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This article examines organized opposition to feminist and LGBTI political projects in Colombia. Although there is a large body of literature on feminist movements and a growing literature on LGBTI movements, there is little research on resistance to them. Through an intersectional feminist lens, this study analyzes the “anti-gender” campaign organized against the gender perspective in Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement to demonstrate the limitations of backlash theory and certain normative understandings of human rights. In contrast to assumptions that backlash is predetermined, the study demonstrates that the anti-gender mobilization against the peace agreement was circumstantial rather than inevitable. To highlight the productive nature of backlash, it traces how opponents employed human rights rhetoric to establish an alternative present and promote an imagined future rooted in exclusion and repression. In addition, it shows that mobilized backlash against feminist and LGBTI movements does not necessarily decelerate or reverse the respective movements’ agendas.

Gender mainstreaming and peacemaking are fundamentally about spurring institutional change. Much of the literature on gendering peace negotiations does not explicitly address the institutional nature of these spheres. Using a feminist institutionalist framework, I analyze the 2010–2016 Colombian peace talks to uncover the endogenic formal and informal ‘rules of the game’ that both enabled and constrained feminist work and the eventual incorporation of a gender perspective within the final agreement. I show that Colombia’s exceptional gender perspective in its 2016 peace agreement was due not just to the inclusion of women at the negotiation table but also paradoxically because of and despite continued gendered logics that prioritized the masculine over the feminine. These findings demonstrate that to understand gender mainstreaming outcomes in peace processes we must not simply account for how many women and which women are at the table, but also for the gendered logics of the negotiation space.