A New Antifeminism? Transnational Networks, Practices, and Discourses of the Far Right in Germany and Switzerland (ca. 1970–1990)
Abstract
Since 1945, the far right has played a central—yet historically understudied—role in the development and circulation of antifeminism. Through its own publications and political practices such as public demonstrations, lobbying efforts, parliamentary initiatives, and legal interventions, far-right actors actively sought to roll back emancipatory achievements in the areas of gender equality, sexual self-determination, and migration. This research project investigates the extent to which, and through which strategies, the far right has constructed feminism and feminist movements as comprehensive enemies.
Beginning in the 1970s, alarmist discourses in both West Germany and Switzerland about declining birth rates became entangled with fears of a so-called "population explosion" in the Global South and with the racially charged rhetoric of "foreign infiltration." These fears coalesced into a central narrative: the imagined threat of national extinction or “genosuicide.” Such demographic anxieties were also taken up by so-called "pro-life" groups that emerged in response to proposals for legalizing abortion in the early 1970s. The project seeks to highlight the significance of pronatalist and nativist population politics as a central, yet underexplored, dimension of antifeminism within the far right.
Primary sources and existing research indicate close intellectual and practical transfers between West Germany and the German-speaking regions of Switzerland. The project therefore adopts a transnational perspective, focusing on the ideological, organizational, and media-related entanglements between these two contexts.
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