Footnotes

01. Anti-Gender Populism and the Rhetoric of a ‘Natural Order’

The rise of anti-gender populism is bound up with ultraconservative claims to a so-called ‘natural order’ of family and gender relations. Graff and Korolczuk (2022) describe how anti-gender actors frame their struggle as one of rescuing nations from “the moral degradation and relativism of the contemporary ‘modern godless states’” (p. 47). This rhetoric positions the ‘natural family’ as the “only fundamental and sustainable unit of society” (World Congress of Families, cited in Graff & Korolczuk, 2022, p. 47), thereby transforming a historically and politically constructed set of hierarchies into an ostensibly timeless principle.

Critically, such framings are not merely symbolic but fuel campaigns of intimidation and violence. For example, Graff and Korolczuk note that the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified the International Organization for the Family and its flagship World Congress of Families as a hate group because of their “vicious rhetoric and vilification of sexual minorities” (2022, p. 47). Parallel dynamics are visible in misogynistic online communities. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) documents how incel forums “act as a haven for more extreme individuals advocating violence against women” (2022, p. 13). The report highlights that such spaces normalise the idea that women’s autonomy is an existential threat to men, embedding misogynistic hate speech within an ideology of naturalised gender hierarchy.

Taken together, these sources illustrate how appeals to a ‘natural order’ do ideological work: they erase the contingency of gender arrangements, delegitimise feminist and queer claims, and provide justificatory frames for both populist mobilisation and online hate communities towards sustaining authoritarian, patriarchal, and misogynistic politics.

References:

Center for Countering Digital Hate (2022) The Incelosphere: Quant Lab Report. London: CCDH. Available at: https://counterhate.com/incelosphere (Accessed: 16 August 2025).
Graff, A. and Korolczuk, E. (2022) Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Movement. London: Routledge.

02. ‘Bitch’

The epithet ‘bitch’ operates at once as insult, cultural shorthand, and attempted site of reclamation. Yarrow (2018) charts how the 1990s gave rise to what she calls a “bitch epidemic,” in which an entire generation of girls grew up in the fog where “music, media, and products freely portrayed women as bitches and every nasty offshoot imaginable…” (p. 299). Within this climate, the term ‘bitch’ flattened women’s complexity into a stereotype of meanness and ambition coded as unfeminine (p. 15), functioning both as punishment and containment: “a way of policing women’s aspirations” (p. 18).

Critical sociolinguistic analysis underscores why this harm persists. Kleinman, Ezzell and Frost (2009) argue that even when used playfully or self-referentially, ‘bitch’ “unwittingly reinforce[s] sexism” (p. 47), offering only ‘false power’ rather than structural challenge. They note that English contains “hundreds more pejorative terms in English for women than for men, most of them sexual” (p. 49, citing Richardson 2004), making clear that the proliferation of sexist terms is systemic, not incidental. Such language sustains the symbolic environment in which exclusion and even violence become normalised: “jokes and terms such as ‘bitch’ sustain an environment in which people use sticks, stones, guns, or bombs against others” (Kleinman, Ezzell & Frost, 2009, p. 49).

Attempts to reclaim the term in popular culture — whether as an anthem of toughness or a slogan of female efficacy — remain fraught. Kleinman et al. conclude that these gestures do not subvert patriarchy but exemplify “false power” (2009, p. 64), since the word’s derogatory history and saturation desensitise audiences: “Bitch is everywhere, so people have become desensitised to its harms, some even enjoying its use” (p. 64). Unlike terms such as “feminist”, “bitch” lacks a collective movement-based reclamation; it continues to operate, in Kleinman et al.’s phrase, as a “flexible term of patriarchy” (2009, p. 64).

For this reason, deploying the word in a cultural artefact such as Nose Fear’s track is intentionally risky. It can operate as adversarial design, staging confrontation with misogynistic language to make its violence audible. Yet it simultaneously risks reinscribing the very patterns it seeks to expose, because the term itself remains deeply bound up with histories of harm. These tensions sit at the core of the project’s agonistic method: refusing resolution, and insisting on the discomfort of contested meanings.

References:

Kleinman, S., Ezzell, M. B. and Frost, A. C. (2009) ‘Reclaiming critical analysis: The social harms of “bitch”’, Sociological Analysis, 3(1), pp. 47–68.
Richardson, K. (2004) Gender Stereotyping in the English Language. London: Routledge.
Yarrow, A. (2018) 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality. New York: Harper Perennial.

03. ‘Get Back in the Kitchen’

The statement ‘get back in the kitchen’ has become one of the most recognisable refrains in the lexicon of online misogyny. Jane (2014) documents how such directives are routinely deployed to ‘discipline’ women who participate in public digital spaces (p. 562). These statements are not isolated incidents but part of a wider pattern of what she terms e-bile, where “electronic venom directed at one woman is all but indistinguishable from that directed at another,” with anonymity and repetition “erasing the individual and coalescing all these mephitic voices into one” (Jane, 2014, p. 566).

Jane emphasises that these phrases are not simply about offence or insult but are integral to “the discursive disciplining of women,” in which symbolic violence polices the boundaries of who can legitimately speak in public (2014, pp. 562–566). The phrase “get back in the kitchen,” therefore, is part of a continuum of gendered exclusionary tactics that reinforce structural inequality through linguistic repetition.

