Political genderphobia in Europe: accounting for right-wing political-religious alliances against gender-sensitive education reforms since 2012Politische Genderphobie in Europa: Ein Ansatz zur Erklärung religiös-rechts-radikaler Allianzen gegen Gender-sensible Politikreformen im Bildungsbereich.

This paper is concerned with the formation of alliances between religious and political right-wing actors against gender-sensitive policy reforms, specifically within the last five years. Given the Catholic origin of a discourse that considers the notion of gender, as a socio-cultural element of identity, a dangerous and totalitarian ideology, this paper elaborates the concept of political genderphobia in order to explain why these actors ally themselves to campaign against “gender”. Political genderphobia takes a supply-side approach that emphasises the relevance of ideological and strategic tenets shared by religious (here Christian) and political leaders—namely, their shared understanding of gender hierarchy, social inequality and cultural homogeneity, as well as their appropriation of certain populist strategies aimed at politicising the term “gender” as an elite invention and mobilising it as a fundamental threat to “the people”. In order to understand why political genderphobia has become a salient concept just within the past decade and accompanies the rise of the radical right, three demand-side factors are also discussed: the Europeanisation of anti-discrimination policies in the arena of education, individual risk perception fostered by the transformation of patriarchal structures, and the alleged or real alienation of liberal European elites from those who are not able or willing to share the egalitarian and freedom-based principles of the liberal project. This paper contributes to a question currently under discussion in various areas of research—anti-gender research, research on religion and morality politics, as well as research on the radical right—concerning the relevance of “gender” for illiberal politics.