ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a summary of the emergence, impact and broader function of anti-gender politics internationally. The chapter traces the historical growth of anti-gender campaigns and political dynamics as they have evolved since the 1990s, and identifies four critical historical waves, each shaping the strategies anti-gender actors use and the issues with which they engage. It also introduces, and blends together, two theoretical models developed within anti-gender scholarship – the Frankenstein and the Hydra – to illuminate the diversity, flexibility and evolving nature of anti-gender constellations and effects. The chapter offers a reflection on the nature of anti-gender politics as a historically novel set of coordinated endeavours to create new realities around gender, sexuality, culture and politics. In doing so, it offers a critique of the wider role of gender in anti-gender politics; as a method for signifying and advancing altered relations of power.
