UC Irvine

This dissertation ethnographically examines the rise of the transnational right-wing anti- gender (anti-feminist) movement in Mexico and its role in mobilizing support for illiberal populist politics in Mexico, Latin America, and elsewhere. Drawing on four years of research with Mexico’s leading anti-gender (“profamily”) activists, including one year of ethnographic research in Mexico City and extensive online research, I examine the sociocultural dynamics and truth politics in the unfolding dispute over gender in the context of interrelated social, political, and economic crises in the context of interrelated crises of security and democracy in late (neo)liberalism. As I trace the rise of anti-gender advocacy in Mexico and how activists cast gender as a threat to the natural (hierarchical) social order, including the traditional “natural family,” I scale my analysis of illiberal gender politics across three interrelated registers of in/security: existential, epistemic, and ontological. Each of the chapters probes the affective sentiments and anxieties (“dudas”) that correspond to these illiberal insecurities as they manifest in the discourses and practices of Mexico’s profamily activist community, including and especially in their appeals to security and in widely circulating conspiracy theories. As anti-gender activists frame gender as an existential threat to oneself, the family, and the nation, they both draw on and deepen dudas about survival, both in literal terms and in terms of one’s way of life. As they raise doubts that gender is what it seems, they both draw on and deepen epistemic insecurity, that is, uncertainty and dudas about who to trust and how to know what’s real. As they draw attention to the transformational consequences of implementing a gender perspective for destabilizing traditional power hierarchies –something which they have quite right– they draw on and deepen dudas about identity, who one is, and about status and security in the social order, which I refer to as ontological insecurity. I focus particular analytical attention on understanding the mechanisms through which anti-gender activists both draw on and stoke distrust as a key political resource. Furthermore, I draw on ethnographic analysis presented here of the dynamics of rising illiberal sentiments and the politics of truth and in/security that shape them to draw insight into the broader implications of anti-gender movements for liberal democracy, the feminist political projects that stake their claims within its terms, and the transnational right-wing coalition building to oppose them. I also advocate for the ethical imperative of an anthropology of “studying through” political differences that uses the tools of ethnography to build “empathy bridges” that can scale the “empathy wall” between “us” and “them,” especially in times like ours of intensified pernicious polarization.