The geopolitics of moral panic: The influence of Argentinian neo-conservatism in the genesis of the discourse of ‘gender ideology’

Neo-conservative activism

Historically, the sexed body constituted an arena of constant dispute. Since the second half of the 20th century these conflicts have been intensified globally, as a result of movements that established gender and sexuality as the center of political dispute (Vaggione, 2005). On the one hand, the mobilization of feminist and LGBTI movements made a number of claims to broaden the scope of sexual practices, bodies and desires (Pecheny and La Dehesa, 2011). On the other hand, an activism that reacted against the processes of expansion and recognition of SR and SOGI rights also appeared. Between the 1960s and 1970s, traditional conservatism reoriented its attention, focusing more strongly on the topics associated with body and sexuality (Vaggione, 2005).

The new temporality in which sexuality entered the political agenda established an updated conservative agenda, known as ‘neo-conservative’ activism. Although the concept ‘neo-conservatism’ is not devoid of problems, labeling this movement enables bringing into focus two central aspects. On the one hand, there was the innovation of an activism whose agenda was mainly focused on keeping a sexual order that was threatened by the political agenda of the second wave of feminism and the emerging LGBTI movements. As a matter of fact, the prefix ‘neo’ highlights the way in which the reaction to the politicization of gender and sexuality opened a new temporality in which some sectors took collective action to fight against the expansion of SR and SOGI rights (Vaggione, 2011).

On the other hand, the ‘conservative’ nature highlights the continuity of these sectors with actors and processes dating back to earlier times and to the prioritization of sexuality in the field of political contest. Marked by the influence of Christianity, the conservative agenda has historically focused on problems associated with the conservation of the political and civil roles of the Catholic church responding to the projects of secular states, anticlericalism, liberalism, etc. While sexual issues were not ignored, today we can notice that they have been included within the list of priority topics. The strength of this contemporary shift toward sexual issues represents the innovation of actions taking place, set against the continued moral and religious background. However, attention has been redirected principally toward the sexed body as a reaction to feminist agendas and LGBTI movements.

This neo-conservative change of direction cannot be understood without understanding the influence of religion in the contemporary political field, particularly as regards sexuality. Far from fulfillment of the omens of traditional theories of secularization that predicted privatization, and even the disappearance of religion in modernity (Casanova, 1994), we can now witness an effervescent renewal of transcendental beliefs (Berger, 2005). This political presence of religion is stronger in the field of the body and sexuality (Vaggione, 2011). When sexual issues entered the political agenda, they affected religions in various ways. In some cases, they enabled a pluralization of certain religious systems and actors. In recent decades, there has emerged a multicolored mosaic of feminist and queer theologies, progressive churches, religious LGBTI and feminist organizations, among others. All these actors challenge the ideas that religious matters should be coupled with contemporary sexual politics under binary schemes, where the secular is associated with advances of SR and SOGI rights, and religion with inevitable conservative positions (Vaggione, 2005). But, on the other hand, the politicization of sexual matters also meant a ‘reactive politicization’ (Vaggione, 2005) of religion against feminist claims and LGBTI rights. Several churches became more dogmatic since they considered these movements to be a threat to sexual morality and the order of the world they protect. This reaction gave rise to the creation of a neo-conservative movement.

In Latin America, neo-conservative activism began to develop strongly in the 1980s (González Ruiz, 2006; Mujica, 2007; Vassallo, 2005). In a context influenced by strong Catholic colonial heritage, the policies issued by the Vatican were very influential in the region. The Vatican turned toward sexual issues as a response to the feminist agenda (Case, 2016), together with the strong opposition initiated by Pope John Paul II against the liberation theology movement, which was very significant in Latin America. All this meant the reunification of the local Catholic structures around the neo-conservative agenda (Htun, 2003).

