Control, alt, delete: Patriarchal populist attacks on international women’s rights

Abstract

The rise of patriarchal populist leaders over the past decade has fortified a long-standing campaign by conservative governments and advocacy groups to undermine women’s international human rights. Their efforts have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women’s and girls’ equality and health. Through our textual analysis of UN records, governmental and nongovernmental publications, media coverage of disputes over language, and background interviews with activists, we identify and delineate the significance of this ‘norm spoiling’ strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. We find that women’s rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language: controlling what women’s rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States’ ‘global gag rule’; altering the meaning of women’s rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom; and deleting foundational words, such as ‘gender’ and ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’, from international agreements. The role of language in today’s patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders’ speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women’s rights.

Marshall Lecture 2022: The Economics of Women’s Rights

“…The author finds that men reacted sharply to Equal Rights Amendments established in many U.S. states throughout the 1970s, expressing more negative attitudes toward gender equality immediately after their introduction. Sanders and Jenkins (2022) discusses more recent backlash to women's rights on the part of populist leaders. Considering the possibility of backlash is another promising direction for future research on the economics of women's rights.…”

Liberal-democratic norms under contestation: Norm relations and their decoupling in the US Supreme Court’s decisions on abortion

“…A global case in point is norms relating to gender equality, which are being seriously challenged by expressive anti-gender, anti-feminist and traditional norms (Cupać and Ebetürk 2022: 2;Sanders 2018). The right to abortion in particular is an important prerequisite for liberal-democratic norms regarding gender equality and women's full and equal participation in society (Sanders and Jenkins 2022a). By contrast, denying women the right to an abortion (or failing to implement such a right) is seen as a hallmark of more conservative, patriarchal and authoritarian regimes (Sigvaldason and Ómarsdóttir 2022).…”

When norms clash

“…Such a focus is not entirely uncommon in existing research. Quite a lot of research has looked at how civil society actors have tried to reframe gender rights in the United Nations by contesting the content of related norms and even the vocabulary used by various actors to articulate the content of these norms (Chen, 1995;Gilby et al, 2021;Nowicka, 2011;Sanders and Jenkins, 2022). There is, therefore, some research on how actors at the meso-level like interest groups or faith-based organisations, contest norms as defined by states and/or international institutions, seeking instead to replace their content, language, and other details with their standards for these norms.…”