Affects: Emotions in Anti-Gender Movements and Queer Resistances

How do emotions fuel anti-gender movements, and how can they fuel resistance too?

What makes fear so politically powerful — and what happens when joy becomes a strategy of resistance?

In this episode of Dialogues for Resistance, we explore how anti-gender movements mobilise emotions to shape public life. These campaigns do not rely on arguments alone: they manufacture moral panic, recruit fear and outrage, and turn children, families, and the nation into emotional symbols of threat. The result is not abstract. It affects how feminist, queer, trans, and racialised communities move through everyday life — producing vigilance, exhaustion, and shrinking spaces of freedom.

But emotions do not belong only to reactionary politics. Joy, care, humour, anger, creativity, and collective resilience can also sustain resistance. They help communities refuse silence, survive hostility, and keep feminist and queer futures imaginable.

Join us as we ask how emotions fuel anti-gender politics — and how they can also nourish solidarity, courage, and the desire to live otherwise.

Keyword: affect, feelings, media panics, manipulation, anger, fear, love, care

Episode Citation: Kulpa, R., & Zabrzewska, A. (2026). Vulnerabilities: Weak Resistances and Precarity (S01E02). Podcasting Social Justice: Dialogues for Resistances (Podcast Series). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22048336

CITING THE PODCAST SERIES:

Kulpa, R., & Zabrzewska, A. (2026). Podcasting Social Justice: Dialogues for Resistances (Podcast Series). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21676257

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome. You're listening to podcasting Social Justice, Dialogues for Resistance. A podcast series about anti-gender politics and queer feminist resistances. My name is Roberto Kulpa.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

And I'm Ada Zabrzewska. In this series, we examine everyday life consequences of anti-gender mobilizations in parliaments, in media, across civil society, and the institutions that shape people's lives.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

In this season one, we stay close to the lived experiences. We ask how anti-gender politics shapes ordinary life, what it does to safety, belonging, and access to care.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

We trace how the same politics travels across borders, through migration regimes and the everyday violences that gather at Europe's edges, alongside the solidarities people built to survive and to resist. Hello everyone, today we're talking about emotions. Not as private moods, but as political forces.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

That's important because anti-gender campaigns are not about argument and rational debate. They move people, they recruit fear, disgust, and moral outrage. They promise safety and certainty. They stage threat, often through stories about children, families, and common sense.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

And then they turn that threat into permission, to police bodies, restrict rights, and narrow who counts as a person.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

In this episode, we'll move from moral panic generated by anti-gender mobilizations to what it means to live with threat.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Then we will speak about joy as a queer feminist strategy of resistance, a way of refusing the shrinking of public life and insisting that queer and feminist futures remain imaginable.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Shall we start?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

One of the main engines of anti-gender politics is moral panic. In simple terms, moral panic happens when a topic that could be discussed calmly gets staged as an emergency, and when emotion starts doing the heavy lifting that evidence and argument can't.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

You can feel it in the familiar anti-gender refrains. Our children are in danger. Gender ideology is destroying the family. Woke activists are silencing free speech.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

These slogans from the front pages are not descriptions, but more like alarms designed to frame some people as threats to some invisible common sense.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

The term in itself was coined in 1972 by sociologist Stanley Cohen to describe situations where media and political actors exaggerate a perceived social danger.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Often linking to youth, sexuality, and morality, these headlines, through that exaggeration, reassert dominant norms.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

In anti-gender campaigns, gender and sexuality are framed as crisis that demands a protective response. And a key takeaway here is that this panic is not spontaneous.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

It is strategically manufactured, and the same emotional anchors, children, family, nation, are used across all European contexts. Protecting children becomes a reason to attack gender education and sex education, or to restrict trans and LGBTIQ plus visibility.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Defending the heteronormative family becomes a way to present feminism and queer rights as unnatural disruptions. And saving the nation casts equality as cultural corruption, a theme especially visible in Central and Eastern Europe, where gender ideology is often narrated as an import from a supposedly decadent Western Europe.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Put together, those moves turn inclusion into a perceived threat. And that's the key political effect.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