In the 1980s, in parallel to this reorganization in the Vatican hierarchy, similar processes occurred in civil society. On one hand, old Catholic organizations led by parishioners, whose institutional objectives had not necessarily been focused on issues related to sexual morality, began to be concerned by these issues. Organizations such as the Consortium of Catholic Doctors and the Corporation of Catholic Lawyers, founded in the city of Buenos Aires in 1929 and 1935 respectively, and the organization Tradition, Family and Property, founded in São Paulo in 1960, began to adhere strongly to the neo-conservative agenda in the 1980s (Morán Faúndes, 2017). On the other hand, a series of new NGOs also began to settle in the region. Their agenda focused almost exclusively on the defense of a reproductive, heterosexual, conjugal and monogamous sexuality model (González Ruiz, 2006; Vassallo, 2005). We can trace the origins of some of these in international Catholic organizations that began to operate in the region in the 1980s (Gudiño and Bessone, 2017). Human Life International, founded in 1981 in the US, was one of the most important ones in this sense. Supported by this organization, various local NGOs emerged in different Latin American countries: Ceprofarena in Peru (1981), the Anonymous Movement for Life in Chile (1985), ‘Pro-Familia’ in Argentina (1983), among others (González Ruiz, 2006; Mujica, 2007; Vassallo, 2005).

In this way, in Latin America a neo-conservative activism began to take shape in the 1980s, operating as a clerical and civil network which first resisted the use of modern contraceptive methods and abortion, and then expanding its agenda to issues such as civil unions, same-sex marriage, gender identity laws, comprehensive sex education, etc. This entire mosaic of actors began to converge under the label of ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-family’ (Morán Faúndes and Peñas Defago, 2016). Today, neo-conservative activism has taken up more complex actions. While in the 1980s Catholicism was the driving force that articulated collective actions, today evangelical sectors have been strongly integrated (Campos Machado, 2006). In addition, many ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-family’ NGOs have gone through a process of religious disidentification. They relegated their confessional elements to a second level in order to prioritize their neo-conservative agenda as a center of articulation and mobilization (Morán Faúndes and Peñas Defago, 2016). Think tanks, confessional universities, bioethicists, etc. have joined this now transnational movement, in reaction to the politicization of new demands mobilized by feminist and LGBTI movements.

‘Gender ideology’ as a new discursive strategy

Throughout its history, neo-conservative activism has resorted to multiple discursive strategies. Many originated in texts produced by the Catholic hierarchy. The last Supreme Pontiffs concentrated a large part of their agenda on responding to the growing feminist and LGBTI movements which became globally dynamic in the second half of the 20th century (Case, 2016). Through institutions such as the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Pontifical Academy for Life, or official instruments such as papal encyclicals, the Vatican has become a powerful propaganda machine (Peñas Defago, 2010). One of the Vatican’s repeated narrative strategies has been the construction of a series of syntagmas that encapsulate its patriarchal and heteronormative positions. Thus, for example, in 1991 John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus expressed the need to build up a ‘human ecology’ to protect human beings from the threat of extinction posed by SR rights. In 1995, the Pope’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae promoted a ‘culture of life’ against the threat of the ‘culture of death’ posed by feminist and LGBTI agendas. The Vatican’s discursive production machinery has enabled a global expansion of the neo-conservative narrative.

‘Gender ideology’, not unrelated to these previous constructions, is one of the most recent discursive inventions of neo-conservative activism (Viveros Vigoya and Rodríguez Rondón, 2017). The academic and intellectual field should not take this concept as a merely descriptive, neutral or consensual term. On the contrary, since it is a concept with specific ideological and political responsibility, only the sectors that share these ideological beliefs agree to use the term as if it were just descriptive and neutral (Paternotte, 2015).

Fernando Serrano Amaya (2017) defines ‘gender ideology’ as the assembly of ideas and interpretations of texts produced in the mid-1990s as a reaction to the gender agenda promoted by feminism, especially at the Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994) and at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing (1995). ‘Gender ideology’ was the name used by neo-conservative activism to synthesize its questioning of the gender approach that was beginning to impact all over the world (Cornejo-Valle and Pichardo, 2017; Kováts, 2017; Viveros Vigoya and Rodríguez Rondón, 2017). Although this concept emerged as a reaction to the transnational actions of the feminist movements in the 1990s, from the beginning it was a combination of ideas that mix and confuse feminist agendas with LGBTI politics without nuance. The threat of gender to neo-conservatism consists in its capacity not only to question the traditional roles between men and women, but also the stability of heterosexuality and the man/woman binary. Thus, although the neo-conservatives in the 1990s generally connected the concept of ‘gender’ with feminist ideas, all the contestation they opened up against ‘gender’ was directed not only to feminist agendas, but also to LGBTIs as well. As a matter of fact, part of the term’s effectiveness consists in its ability to simplify the complex and unify the diverse. Through this umbrella concept (Grzebalska and Soós, 2016), neo-conservative activism eliminates the internal divisions as well as the debates that exist within both feminist and LGBTI movements, beyond alliances and solidarity. Both movements are included in the concept of ‘gender ideology’.

