Paper short abstract:

The presentation focuses on the notion that ‘gender’ threatens ‘natural family’, which propels anti-gender mobilizations worldwide. To abolish this threat, we are called to return to the natural order of things. What does this mean, and more specifically, what does it mean in Eastern Europe?

Paper long abstract:

The presentation focuses on the notion that ‘gender’ threatens ‘natural family’, which propels anti-gender mobilizations worldwide. To abolish this threat, we are called to return to the natural order of things. What does this mean? Return to where and how, to what nature and what order? To unpack this narrative, its frames and normative basis, the presentation will show that the trope of threat couples with the trope of care for the family. In a variety of narratives on family in circulation today, some of which represent the realities of families better than others, the narrative of return is a specifically normatively loaded one, belonging to the staple arsenal of (ultra)rightwing rhetoric. Feeding on crises, it struggles for a hegemonic position of the master narrative on family. Although essentially transnational, narrative of return has its particular East European, postsocialist version. In this particular context, it combines three crucial dimension: the current trend of ‘return from Europe’, rejection of ‘westernism-by-design’ and the specifically framed postsocialist capitalism.