A moral panic doesn't only persuade people, it trains them. It teaches audiences who to fear, who to mistrust, and who can be silenced.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

And it clears the ground for policies and everyday violence that attacks gender and sexual diversity freedoms.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

What the resist findings show beyond any doubt is that the fear, disgust, and outrage created by anti-gender actors takes a toll on all the people, especially queers and feminists.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

The toll is both physical and emotional. Across our nine cases, our participants describe the compounding of attacks and systemic discrimination as producing a pervasive fear of extreme violence, not only against individuals but against organizations too.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

And that fear isn't hard to understand when anti-gender rhetoric keeps insisting that gender and sexual minorities are threats.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

When you're repeatedly framed as dangerous to children, to the family, to the nation, the atmosphere changes. Participants described feeling unsafe and undervalued, and not only those directly targeted, people with progressive or non-traditional values more broadly, also talked about living in a climate where hostility feels increasingly normalized.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Many of our participants described being targeted because they are trans andor racialized, with experiences that cut across the ordinary infrastructures of life: public spaces, healthcare, workplaces, and social settings.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

So fear becomes ambient. It doesn't belong to a single moment. It attaches itself to routines, to services, to relationships. Across the case studies, participants frequently reported living in a state of fear that changes behavior.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

People talked about avoiding public events, making themselves less visible, and modifying daily routines to minimize the risk of confrontation.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Some communities also described heightened vigilance, scanning surroundings, checking who's nearby, assessing whether a space might pose a threat. It's exhausting, a kind of continuous calculation.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

And it shows us something crucial. Fear isn't simply personal, it's relational and structural.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

It's what it feels like to move through environments where institutions, media, and social interactions are all in different ways signaling danger. So far we've been talking about the emotions that anti-gender politics tries to mobilize and the toll that can take on people and communities it targets. But how can emotions fuel queer feminist resistance?

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Well, we have an answer to that question in the resist findings. As anti-gender hostility continues to shape our lives, it is creativity, joy, humor, but also anger that often become a powerful counterforce and a form of resistance.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Joy in particular affirms that queer and feminist lives are not only something to protect, but something worth celebrating. Joy is not a distraction from politics. It's one of the ways movements refuse to be reduced to fear and survival.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Sometimes it's a practice of staying connected. Humor in group chats, singing together at marches, a shared meal after a meeting, dancing at pride, making art, building small safe gatherings.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

So to put it differently, if care is the infrastructure that sustains activism, then joy is the energy that keeps that infrastructure from collapsing into sheer exhaustion.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

And while anger at injustice can be exhausting, it can also fuel creativity and sharpen what's at stake. And when held collectively, it can push people from isolated frustration into organized action.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

What's striking is how joy shows up, not only in relatively safe spaces, but under conditions of violence and precarity, where it might seem least available.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Yes. Do you remember the Greek example? One participant in described living with threats and abuse, but also with a stubborn insistence on desire on life. They said, Thank goodness that I can be here talking with you. It has often been abusive. There have been many threats, but not enough to put a stop to the desire for life, to devour all this amazing spectrum of experience brought by that queer life.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Yes. And I also remember Eleni from Greece, who linked joy to collective resilience and to what Sara Ahmed calls killjoy feminism. The refusal to keep the peace by keeping quiet.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Our favorite figure, the feminist killjoy.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

This is the person who spoils the mood by naming sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and in doing so reveals that the real problem was never the refusal but the injustice itself.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

And maybe that's the point. Joy doesn't mean pretending everything is fine. Joy can sit alongside grief, anger, and exhaustion and still create breathing space.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

It can be the feeling of we're still here and we're not alone. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Thank you. You've listened to Dialogues of Resistance, a podcast series about how anti-gender politics travels and how queer feminist resistances answer back.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

We follow those dynamics across Europe, and you've just listened to an episode on how emotions can be either mobilized for repression or cultivated for collective endurance.