This special issue advances feminist inquiry and theorizing of the politics of knowledge within our current, highly paradoxical societal landscape. It draws together feminist analyses of “expertise” with feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge, Black feminist thought, theory of affect and emotions, sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies (STS). As such, it enables a timely interdisciplinary engagement with current paradigmatic shifts in knowledge production and claims to expertise as well as an examination of the gendered and racialized epistemic authority.

Gender matters in global politics. After the US elections, we know this better than ever: the mass appeal of Trump’s blatant misogyny is just a part of the problem. Populism in the US and elsewhere feeds not only on economic instability and fear, but also on anxieties around gender relations, (homo)sexuality and reproduction. In country after country, critiques of what conservatives (especially Catholics) term “gender” or “genderism” – gender equality policies, sex education, LGBTQ and reproductive rights – have helped to mobilize men as well as women, paving the way for populist leaders. This article argues that while opposition to feminism and gender equality policies is not new, the current upsurge marks a departure from the previous neoconservative paradigm: social conservatism is now explicitly linked to hostility towards global capital.

This article examines how discourses on assisted reproductive technologies are locally appropriated, translated or contested in the specific cultural and political contexts of Poland and Sweden. The aim is to investigate how two national patients' organisations, namely the Polish association Nasz Bocian and the Swedish organisation Barnlängtan, articulate rights claims in the context of reproductive technologies. To this end, we investigate how these organisations utilise specific context-dependent and affectively laden political vocabularies in order to mobilise politically, and discuss how each of these two groups gives rise to a different set of politicised reproductive identities. In order to trace which political vocabularies the respective organisations utilise to mobilise their respective rights claims, we draw primarily on political discourse theory and concepts of political grammars and empty signifiers. Lastly, we discuss which political reproductive identities emerge as a result of these different versions of political mobilisation around assisted reproductive technologies.

Masowe protesty przeciwko projektowi całkowitego zakazu aborcji w 2016 okazały się sukcesem. Udało się nie tylko zmobilizować do działania setki tysięcy kobiet, ale też wymusić na rządzących zmianę decyzji. Projekt Ordo Iuris został odrzucony po pierwszym czytaniu w Sejmie i choć nie była to z pewnością ostatnia próba zaostrzenia prawa aborcyjnego w Polsce, udało się wygrać przynajmniej tę bitwę. Skala i zasięg protestów pokazują ogromny potencjał zaangażowania kobiet, które nie mieszkają w wielkich miastach i które nie uczestniczyły do tej pory w życiu politycznym, a przynajmniej nie tak aktywnie jak przy okazji Czarnych Protestów. Okazało się, że polskie społeczeństwo obywatelskie nie jest bynajmniej uśpione i apatyczne, ale aktywne i gotowe do wyjścia na ulice, gdy sytuacja tego wymaga. Ten rozdział stara się odpowiedzieć na pytania: dlaczego kobiety zmobilizowały się właśnie w tym momencie i jak to się stało, że w 2016 roku doszło do masowego buntu Polek.

This article focuses on the epistemic strategies employed by ultraconservative movements to oppose women's reproductive rights and the ways in which the women's movement counteracts these efforts. The core argument is that nowadays the opponents of gender equality and sexual democracy are seeking not only political but also epistemic power, producing a new body of gender knowledge. A detailed analysis of the struggles around the 2016 Stop Abortion bill in Poland shows, however, that the women's movement can counteract these challenges by mobilizing not only medical and legal expertise, but also tacit knowledge and affects.

This article examines successful mass mobilization against the proposed total ban on abortion, focusing on the Black Protest initiated online in September 2016 and the All-Poland’s Women Strikes which took place on the 3rd and 24th of October 2016. The aim is to explain how the resistance towards the proposed bill emerged and developed over time, and to shed light on the factors behind its success. It is argued that the emergence of and mass participation in the protests resulted from a range of factors including the heightened political climate in Poland and normalization of street protests as a reaction to the closing of regular communication channels between citizens and authorities, as well as an emotional dynamic of mobilization and wide use of social media for sharing information, communication and networking. The success – the government’s decision to reject the project – can be explained as stemming from the mass scale of mobilization but also from favorable political opportunity structure and the lack of popular support for the proposed law. The analysis shows that the protests followed the logic of connective action based on the use of flexible, easily personalized action frames, which were well-embedded in cultural narratives referencing the history of resistance against an oppressive state. 

