Significant progress on gender equality has been made in past decades, but in recent years feminist and queer movements have faced a rising onslaught of violence and repression that targets and seeks to reverse progress on gender equality. Between 2019 and 2022, progress on gender equality stalled or declined in 40 percent of countries. This coincides with a rise of anti-gender actors gaining in strength, funding and impact, and pushing anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQI+ views.
Around the world, this backlash against gender justice and equal rights for all manifests as violence and harassment against gender activists, and attacks on legal protections for LGBTQI+ and women’s rights. For example, hard-won abortion rights have been rolled back in Poland and the United States. Regimes have brutally repressed women’s rights and gender equality activists, such as in Afghanistan and Iran, and conflicts in Sudan and Ukraine have had a devastating impact on progress towards gender equality. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 imposes draconian penalties for people in same-sex relationships.
In a time of backlash and growing fragmentation, solidarity becomes a source of strength for different ‘communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together’. Building transformative solidarities requires challenging multiple hierarchies, sharing resources, information, and decision-making power within movements to help transform power relations.
Against this context, our new report on ‘Building Solidarities: Gender Justice in a Time of Backlash’ examines the ways gender equality is under attack globally and puts forward six guiding principles for building solidarities for gender justice as a primary tactic to counter the rising backlash.
Read more: Building solidarities for gender justice.
1. Amplifying diverse voices
Plurality in the field of gender and development ensures that feminist activism not only effectively addresses complex realities of women’s experiences, but also acknowledges the interconnected challenges of many men, trans and other gender identified people. Interventions by black, decolonial, anti-colonial, queer and transnational feminists challenge the homogenised category of ‘woman’, enabling more nuanced methodologies and innovative outputs, which are needed for building solidarity.
Diverse methods of research such as visual and performative methodologies in participatory action research (PAR) and embodied practices such as role-play, body sculpting and theatre have proved important in enabling diverse and marginalised voices to be heard through physical, sensory and emotional enactment. Employing arts and performance as tools for movement building expands diverse expressions and voices associated with gendered and marginalised identities. Production of visual and digital media, such as animations, films and photography plays a key role in cultivating feminist solidarity, by engaging audiences in dialogues that bridge personal experience and collective action.
2. Embracing intersectional ways of working
To build intersectional solidarities, multiple issues relating to religious minorities, confronting social class, disability, age and life cycle constraints need more attention.
In the global South, class divides have prevented key issues from being discussed openly or in a constructive spirit, instead pitting the interests of feminists of different classes against one another.
Individual characteristics such as age and disability further discriminate and lead to exclusion. The sexuality of people with disabilities is minimised in discussions and since they are invisibilised, their missing contributions are not even noticed.
A priority for the gender equality movement is to do more to challenge the discrimination socioeconomically excluded women face on the grounds of religion, caste, age, class and other socially constructed hierarchies. Solidarity in the form of collective organising transcends class boundaries to challenge gender inequalities in market activities. Additionally, greater recognition of impairment and disability as important aspects of identities that combine with other characteristics is essential.
3. Decolonising knowledge about gender and development
Decolonising knowledge is critical within Gender and Development studies to dismantle power structures that perpetuate Northern, colonial and patriarchal biases across research institutions, policymaking bodies and everyday lives. Decolonial practice calls for de-centring dominant forms of knowledge, to create a more complete and realistic understanding of development.
A critical aspect of this process is to challenge traditional notions of ‘academic’ and ‘legitimate’ knowledge, including who produces it, and how it is produced and disseminated. Decolonising research processes requires pushing the boundaries of what is considered legitimate knowledge and adopting innovative methodologies to shed light on sensorial experiences such as the sight, smell, touch and sound of those who are often unseen, unheard or neglected.
4. Digital spaces as sites of resistance and solidarity
Despite severe gender backlash online, digital platforms have proved to also enable spaces of resistance and sisterhood, enabling feminist activists to transcend geographical and socio-cultural barriers, connect with global networks and amplify their voices. Recognising the important role of digital spaces in gender justice movements, progressive donors are increasingly supporting initiatives to build robust digital capacities, infrastructure and tools that enhance digital security and counter disinformation.
5. Funding progressive action
To achieve sustainable funding for gender justice movements, especially feminist and LGBTQI+ organisations, – as opposed to general funding for gender equality programmes, which does not usually reach grass roots levels – a feminist funding ecosystem needs to be built that tackles issues of power, through actions by all the different actors in the ecosystem.
Traditional funding models have favoured large grants to international organisations, marginalising grass roots organisations that work directly with affected communities. A key priority is to provide long-term core funding to Southern-led organisations and movements to ensure organisations have sufficient resources to offer fair wages and benefits and cover operational costs. Expanding access to these funds, especially for grass roots organisations, involves offering funding applications in multiple languages, simplifying reporting requirements and establishing flexible financial management practices. These investments can help bridge the gap between grass roots activism and broad public engagement.
6. Centring mutual care in solidarity building
In the context of diminishing democratic freedoms and shrinking civic space, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, feminist activists confront severe exclusion and inequality, often operating without sufficient resources in terms of institutional support. This environment has led to significant burnout and activist fatigue, further straining their efforts.
By understanding the complex ways in which various structures of power – including those based on gender, race, class and sexuality – shape individual experiences of violence, it is possible to develop healing practices that resist oppressive systems. These practices should centre on the people most affected by systems of racial, gender and sexual oppression, including indigenous people, people of colour, LGBTQI+ people and women with disabilities. By embedding healing into activism, it not only fosters personal healing, but also strengthens the collective capacity of movements to drive systemic change, capturing the transformative essence of healing justice.
In conclusion, there is no single path to gender equality, but multiple pathways are needed towards a common destination – with solidarity at their core. Where solidarities have been successfully built or strengthened, we need to understand what has driven this success, and how we might use it to inform and inspire further action.
Our praxis needs to be driven by an ethic of ‘calling in’, and a willingness to deepen understandings and thereby build trust, especially where anti-gender actors seek to create division. This can help to build a more collaborative and caring gender justice movement to push for greater gender equality.