Unlike other neo-conservative concepts, such as the culture of life/death, which was mainly a Vatican production, ‘gender ideology’ was the result of a broader intellectual output. Neo-conservative intellectual activists (mostly parishioners) in collaboration with the discursive system of the Holy See gave rise to this production (Paternotte, 2015). Academic literature usually uses a linear narrative to tell the history of this gender questioning. The book Who Stole Feminism?, written by the American academic Christina Hoff Sommers (1994), tends to be considered the precursor to this period. She did not use the term ‘gender ideology’ in her book. However, she proposed a categorization that became a key point for the further development of this concept: the difference between what she called liberal or equality feminism (first-wave feminism) and gender feminism (the second wave of feminism). According to her, equality feminism obtained significant achievements in the area of rights, such as women’s suffrage and formal equality before the law. However, she believed the new ‘gender feminism’ had been radicalized, by considering that women’s oppression went beyond the boundaries of legal inequality. The category ‘gender’ used by this new feminism believes that the roots of women’s oppression are not only legal issues but also cultural structures (responding to a patriarchal society). But according to Hoff Sommers, such cultural oppression is not real, since women enjoy unprecedented equal rights nowadays. According to the author; the term ‘gender’ belongs to an ideological category, not to an objective one.

After Hoff Sommers published her book, Dale O’Leary (researcher at the Catholic Medical Association of the United States) wrote the position paper: ‘Gender: The deconstruction of women’ in 1995. This document is often considered to be the main text of neo-conservative questioning of gender. ² The report was issued at the NGO Forum celebrated in parallel with the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. According to Sara Garbagnoli (2016), reviews of it were presented that same year to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Going back to the ideas of Hoff Sommers, O’Leary accused ‘gender feminists’ of restoring the ideas of classical Marxism, but updating them from a cultural perspective. According to the author, feminists criticized Marxists theorists for focusing their revolution on class conflict, ignoring the gender conflict originated by the patriarchal family that presupposes class inequality.

By quoting authors such as Shulamith Firestone or Heidi Hartman, O’Leary noted that for contemporary feminists gender oppression was interlocked with class oppression, and nowadays, the revolutionary discourse was not only limited to economics, but to culture as well (O’Leary, 1995, 1997). The concept of ‘gender’ revealed a false antagonism between men and women, but at the same time it highlighted the possibility of overcoming it, since masculine roles of power and feminine roles of subordination would be cultural constructs that could be modified. O’Leary was infuriated by the idea that ‘gender’ was a category which could break up the stability of binary sexual difference, of heterosexuality as a ‘natural’ orientation, and therefore, of the heterosexual and conjugal family. By deconstructing the perceived naturalness of women’s sexed bodies, authors such as Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling disturbed O’Leary. Thus, ‘gender feminists’ (a category that mixed radical feminists, Marxists, LGBTI and queer people) represented a threat to the ‘natural’ order of things or, in other words, a threat to biology itself. To illustrate the extent of that threat, O’Leary claimed these beliefs were global conspiracies (Baden and Goetz, 1997), emphasizing that ‘gender feminism is an imperialist ideology’ (O’Leary, 1995: 28).

One must consider Hoff Sommers and, mainly, O’Leary to be the first neo-conservative intellectuals who tried to attack the theoretical and conceptual bases of gender as a ‘socially constructed category’. Their ideas were gradually incorporated by the Catholic hierarchy (see Ratzinger, 1996), who renamed the gender agenda: ‘gender ideology’. We can see the first record of the use of this syntagma in the book L’Evangile faceau désordre mondial (prologue by Benedict XVI) by the Belgian priest Michel Schooyans (1997). Later, in 1998, the Catholic hierarchy published the first official text that explicitly used the concept of ‘gender ideology’ to synthesize the neo-conservative questioning of gender. Written by the Peruvian Episcopal Conference (Conferencia Episcopal Peruana, 1998), the document was called ‘Gender ideology: Its dangers and scope’. Republished in 2003 in the book Lexicon: Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family, Life and Ethical Questions by the Catholic Church (Pontificio Consejo para la Familia, 2003), the text contained a synthesis of the report ‘Gender: The deconstruction of women’ written by O’Leary in 1995. The document restored the main aspects that neo-conservatism attributed to the gender agenda: an assumed anti-scientific (and, therefore, ideological) character, its relation with Marxism, and its conspiratorial nature. From that point on, there was a global increase in the production of neo-conservative texts about ‘gender ideology’. The new texts replicated the elements assigned to the feminist agenda by Hoff Sommers and O’Leary. While some issues are emphasized more than others, the texts always follow the same pattern (Cornejo-Valle and Pichardo, 2017).