This article engages with feminists critiques of neoliberalism, specifically with the influential narrative about the NGO-ization of women’s movement and co-optation of feminism by neo-liberalism (Charkiewicz 2009, Fraser 2011, McRobbie 2009). It argues that while the vision of the feminist actors as “the handmaidens” of neoliberalism accurately captures some aspects of contemporary feminist organizing, it obfuscates others, especially new and original forms of resistance taking place beyond the perimeters of what is usually included in the “Western” context (Aslan and Gambetti 2011, Funk 2012). I discuss some examples of the struggles against neoliberal logic and practices in the Polish context, arguing that while there has been a strong trend towards professionalization and de-politicization of civic activism in the country, during the last decade we can observe a growing resistance against this tendency. The paper concludes with discussing various forms of anti-neoliberal women’s organizing highlighting the opportunities and risks involved in employing them in the context of the local and transnational struggles.

This article examines the public debate on reproductive technologies in contemporary Poland, focusing on the rhetoricalstrategies used by the main opponents of IVF: conservative politicians representing the leading parties in the Polish parliament andthe representatives of the Catholic Church. The analysis highlights the exclusionary logic inscribed in the construction of the maincategories of political subjects in this debate, revealing important limitations of reproductive citizenship in the Polish context. Thestudy draws on a variety of texts published in print and electronic media between 2007 and 2015, including articles on infertility andreproductive technologies published in the main Polish daily and weekly print publications, online resources (web pages, forums andFacebook pages), documents issued by the representatives of the Church, politicians and experts, e.g. open letters, commentaries,information for the media and interviews.

W rozdziale próbujemy odpowiedzieć na pytania: Co się stało z naszym światem? Co zrobić, aby odzyskać przyszłość? Naszym zdaniem kluczowa jest szeroko rozumiana kwestia płci i opieki, czyli gender. Pokazujemy, że choć liberalny mainstream wie już, że o gender wypada co pewien czas wspomnieć, częściej też dopuszcza do głosu kobiety, ale chyba nie bardzo rozumie, dlaczego należy to robić. Gender to pewien nadmiar, dodatek do tego, co stanowić ma rdzeń opcji liberalnej – demokracji proceduralnej, trójpodziału władzy i wolnego rynku. Co więcej, feminizm na co dzień bywa niewygodny. Po pierwsze, komplikuje ulubioną kategorię liberałów jaką jest abstrakcyjnie pojmowana „jednostka”. Po drugie, utrudnia przyjazne relacje z Kościołem, uważane w naszej polityce za sine qua non wyborczego sukcesu. I wreszcie dlatego, że gdyby  potraktować żądania feministek poważnie, to część panów musiałaby się posunąć i na szpaltach gazet, i w ławach poselskich. Kobiety wciąż są na pozycji petentek i wciąż słyszą: tak, równość płci jest ważna, ale po pierwsze są sprawy pilniejsze, a po drugie – społeczeństwo polskie jest zbyt konserwatywne, trzeba z tym poczekać. Opozycja parlamentarna, zamiast budować spójną przeciwwagę dla prawicowej wizji świata, próbuje siedzieć okrakiem na genderowej barykadzie, Kościołowi oferując świeczkę a ruchowi kobiecemu ogarek. Nawet po Czarnych Protestach i Strajkach Kobiet – masowych mobilizacjach bez precedensu w ciągu ostatniej dekady – kwestie równościowe wciąż z trudem przebijają się do głównego nurtu publicznej debaty. W swojej analize wskazujemy, że brak namysłu nad gender wśród polskich obrońców demokracji może stać się gwoździem do ich trumny. Najwyższy czas, by obóz progresywny zrozumiał, że gender nie jest dodatkiem ale rdzeniem konfliktu, i to zarówno w kulturowym jak i ekonomicznym jego wymiarze.

This article examines the recent wave of grassroots mobilizations opposing gender equality, LGBT rights and sex education, which vilify the term gender in public debates and policy document. The anti-gender movement emerged simultaneously in various locations after 2010. We argue that it is not just another wave of anti-feminist backlash, or a new tactic of the Vatican in its ongoing efforts to undermine gender equality, but a new ideological and political configuration, which emerged in response to global economic crisis of 2008 and the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy. The backlash of the 80s and 90s combined neo-conservatism with market fundamentalism (which is to some extent still the case with neoconservative Christian fundamentalists in the US and elsewhere), while the new movement – though in many ways a continuation of earlier trends – tends to combine  gender conservatism with a critique of neoliberalism and globalization. Liberal elites are presented as “colonizers”; “genderism” is demonized as an ideology imposed by the world’s rich on the poor. Thanks to the anti-colonial frame, anti-genderism has remarkable ideological coherence and great mobilizing power: right-wing populists have captured the imagination and hearts of large portions of local populations more effectively than progressive movements have managed to do. The article examines the basic tenets of anti-genderism, shedding light on how this ideological construct contributes to the contemporary transnational resurgence of illiberal populism. We argue that today’s global right, while selectively borrowing from liberal-left and feminist discourses, is in fact constructing a new universalism, an illiberal one. While the examples discussed are mostly from Poland, the pattern is transnational, and our conclusions may have serious implications for feminist theory and activism.  

