Scientizing Gender? An Examination of Anti-Gender Campaigns on Social Media, Norway

Abstract

This chapter examines anti-gender campaigns in Norway, a country often considered a haven for gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights. Recent years have seen global mobilizations that target gender diversity and sexual rights as urgent threats to national identity and social security. Anti-gender campaigns mobilize ‘gender’ and ‘science’ to posit transgender and queer populations and activist mobilizations as counter to biological ‘facts’ and moral values, and hence as threats to societal stability. To date, scholarship on anti-gender and reactionary mobilizations has typically focused on Eastern or Southern Europe, but as this chapter demonstrates, anti-science ideology is also a central discursive tactics for anti-gender campaigners in Norway. By way of analyzing four select Twitter accounts’ discourse over a 12-month period, I demonstrate the ways in which anti-gender campaigns seek to influence public opinion and policy making, and their connections to reactionary transnational movements. I argue that Norway’s anti-gender campaigns and movements must be taken very seriously as they—seen in a geopolitical context—represent a reactionary populist backlash to basic human rights principles, and even democracy itself.