On the Strategic Uses of Women’s Rights: Backlash, Rights-based Framing, and Anti-Gender Campaigns in Colombia’s 2016 Peace Agreement

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines organized opposition to feminist and LGBTI political projects in Colombia. Although there is a large body of literature on feminist movements and a growing literature on LGBTI movements, there is little research on resistance to them. Through an intersectional feminist lens, this study analyzes the “anti-gender” campaign organized against the gender perspective in Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement to demonstrate the limitations of backlash theory and certain normative understandings of human rights. In contrast to assumptions that backlash is predetermined, the study demonstrates that the anti-gender mobilization against the peace agreement was circumstantial rather than inevitable. To highlight the productive nature of backlash, it traces how opponents employed human rights rhetoric to establish an alternative present and promote an imagined future rooted in exclusion and repression. In addition, it shows that mobilized backlash against feminist and LGBTI movements does not necessarily decelerate or reverse the respective movements’ agendas.