This chapter examines the mobilization against “gender” which has spread across Poland since 2012, pointing to both local specificities and links to the transnational context. As we will show in the present analysis, while Polish anti-genderism is part of a boarder transnational trend (a fact long invisible to most of Poland’s liberal defenders of gender), some aspects of this phenomenon are indeed locally embedded. The campaign has consisted of many initiatives undertaken by the Catholic Church and conservative groups to fight gender equality education and legislation, sexual and reproductive rights, as well as the very use of the term “gender” in policy documents and public discourse. Polish anti-gender campaigners claim that their aim is to protect the Polish family (especially children) against feminists and the “homosexual lobby”; to defend authentic Polish cultural values (which are equated with Catholic values) against the foreign influence of the corrupt West and liberal European Union. Targets include sexual education, ratification of the Istanbul Convention and gender equality policies more broadly.

In our view, the current wave of anti-gender mobilization in Poland is not business as usual or another wave of conservative backlash, but a new ideological and political configuration, which successfully combines the local and the transnational, making possible a politically effective mass movement. We argue that the success of anti-gender mobilization can be explained by its leaders’ skillful references to ordinary people’s dignity and their identity as an oppressed majority. Anti-genderism consistently presents itself as an effort to defend authentic indigenous values against foreign forces and corrupt elites – a discourse which we interpret as a variant of right-wing appropriation of the anti-colonial frame. What may be construed as an Eastern European peculiarity is that in the region gender tends to be discredited as totalitarian ideology as exemplified by the following statement made in 2013 by Polish Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek: “Gender ideology is worse than communism and Nazism put together”. While the contested policies are coming from the West and are presented as Western impositions, genderism itself is seen as a vast project of social engineering rooted in Marxism and comparable to Stalinism. This tension or ambivalence persists in many of the documents and statements examined here: genderism is demonized as a cultural imposition a foreign body that is Western and Eastern at the same time.

In recent decades, theorizing about societal and political transformations has been closely intertwined with claims about new modalities of knowledge production. A reflexive mode of knowledge has been identified hich assumes that science has lost its traditional status of relative autonomy and is thus becoming increasingly interwoven with other societal spheres. The shift of classical research universities towards a more application-oriented mode of scientific knowledge as well as the institutionalization of gender studies as an interdisciplinary field corresponds with this socially distributed system of knowledge production. 

These changes have profoundly reshaped political processes and public communication, yielding a novel style of governing through knowledge and resulting in both the scientification of politics and a heightened politicization of expertise. Contestation of the sharp distinction between academic and other forms of knowledge has created new possibilities for co-production and transgressive knowledge while also providing fuel for regressive politics. This seems to have taken many scholars by surprise, but a few, such as Donna Haraway and Ulrich Beck, foresaw it decades ago. 

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to advance feminist theorizing about the politics of knowledge through a critical examination as well a recasting of different approaches circulating in current feminist debates. Second, it explores Germany, a country that has experienced major transformations with regard to both its gender policy and political knowledge regimes. I argue that a broader understanding of societal changes, and of the modalities of knowledge production accompanying them, provides an analytical lens that allows us to move beyond the linear imaginary prevalent in much feminist scholarship on knowledge and expertise, capturing ambiguities with a more nuanced perspective. Launching the concept of feminist political epistemology, the paper investigates the paradoxical constellation of democratization of expertise and anti-gender right-wing mobilization that challenges the epistemic credibility not only of gender studies, but of academic knowledge itself. 

The paper explores Germany, a country that has experienced major transformations with regard to both its gender policy and political knowledge regimes; the German context provides vital insight into the contradictory dynamics involved in new modalities of governing and epistemic authority. 

This article proposes the concept of feminist political epistemology to examine the changing modalities of knowledge production in Germany. The article examines how German gender equality policies have been embedded in and shaped by the shifting modalities of knowledge production and the remaking of the science expertise–politics nexus. The two formative time periods investigated—the 1960s–1970s and 1998 to the present—account for major shifts in the gender and political knowledge regime in Germany. The findings provide insights into the contradictory dynamics involved in transformations of political and epistemic authority.

