‘Stop torpedoing women's rights!’: Feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics in Spain and Catalonia parliaments

Abstract

Democracy and gender equality are increasingly contested in European parliamentary contexts, with the rise of political parties and movements that oppose feminist politics and the rights of women, LGBTI* and racialised people. Existing literature exploring far-right and anti-gender actors in institutional settings has focused on their discourse and impact on parliamentary politics and governments. Yet, limited attention has been paid to the feminist responses articulated in parliamentary contexts that face active opposition to gender and LGBTI* equality. This article addresses this gap by analysing feminist parliamentary responses to such opposition, and the factors that enable and constrain these responses, by undertaking a multi-level comparison between the Catalan Parliament (2021–2024) and the Spanish Parliament (2019–2023), based on content analysis of 21 parliamentary debates and 42 in-depth interviews.

We argue that the capacity of parliaments to respond to anti-gender, far-right opposition to gender, racial and LGBTI* equality is structured by macro-, meso- and micro-level enabling and constraining factors that include the state of democracy and its legacies, state structure, the constellation of anti-gender and pro-equality forces, the institutionalisation of equality, and the role of critical actors. By identifying a range of feminist strategies employed in the Spanish and Catalan parliamentary contexts – including ‘knowledge’, ‘coalition-building’, ‘rule-making’ and ‘everyday pragmatic engagement’ – this article contributes to developing the emerging scholarly field of feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics, thereby advancing the theory of feminist institutionalism, state feminism and anti-gender politics in parliamentary contexts.