Enregistering “gender ideology”
The emergence and circulation of a transnational anti-gender language
Rodrigo Borba | Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Mobilizations against gender equality and sexual diversity have gained political traction globally despite their
hyperbolic modes of action and conspiracist rhetoric. These anti-gender campaigns rally around “gender ideology,” a trope used to
anathemize feminist and LGBTQIA+ activism/scholarship. This paper argues that anti-genderism is a register – a conventionalized
aggregate of expressive forms and enactable person-types – of which “gender ideology” is the most famous shibboleth. The paper
shows how inchoate collections of words, modes of action, and images of people (i.e. signs) have been enregistered into the
cohesive but heterogeneous whole of anti-genderism through semiotic processes of clasping, relaying, and grafting (Gal 2018; 2019). The paper offers a
sociolinguistic analysis of anti-genderism to understand the challenges it poses to the enfranchisement of women, queer, trans,
and nonbinary people.
Keywords: “gender ideology”, anti-genderism, enregisterment, register, metapragmatics
Article outline
- 1.The challenges ahead
- 2.Anti-genderism as a register
- 3.Forging metapragmatic labels: The “totalitarian feminist”
- 4.Expansion: Relaying discursive arenas of action
- 5.Graftings: Turning rights vocabulary inside out
- 6.Conclusion: Unexpected coalitions and queer refusal
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 11 February 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.21003.bor
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.21003.bor
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