What are these elements? According to Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff (2018), who studied this discourse from a critical academic approach, ‘gender ideology’ discourse is composed of three broad dimensions. First, the effectiveness of this term is based on its capacity to appropriate objectivity: neo-conservatives affirm that sex, gender identities and sexual desire are biological attributes. Therefore ‘gender ideology’ discourse considers neo-conservative sexual politics in terms of objective and neutral evidence, whereas their detractors follow purely ideological rules. It is clear that ‘ideology’ is used as a synonym for ‘false ideas’, versus the ‘true ideas’ stood for by neo-conservative activism (Cornejo-Valle and Pichardo, 2017). ‘Gender ideology’ discourse seeks to re-naturalize gender and sexuality under binary and unquestionable ideas (Garbagnoli, 2016).

The second point highlighted by Korolczuk and Graff regarding ‘gender ideology’ is the way in which this concept has attributed a neo-Marxist character to feminist and LGBTI political theories and demands (Anić, 2015; Hankivsky and Skoryk, 2014; Maďarová, 2015). According to O’Leary (1995), the claims of these movements are a sort of cultural Marxism, intended to abolish the systems of class and gender division, sexual hierarchies and, ultimately, the ‘traditional family’. Summing up, neo-conservatives mobilize the concept of ‘gender ideology’ to show that Marxism is not an outdated ideology. On the contrary, it has an new battlefront, focusing on the body and sexuality. Through the discourse of ‘gender ideology’, 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 (Miskolci and Campana, 2017) bundling together Marxism, feminism and LGBTI movements (Anić, 2015).

Finally, the third element highlighted by Korolczuk and Graff is the global conspiracy, ideological totalitarianism and cultural neo-colonialism narrative mobilized under the umbrella of ‘gender ideology’ (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018; Paternotte, 2015; Paternotte and Kuhar, 2017). Indeed, neo-conservatives assume the existence of a global scenario where feminist and LGBTI agendas are supported by large corporations, human rights agencies and international donors, among others. Their intention may be to spread this ‘gender ideology’ to every corner of the world by using the international human rights agenda as a tool (Cornejo-Valle and Pichardo, 2017) and rallying the interests of global capital markets to their cause (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018). Neo-conservatives believe that all this ‘cultural neocolonialism’ is being mobilized by global conspiracies and alliances: ‘This sinister global force, supposedly funded by transnational corporations such as Amazon and Google, is described as a new form of colonialism, the most vulnerable targets of which are developing nations in Africa’ (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018: 807).

‘Gender ideology’ is an empty signifier that functions as a mobilizing tool against same-sex marriage, access to abortion, sexual education, etc. It concentrates multiple and even contradictory agendas and actors (Marxism, feminism, LGBTI, United Nations, global capital, etc.) under the same conceptual umbrella (Kováts and Põim, 2015; Kuhar and Zobec, 2017; Mayer and Sauer, 2017). This strategic discourse has allowed neo-conservative activism to attract wide audiences from beyond the mainstream (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018; Kováts and Põim, 2015; Paternotte and Kuhar, 2017; Pető, 2016). It serves as the ‘symbolic glue’ (Grzebalska and Pető, 2018) for agenda setting between traditional neo-conservatives and other forces, such as neo-fascist movements and far-right paramilitary groups that believe that feminist and LGBTI agendas are updates of Marxist philosophies. What is more, some anti-globalization actors interpret these agendas as the forces of new imperialism (Anić, 2015; Korolczuk and Graff, 2018). Thus, SR and SOGI rights are being threatened by new neo-conservative alliances.

Revising the genealogy of ‘gender ideology’ in Argentina

As we have noted, the literature tends to trace the origins of ‘gender ideology’ discourse to the United States, in the texts of Hoff Sommers and O’Leary, and later found at the heart of the Catholic hierarchy. However, literature in this respect has not considered the intellectual influence of Latin American neo-conservative activism in this network. The intellectual theories developed here were later taken up by the global North neo-conservatives and the Catholic hierarchy. Namely, Argentine neo-conservatives, particularly those located in the city of Buenos Aires and the province of Córdoba, were crucial in this process.

