Gender as discourse: Feminist knowledge production and anti-gender campaigns in Lithuania

‘ Gender’ has been broadly understood in multiple ways: as a social construct, a prescription of social roles, an experience and an identity, among others. However, in the context of Eastern and Central Europe, ‘gender’ also constitutes a discourse that is intertwined with the politico-economic processes of Europeanisation and market liberalisation. Here, the notion of, specifically, gender equality entered in a particular sociohistorical moment, tracing back to the transformation period from Soviet socialism to neoliberalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet-era ‘woman question’ was replaced by the gender equality framework, the latter normalised and universalised as the sole progressive approach to women's emancipation. To expose the gender equality framework's sociohistorically determined status, I turn to the contemporary ‘anti-gender’ campaigns, which, since the early 2010s, have been gaining traction in the region and beyond. These campaigns are united by their opposition to ‘gender ideology’, a catch-all term invoked to contest any perceived challenges to ‘traditional’ gender norms, roles and social relations. Through the conceptualisation of gender as a discourse, I argue that ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations, despite their reactionary framing, reveal how dominant approaches to women's emancipation – also understood as the gender equality framework or liberal feminism – are entangled with the sociohistorical contexts in which they emerge. I demonstrate how the ‘anti-gender’ campaigns point to a critique of the dominant liberal approach to women's emancipation as well as to an alternative understanding of oppression and gendered subjectivities. I illustrate how both the contemporary ‘gender’ equality and the ‘anti-gender’ approaches operate as knowledge-producing discourses that put forth specific understandings of emancipation, while foreclosing others.