Chapter 20
“Gender ideology” and the discursive infrastructure of a transnational conspiracy theory
The formula “gender ideology” has recently gained political traction in several countries. This chapter investigates its conspiracist discursive infrastructure by probing two corpora of far-right media from Brazil and the US. Analysis indicates that “gender ideology” is framed within semantic realms of manipulation, puppeteering, falseness, and danger. It also suggests that anti-gender rhetoric acts as an all-encompassing narrative whereby a cohort of inchoate but ideologically interlinked conspiracy theories are lumped together in a seemingly coherent whole. Comparing datasets from two countries empirically illustrates how anti-gender rhetoric crosses transnational borders and adapts to local specifics along the way.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Anti-gender conspiracy narratives
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.Analysis
- 5.Concluding remarks
-
Notes
-
References
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