Gender Wars. Or How the Right Takes Control Over the Future

The authoritarianism of right-wing movements runs so deep that they attempt to dictate whom you share a bed with, how you dress, and how many hours you spend with your children—assuming, of course, that you have them. These movements impose rigid directives on these matters and are prepared to eradicate any way of life that fails to conform. In this context, warfare is not merely metaphorical but an everyday practice of annihilating difference. Anything that does not align is either corrected or removed. All of this is done under the guise of restoring a pure, homogeneous social order. Violence is no longer an aberration, but rather a legitimate means of settling political disputes. Extermination is deemed not only acceptable, but also necessary for survival.

We are dealing with an extended warfare—territorial, cultural, and affective—framed as an unending showdown of good versus evil. This image is extraordinarily effective at defusing conflicts over wealth and power distribution by channelling frustration and resentment into a narrative devoid of class analysis. Through this process, a "people-as-victims" identity is constructed, rooted in an anti-gender ideology that specifically targets vulnerable children as symbols of the nation's future.

As Nuria Alabao argues in her latest book, Gender Wars: The Sexual Politics of the Radical Right, moral panics emerge as a potent strategy in this power struggle. Such panics demand a strong protector to shield the vulnerable, thereby re-anchoring popular sectors to conservative elites who promise protection. However, this security comes at a price: the surrender of autonomy by those deemed fragile, who are expected to submit to the imposed security, graciously imposed. Alabao demonstrates how this constructed threat is used to control social (re)production mechanisms and ensure the future unfolds as desired.

Your sex is their economy

In 1980, what came to be known as the Sex Wars took place — the political precursor to what Nuria Alabao explores in her book, which is now re-examined through the lens of gender and in the context of the resurgent far-right. The Sex Wars fractured the powerful feminist and sexual liberation movement in the United States, marking the end of the second wave and ushering in a phase of moral and economic conservatism. Under familialist neoliberalism, the right eroded wages and working-class rights while shifting debates around gender and sexuality to the private and de-politicized realm. Here, women are once again cast as "good mothers," now expected to be workers, too—perhaps even lesbians, but properly married and reproductive.

Far from the autonomy once claimed by the feminist movement, the new capitalist model demanded obedience in exchange for a wider array of consumer goods. Pro-sex feminists who defended pleasure and bodily experimentation were smeared as perverts and pedophiles. Meanwhile, the anti-pornography sector aligned with right-wing parties, particularly Reagan’s Republicans, to demand greater protection for the so-called innocent souls of good women and their children. This allowed the state to withdraw from its role as the guarantor of basic economic needs while intensifying surveillance of populations and governing their behavior, particularly with regard to reproduction (of cheap labor) and care work.

In line with arguments made by other strands of feminist political economy, such as Melinda Cooper’s Family Values, neoliberalism reasserted the family as the central reproductive unit. This detached the state from its responsibility to support future generations. For example, the family wage and social assistance programs were dismantled. Care and provision became privatized and the sole responsibility of parents, who were expected to police not only their children's conduct, but also their own. In this context of declining labor rights and purchasing power, increased vigilance over moral conduct served to discourage dissent under the guise of protecting children from deviants and pederasts.

This entire process makes clear that every regime of exploitation rests on a sexual regime that underpins it. It also reveals how far conservative forces will go to win this terrain. Although they lost ground during the last decade due to fourth-wave feminist momentum, Gender Wars shows that these conservative forces remained organized. They continue to regroup and prepare to strike back in defense of the rigid social order demanded by capital—one predicated on full control over all dimensions of life, including the eradication of bodily autonomy for all those marked as different.

Your gender is their future

At the turn of the century, the Vatican coined the term "gender ideology" as a strategic weapon against feminist and progressive movements that were rapidly gaining strength on a global scale. Through this term, the Church created a new enemy that was quickly adopted by various conservative movements as a unifying symbol to represent anything perceived as a threat to the traditional order. As a result, diverse right-wing actors who share little in common and do not form a historic bloc in Gramscian terms have embraced it as a unifying reservoir of hatred and a political tool for forming regressive coalitions in sexual and economic terms.

As Nuria Alabao explains, the strategy is to label those who practice and proclaim bodily autonomy as perverse and depraved. This generates moral panic, neatly dividing society into two camps: victims and perpetrators. In this framing, the most violent and oppressive groups appear as victims with a right to self-defense, while so-called sexual predators are positioned as threats merely by virtue of their existence. Once again, children are framed as the most endangered group by sexual libertinism because who would dare oppose their defense?

However, whenever right-wing movements invoke the defense of children, it is a sign that they are about to strip you of some freedom. In line with queer theorists such as Edelman and Stockton, Gender Wars reveals how childhood functions as a symbol of the future—that which is not yet, but which we must make of today. Thus, childhood operates as a mechanism of surveillance for adult behaviors and as a blank space that shapes the future. Through a metonymic operation, children are imagined as both the biological and cultural extension of their progenitors and the living embodiment of national, civilisational, and even human survival.

This explains why appeals to defend childhood ignite the fiercest passions and why so many willingly give up autonomy and power in its name. One may relinquish anything except one's children—the last guarantors of transcendence for the natural/divine order that Western modernity builds for itself. From this perspective, the fixation on birth rates has little to do with demographic concerns and much to do with perpetuating "whiteness" into new generations as symbols of the promise of tomorrow: a future that explicitly excludes any form of alterity As Nuria Alabao explains, this obsession demands total control over gestating bodies and targets women as reproducers of the nation, reinforcing their unpaid caregiving role. This authoritarian anti-feminism is not an ideological whim—it sustains a cumulative regime of capitalism.

The problem for these right-wing actors is not the existence of sexual minorities itself. This is evidenced by their strategic alliances with homonationalist agendas that exploit some LGBT rights to justify xenophobic policies. Rather, they are concerned with anything that destabilizes the extractivist and racial order fundamental to their political projects. This is why their offensive also targets those who recognize agency in feminized bodies, children, the Earth, and territories. Today, we are witnessing neo-(conservative/liberal) actors once again forging alliances with marginal libertarian feminists. Under the guise of "protecting women and children" from the supposed dangers posed by migrants and sexual dissidents, they are making a desperate attempt to restore the social order from its sexual foundations up.

Radical plurality is our strategy

Gender Wars describes one of the core dimensions in which the cultural battle is currently being waged and where right-wing movements have declared war on us: the power to decide what happens to our bodies and shape possible futures. Through rigorous examination and deep understanding of the campaigns and policies implemented across various European countries since the beginning of the new century, Nuria Alabao’s book enables us to map the ongoing global disputes over our bodies—contestations that now span every corner of the planet.

In response to the attempt to "remoralise society and reinforce the role of heterosexual marriage, defined by differentiated gender roles and oriented towards reproduction," the author proposes embracing many genders, sexes, and bodies, as well as many ways of inhabiting the world. This approach transcends narrow classifications that create closed groups where some are included and others excluded. Plurality must therefore define our struggles. Today, our main task is to articulate class struggle alongside struggles around race and gender, ensuring the autonomy of all bodies and collectives that right-wing forces seek to dismantle.