In order to illustrate this, we will refer again to the abovementioned report: ‘Gender: The deconstruction of women’ by Dale O’Leary, foundational for the neo-conservative ‘gender ideology’ discourse. O’Leary reviewed a large number of papers and books written by feminist and queer theorists in order to question gender theory. In her report she quoted Simone de Beauvoir, Alison Jagger, Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, among others. However, O’Leary only referred to two authors, who both belong to her same line of thought, to support her neo-conservative position. One was Christina Hoff Sommers, who set the difference between equality and gender feminism. The other was the Catholic activist Cristina González de Delgado, ³ from Córdoba, Argentina. O’Leary quoted a report written by González de Delgado that warned of the threat represented by the gender perspective being mobilized in human rights spaces. This report was written after González de Delgado’s participation in the Sixth Regional Conference on the Integration of Women in the Economic and Social Development of Latin America and the Caribbean, held in September 1994 in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina. This conference was a preliminary to the NGO Forum to be held a year later alongside the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

From that moment, González de Delgado was concerned about the feminist approach’s gender agenda which declared ‘that there exists no natural man or natural woman, that there is no conjunction of characteristics or conduct exclusive to one sex, even in the psychic life. … The non-existence of a feminine or masculine essence allows us to reject the supposed “superiority” of one sex or the other and to question as far as possible whether there is a “natural” form of human sexuality’ (González de Delgado, 1994, quoted in O’Leary, 1995: 4).

In Córdoba, the name Cristina González de Delgado became known in 1997 when she worked in conjunction with many parents of students and filed a writ of amparo against co-education in the traditional Montserrat boys’ school. ⁴ A few years later, during 2002 and 2003, her name became well-known again, but this time countrywide. In Córdoba, the NGO she directed, Mujeres por la Vida (Women for Life), filed writs of amparo against the recently created National Program for Sexual Health and Responsible Procreation and against the Responsible Motherhood and Fatherhood Program of the province of Córdoba (Peñas Defago, 2018).

Argentina’s neo-conservative activism was not only a credible informant for the neo-conservatives in the global North (nor was González de Delgado the only voice in these parts of the world) but also, at one and the same time, Argentina was in fact a generator of neo-conservative thought bent on questioning the gender agenda. Some of these questionings, in particular those originating in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, were summarized in the book La mujer hoy. Después de Pekín (1995) (The woman today. After Beijing), co-written by priests and neo-conservative civil society activists. This book condensed a number of reactions of neo-conservative activists to the conference held in Mar del Plata in 1994. Several articles included in the publication featured what the authors thought were the theoretical-ideological bases and the political intentions of gender theory, resulting in a local production later to be called ‘gender ideology’. ⁵ Articles such as ‘La perspectiva de género’ (‘Gender perspective’) and ‘Hacia un feminismo femenino’ (‘Towards a feminine feminism’) by Jorge Scala (1995a, 1995b), ⁶ ‘Feminismo y educación’ (‘Feminism and education’) by Cristina González de Delgado (1995) and ‘La teoría de género’ (‘Gender theory’) by Marta Siebert (1995), ⁷ among others, analyzed these ideas with scrupulous attention.

Each of these authors questioned the gender agenda in different ways. Yet, all of them had the same line of thought, i.e. they focused on the idea that gender theory threatened the model of ‘traditional family’, heterosexuality and procreation. In general, all the texts presumed that gender was not a theory, but an ideological construct that aimed to produce cultural changes by manipulating the language (Bergonzo de Arcagni, 1995; González de Delgado, 1995; Sanahuja, 1995; Scala, 1995a; Siebert, 1995). The authors explained how the concept of ‘gender’ shapes the ‘semantic war’ (Siebert, 1995: 23) by reversing the semiotics of the real essence of the body, the family, sex, life, etc., in order to create a sexual order devoid of what neo-conservatism considers normal and natural: heterosexuality, procreation, marriage and monogamy.