In the last decades, theorizing about societal and political transformations have been closely intertwined with claims about new modalities of knowledge production. A reflexive mode of knowledge was identified and assumed that science has lost its traditional status of relative autonomy and thus becomes increasingly interwoven with other societal spheres. Exemplary for this changes was the transformation of classical research universities towards a more application-oriented mode of scientific knowledge. The institutionalization of women´s and gender studies as post-academic interdisciplinary field corresponds with this socially distributed, system of knowledge production. Equally important has been the remaking of the policy-science nexus. Scientific claims in political processes have become increasingly publicly contested, especially in new policy areas such as ecological and genetic technologies and not least in the field of gender policies. The traditional technocratic and hierarchical policy-making style has been gradually reshaped by more horizontal participatory procedures in which “expert” knowledge is not synonymous with “scientific” knowledge. The past decades have seen a growing commitment by governments to public involvement, and public dialogue in governance, which have been classified as democratization of expertise. These developments implied a recognition of feminist knowledge and academia as politically relevant “gender expertise,” in many European countries, also in Germany. Parallel to this processes, since around 2005 public campaigns against the “ideology of gender” or “genderism” started to question the scientific character of gender research as a discipline. This paper explores the interplay between gender, knowledge, and policy-making in Germany within the field of gender equality within this highly contradictory constellation. Feminist research about the science-policy-politics nexus has been for quite some time a remarkable gap in feminist political science, but has been expanding in the last couple of years (Bustelo, Ferguson and Forest 2016; Cavaghan 2017). “Male-stream” shows that countries differ enormously with regard to the ways in which they institutionalize expertise and assess knowledge claims in political processes (Jasanoff 2005; Campbell and Pedersen 2010; Weingart and Lentsch 2010). In terms of gender policies, Germany presents a puzzling case. While (West) Germany was until quite recently very reluctant to remodel its strong male-breadwinner gender regime, it has since the 1970s established one of the largest gender equality machineries in Europe. Germany’s gender equality institutions have, however, not prevented it from becoming a notorious laggard with regard to the implementation of relevant European Union directives (Liebert 1999; Lang 2009). This paper deploys a novel perspective. It launches the concept of political epistemologies drawing on insights from science and technology studies, which have been pioneering research focusing on the policy-science nexus and moving it from a linear “knowledge utilization approach” towards a notion of co-production and boundary-crossing configurations. It will pursue the following questions: In what ways has scientific expertise contributed to the shape of these political fields? What institutional and epistemic mechanisms can account for the detected knowledge regime? Which impact has the anti-genderist mobilization on the political epistemology?

In recent decades, theorizing about societal and political transformations has become closely intertwined with claims about new modalities of knowledge production. Exemplary of these changes has been the remaking of the policy–science nexus. Traditional technocratic and hierarchical policy-making styles have been gradually reshaped by more horizontal participatory procedures in which “expert” knowledge is not synonymous with “scientific” knowledge. These developments imply recognition of feminist knowledge and academia as politically relevant “gender expertise” in many European countries, including Germany. However, in about 2005, public campaigns against the “ideology of gender” or “genderism” began to question the scientific character of gender research as a discipline.  This paper advances feminist approaches to the expertise–policy nexus by deploying the concept of political epistemologies and drawing on the insights from science and technology studies that have been moving it from a linear “knowledge utilization approach” towards a notion of co-production and boundary-crossing configurations. The “male-stream” shows that countries differ enormously with regard to the ways in which they institutionalize expertise and assess knowledge claims in political processes. This analysis explores the German political knowledge regime through the lens of such comparative typologies. It focuses on the period from 2000 onwards, which has been marked by major reform projects within the field of gender policies. This era has encompassed a double transformation: one from women and gender towards intersectionality and diversity as well as one represented by the shift in the contact zone between expertise and politics, developing from an expertise embedded primarily within government and public bodies into a horizontal web of advisory systems. Drawing on interview data and documentary analysis, this article considers the following questions: What institutional and epistemic mechanisms can account for Germany’s knowledge regime? What impact is anti-genderist mobilization having on political epistemology?

Feminist geography in Poland does not exist as a sub-discipline of geography. While there are individual Polish geographers pushing for feminist perspectives, most feminist analyses of issues relating to place, space and politics of location can be found within gender studies or feminist sociology. In this sense, feminist geography in Poland cannot compare to Anglophone feminist geography and attempts to incorporate it within such an established field risks being reductive. Instead, in this report, we shift the focus to the scholarship and activism that does exist in Poland, outside of geography. This contribution focuses on shedding light on geographical questions such as the body, the city and gendered geopolitics that have been recurring themes in gender studies, feminist sociology and feminist activism in Poland. We conclude by pointing to the need to mobilise broadly, and internationally, between disciplines with the intention of de-centering dominant knowledges. For feminist scholarship this is particularly important in the context of recent political successes of right-wing forces.