Counteracting Challenges to Gender Equality in the Era of Anti-Gender Campaigns: Competing Gender Knowledges and Affective Solidarity El _ zbieta Korolczuk 1,2, * This article focuses on the epistemic strategies employed by ultraconservative movements to oppose women’s reproductive rights and the ways in which the women’s movement counteracts these efforts. The core argument is that nowa- days the opponents of gender equality and sexual democracy are seeking not only political but also epistemic power, producing a new body of gender knowledge. A detailed analysis of the struggles around the 2016 Stop Abortion bill in Poland shows, however, that the women’s movement can counteract these challenges by mobilizing not only medical and legal expertise, but also tacit knowledge and affects. Introduction Contemporary debates on gender knowledge and expertise have fo- cused primarily on the possibilities of applying feminist insights and gender expertise to state institutions and organizational environments and the possi- ble effects of such application, both for society and for feminism. However, in the context of the rise of ultraconservative movements and the right-wing electoral victories in many European countries, opportunities for inserting a feminist agenda in institutional settings are closing (Ko ¨ttig, Bitzan, and Peto ¨ 2016; Verloo 2018a). As observed by Mieke Verloo, political opportunities for feminist politics are dwindling due to “the growth of far right ... parties; the consolidation of neoliberal capitalism and the weakening of social democracy and the strengthened role of organized religion” (Verloo 2018a, 47). The opponents of gender and sexual equality target gender studies and gender ex- pertise, accuse gender studies scholars of being ideologues rather than 1 So ¨ derto ¨ rn University, Sweden 2 University of Warsaw, Poland *elzbieta.korolczuk@sh.se socpol: Social Politics, Winter 2020 pp. 694–717 doi:10.1093/sp/jxaa021 # The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access publication July 24, 2020 Social Politics 2020 Volume 27 Number 4 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sp/article/27/4/694/5875753 by guest on 02 July 2022