【by SHIMIZU Akiko, June 2024】
Although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti–gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely, the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at birth,” resume their natural and “moral” positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy. The project is fragile, however, since the patriarchal order it seeks to restore never quite existed in the form they seek to actualize in the present. (Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? pp.14-15)
It has been a while since the resurfacing of right-wing populism——the rise of alt-right and other white-supremacism, the spread of ultra-nationalism, and the increasing public support for authoritarian populism——became so prominent across nations and continents that even those of us who had not necessarily been familiar with the concept of “populism” at the turn of the century gradually came to grips with it. The crucial role gender has been playing in this socio-political phenomenon has been, on the other hand and as per usual, less discussed and analyzed until much more recently. That is to say, until people started noticing that, even as different populist politics in different locales consist of widely diverse actors and have quite dispersed political goals, they seem to share the impossible dream of restoring the stable and homogeneous familiarity ostensibly guaranteed in the nostalgic past, with “gender” functioning as the unified marker of the externalized threat to the dream that binds these actors together to form a movement: the anti-gender movement.
The so-called anti-gender movement can be traced back to the Vatican’s alarmed reaction in the 1990s to gender mainstreaming in the arena of international politics, especially after the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, and the Fourth World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995. While at its initial stage in the 1990s it mainly attacked women’s reproductive rights, the movement regained its momentum with the global financial crises in the late Noughties and, exploiting the growing sense of deprivation and social anxiety, expanded to oppose a wider variety of issues such as comprehensive sex education in schools and marriage equality. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges rulings, the movement shifted focus again in the mid 2010s and currently it is transgender rights that have been the main target of the movement.
It has often been pointed out that the anti-gender movement is global as well as transnational: the similarity of the targets it chooses, political strategies it adopts, and rhetoric and discourses it deploys at different locales across the globe is not coincidental but quite often resulting from the circulation of funds, actors, or ideas. Undoubtedly this is also the case with Japan, and the readers will find in the following essays how the local movement in Japan shares a pattern of mobilization, political configuration, or rhetorical formation with that in the Anglo-American, European, or other East-Asian countries.
However, as some of the contributors of this issue argue, contrary to what may well be imagined by those working on the Anglo-American and/or European anti-gender movement, the circulation at least of ideas, discourse and political configuration has not been one-way: part of what constitutes the current localized version of the anti-gender movement has been “imported” from the outside; and yet, part of what constitutes the global/transnational anti-gender movements seems almost precedented by what is called the “gender backlash” that took place in Japan in the early Noughties. The current version of the anti-gender movement in Japan, therefore, is better not understood as a mere derivative or a branch of the purportedly universal Euro-American original or mainstream. Even as it has been contingently informed by a uniquely local political background, some of what Japan has experienced since the time of the “gender backlash” twenty-five years ago has later manifested in other locales with their respective local inflection.
In that sense, the editors hope that the following four essays in this issue will give the readers some insights into how this latest and yet not-so-new transnational populist movement operates, not only within Japan but possibly in other locales. KAWASAKA Kazuyoshi focuses on the scaremongering discourses detectable in the “gender backlash” in Japan and discusses how the similar use of negative affect can be both historically and transnationally observed. SHIMIZU Akiko also takes up the use of fear in the latest anti-gender movement in Japan and ties it with how in/visibility has been treated in the politics of difference. Stefan Würrer gives a possible interpretation of how a prominent feminist could end up forming an alliance with the right, a phenomenon observed in various locales during this latest stage of the anti-gender movement. Claire Maree, focusing especially on words and discourses, proposes both a theoretical framework and concrete examples for understanding how the politics of anti-genderism travels.
AUTHOR
SHIMIZU Akiko, Professor, Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan
SHIMIZU Akiko (PhD) (she/her) is a professor of feminist and queer theories at the Department of
Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. Her research interests are: feminist theories of bodies and self-representation; post-colonial feminism and cultural interpretation; anti-gender movements in Japan; proximity, fear and the possibility of coalition. She is a translator (into Japanese) of Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?