender Studies in German academia, since national and regional funding heavily depends on a rather traditional disciplinary structure.
An additional element plays a crucial role: the phantasm of censorship due to political correctness (Ginsburg 2014; Grau 2016; Meyer 2015). Such articles claim there is an entire apparatus of control and censorship, a sort of centralist control on any aspect of academic life: the content of research projects, the recruitment of personnel and tenure decisions or the micro-politics of university life in general. This conspiracy rhetoric either evokes the Nazi past of Germany or explicitly blames “the USA/America” for importing political correctness into German politics and academia. Crucially, certain wordings are an exact quote of Nazi rhetoric. Gleichschaltung, for example, is the concept used by the Nazi regime to align all institutions to the same racist, anti-Semitic and ethno-nationalist ideology.
Anti-genderist articulations in Germany come from heterogeneous contexts. Compared to other European countries, the Catholic/Christian imprinting is less salient. Rather, the various tropes and the rhetoric at the core of the anti-genderism discourse function as a “glue” (Kováts and Põim 2015) between a variety of different actors, networks, movements and political parties. These tropes all relate to the rejection of post-essential or post-natural foundations of identities, groups and rights. That is, anti-genderism in Germany refuses the empirical evidences and the conceptual framing of gender (and sexuality, family, reproduction) as socially constructed, historically framed, culturally negotiated and individually experienced in variable ways.
This rejection may or may not be understood as a backlash, but it certainly reacts to significant shifts and paradigm changes in the normative foundations of German policies regarding (gender) equality, family, inclusion and citizenship. Such shifts reflect the liberalization of (especially West) German society in the aftermath of the emancipatory social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. In this light, it is no surprise that many voices within “anti-genderism” formulate more or less malevolent defamations of the “68ers”, seen as the origin of most contemporary liberal evils.
Therefore, current “anti-genderism” discourse in German politics can also be read as an intent of certain sectors to undo or ditch part of recent history. “Anti-genderism” is also strongly linked, is substantially fuelled by and at the same time feeds anti-statal (anti-public) affects in general, and anti-EU affects in particular. Gender as understood in gender mainstreaming is systematically used as a code for “Brussels” and as a way to denounce problematic things about the EU (such as lack of democratic procedures and bureaucracy).
Finally, the form of anti-genderist articulations in Germany is particularly interesting. There is indeed an overall style of self-heroization. By this, I mean a performative discursivity, which sets itself as a marginalized voice – silenced by lobbies, by powerful transnational conspiracy, by ideological media and public censorship, by an omnipotent “mafia” of political correctness – which claims to speak for the “silent/silenced majority”. Since gender (and queer and/or LGBTTI* activism alike) is framed as far detached from common sense and beyond reason, rationality and normal “evidence”, as ideological, “anti-genderism” claims not only to speak for a majority, but also to represent “normal” people’s common sense.
1.Besorgte Buerger, http://besorgtebuerger.tumblr.com/. Accessed 15 June 2016.
2.Approximately 65% of mothers with children under 18 years are employed in paid labour. From these, approximately 75% work part time, often due to a lack of reliable and affordable childcare (Jurczyk and Klinkhardt 2014).
3.Weaver (2010).
4.Manufactum, http://www.manufactum.de. Accessed 15 June 2016.
5.Public opinion polls show complex and ambivalent, partly contradictory, stances regarding the combination of parenting, especially motherhood, and paid labour. Most Germans state that “good mothers” should work but also strongly support the notion that mothers should be at home in the afternoons, in order to help their children with school homework or otherwise (BiB 2013).
6.Such as the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities or the World Congress of Families.
7.Anglico Press (2016).
8.For further analysis on “heroism” as new populist rhetoric in the German context, see Villa (2016).
9.For more details on von Storch within German and European contexts, see Kemper (2014).
10.Zivile Koalition (2016), founded in 2010 and run by her family.
11.For further details and methodological background, see Hark and Villa (2015).
12.Besorgte Eltern (2016).
13.See Herzog (2005) for sexual politics in Germany and Reichardt (2014) for a more general description and analysis of new social movements in Germany.
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