Gender as death threat to the family: how the “security frame” shapes anti-gender activism in Mexico

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers an ethnographic and frame analysis of how Mexican anti-gender campaigners have leveraged Mexico’s twin crises of corruption and security to cast “gender ideology” strategically as a security issue through a “security frame.” It explores how formal security expertise and a deepening security culture shape the framing strategies of anti-gender campaigners who effectively weaponize gender ideology as a tool of culture war. Two discursive strategies are analyzed that make the security frame both cohesive and compelling: while the “nested empty signifier” of the culture of death renders gender ideology a credible death threat to the family by bringing security and gender politics into a common, cohesive security master frame, a logic of securitization constructs gender ideology as a potent, virulent, and imminent existential threat to the family that directs efforts to secure the family. An analysis of how anti-gender activists have developed and deployed the security frame in Mexico offers not just contextualized insight into how anti-gender campaigns have been articulated and sustained there, but also how anti-gender campaigns might mobilize widespread insecurities across Latin American contexts to advance illiberal political projects that impede broader discussions about institutional and democratic deficits.