Reference:

Jane, E. A. (2014) ‘“Back to the kitchen, cunt”: speaking the unspeakable about online misogyny’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 28(4), pp. 558–570.

04. ‘Protect the Children’

A central motif of anti-gender mobilisation is the insistence on defending children from alleged threats posed by feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender studies. Graff and Korolczuk (2022) describe how campaigns across Europe (and beyond) have almost invariably deployed – both rhetorically and visually – “the child in danger and the traditional family in need of protection,” with logos featuring silhouettes of nuclear families repeated across national contexts (p. 58). This strategy has been used to oppose sex education, same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, and even academic studies. In Poland, thousands of schools sought “Family Friendly” certification to shield children from supposed “gender indoctrination” (p. 58). In Peru, the Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that including “gender ideology” in curricula violated parental rights, while in Brazil, opposition to gender studies became a key strand of Bolsonaro’s campaign (p. 58).

The child thus becomes a powerful political symbol. By positioning themselves as defenders of childhood innocence, ultraconservative actors are able to mobilise anxieties about social change and bind them to populist narratives of crisis. As Graff and Korolczuk argue, “the current attack on ‘gender’ would not be such a success if right-wing populism did not address the real needs and grievances of many families in Europe and beyond” (p. 59). This framing allows anti-gender campaigns to appear as champions of family welfare, even as they re-embed rigid hierarchies of gender and sexuality.

Reference:

Graff, A. and Korolczuk, E. (2022) Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Movement. London: Routledge, pp. 58–60.

05. ‘Moral Panic’

The invocation of moral panic has been one of the most recurrent strategies of neo-conservative activism at a global level (Faúndes 2019). Through this syntagma, a variety of ‘moral panics’ have been mobilised against feminist and LGBTQ+ rights, accusing them of promoting the destruction of (inter alia) family values (p. 402). Faúndes further notes that these campaigns have worked transnationally, linking actors from the United States, Europe, and Latin America: “neo-conservatives establish that we are witnessing a kind of cultural battle where left-wing movements consider gender and sexuality more important than economy and class. They use the concept of ‘gender ideology’ to encourage moral panic” (p. 409).

In this way, ‘moral panic’ functions not as an accidental by-product but as a deliberate tool for framing feminist and queer politics as existential threats. The effect is to cast emancipatory movements as dangerous conspiracies, transforming political disagreement into a struggle for civilisation itself.

Reference:

Morán Faúndes, J. M. (2019) ‘The geopolitics of moral panic: The influence of Argentinian neo-conservatism in the genesis of the discourse of “gender ideology”’, International Sociology,

07. ‘Natural Order’

Anti-gender discourse persistently frames feminism and queer politics as corrosive forces undermining a divinely sanctioned or biologically determined natural order. As summarised by Hennig (2018), religious and political opponents of gender-sensitive reform reject ‘gender’ precisely because it clashes with “a naturalist hierarchical understanding of gender relations and with the anti-pluralist conception of a homogeneous society and/or nation” (p. 7, cited in Graff & Korolczuk, 2022, p. 16).

This rhetoric constructs the post-1960s gains of feminism and sexual liberation as catastrophic. As Graff and Korolczuk observe, in ultraconservative retellings “the 1960s brought about a dissolution of the ‘natural order.’ ‘Gender,’ as the core element of this tectonic shift… epitomizes the collapse of the fundamental God-given difference that makes society function properly: that between men and women” (2022, p. 17). Within this narrative, divorce, abortion, gay marriage, and even gender studies themselves are not discrete issues but symptoms of a singular decline.

By appealing to a ‘natural order,’ anti-gender campaigns transform historically specific arrangements into universal truths, presenting hegemonic patriarchal hierarchies as inevitable and dissent as dangerous.

Reference:

Graff, A. and Korolczuk, E. (2022) Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Movement. London: Routledge, pp. 16–18.

07. ‘Tradition’

The invocation of ‘tradition’ in anti-gender discourse is, again, rarely neutral; it functions as a rallying cry to defend hierarchies under the guise of continuity. Graff and Korolczuk explain how ultraconservative actors frame gender equality as a civilisational threat, positioning the ‘traditional family’ as “the last frontier of resistance, a source of hope and a reservoir of solidarity” (Graff & Korolczuk, 2021, p. 6). In this discourse, the family is elevated as the naturalised core of society, and appeals to tradition provide a vocabulary through which opposition to feminist and LGBTQ+ rights can be presented not as reactionary but as restorative.

Tradition is thus mobilised to legitimise exclusion where right-wing populism seeks a “self-affirmation of masculinity” through the promise of restored paternal authority and “the re-establishment of traditional gender constellations” (Sauer, 2020, p. 30). Thus, ‘tradition’ becomes less about cultural memory than about afixing gender in its place, naturalising patriarchal power as if it were timeless.

References:

Graff, A. and Korolczuk, E. (2021) Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment. Abingdon: Routledge.
Sauer, B. (2020) cited in Graff, A. and Korolczuk, E. (2021) Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 30.

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