Thus, Marta Siebert, in her attempt to trace the origins of this process, concluded that the sectors that promote gender theory came from a long process of ‘regression of the human spirit’ (1995: 23). Such regression began in the 14th century with the rise of nominalism, and was intensified by the critical, empiricist and rational spirit of modernity. According to her, it is clear that feminism and LGBTI movements inherited these ideas, focusing their attention on the production of a new sexual order thanks to the influence of authors such as Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault. Indeed, it was argued, the principle that there is no universal reality and all positivity is based on a discursive framework which classifies objects led feminists to undermine the supposed naturalness of our sexed bodies and to merge with LGBTI theoretical perspectives.

According to the authors of this book, this was the origin of a new era of mobilizations oriented towards the construction of new subjects based on sexual desires and identities far from what would be the essence and nature of human beings (Pascual, 1995; Scala, 1995a; Siebert, 1995). The theory of gender supposed an attack against biology itself (Scala, 1995a), through the adoption of a series of anti-scientific, strictly ideological ideas (González de Delgado, 1995; Scala, 1995a; Siebert, 1995).

One of the strongest reasons why the authors showed special concern about the concept ‘gender’ is because it not only questions the naturalness of conventional masculine/feminine roles, but also disapproves of heterosexuality and the anatomical difference between men and women by confronting cultural and biological aspects. The gender theory invalidates the objective nature of the body and sexuality explained in biology, shifting the sexual differences from a physiological to a cultural level in order to empower women (González de Delgado, 1995) and ‘destroy the family, women and the vulnerable’ (Bergonzo de Arcagni, 1995: 82). Neo-conservative activism in Argentina warned of the three threats inherent in the mobilization of the gender agenda: first, to the traditional masculine and feminine roles; second, to heterosexuality as a ‘natural’ orientation; and third, to sexual difference, i.e. the physiological division between men and women.

This concern about the repercussions of the ‘gender’ category in the stability of sex differences should be highlighted. In the mid-1990s, in most of the feminist movement the idea that sex was biological-natural and gender culture-related was still strong (Baden and Goetz, 1997). Likewise, in various Latin American contexts, many of the transgender demands and perspectives were competing to gain visibility, even within the LGBTI movements. The emergent theories, which criticized the unquestionable nature of the binary category of male or female, such as queer theory, unleashed moral panic among the neo-conservatives long before they made a significant impact on various progressive sectors. A key moment was the text by the Mexican feminist scholar Marta Lamas (1994) presented at the regional conference in Mar del Plata in 1994, which struck fear in the neo-conservative community. The text questioned, among other issues, the ‘naturalness’ of the man/woman binary and gender identities by analyzing intersex corporeality. Neo-conservative authors such as González de Delgado (1995), Scala (1995a, 2001, 2003), Siebert (1996), presbyter Lorenzo Pascual (1995) and O’Leary (1997) were obsessive in their analysis of Lama’s document. Her ideas were disturbing to the Argentine intellectual neo-conservatives.

Consequently, neo-conservatives began to track the origins of the gender agenda. Although some of them found its roots in liberal culture (Scala, 1995b), others saw in feminist theory echoes of Marx:

The Marxist ideology disapproved of private property of the means of production. He believed it was the root of all the evils of mankind; as if the only problem of human beings were of an economic nature. He was wrong. Yesterday: economy; today: sexuality. Yesterday: the bourgeois-proletarian dialectic; today: the male-female dialectic. Yesterday: the socialization of the means of production; today: gender equality. (Pascual, 1995: 51)

Just like O’Leary, Pascual overstated the impact of the Marxist branch of feminism in order to cause confusion about all gender theory production. The neo-conservative discursive system ignored the numerous divisions and internal debates of the gender theorists, among the Marxist, poststructuralist, liberal, postcolonial currents, etc., in order to persuade people that the ideological root of the whole spectrum was Marxism.

The Argentine neo-conservatives believed that this reorganization of the classic Marxist economic theory now oriented towards a new gender-focused cultural Marxism represented both a local and a global threat. According to these authors, the expansion of these ideas was developed in conjunction with local and transnational parties who operated in a sort of worldwide conspiracy against the natural order of things: ‘The national and provincial government, in conjunction with universities, NGOs, and the economic sponsorship of United Nations Agencies, are now implementing new legal frameworks regarding female equality’ (González de Delgado, 1995: 111). The gender agenda ‘will reach its goals after much planning. This plan will be perfectly outlined, step by step in order to achieve each and every aim’ (Siebert, 1995: 30). Conspiracy theories are common among these early neo-conservative works.

Thus, in the mid-1990s, the discourse of Catholic activists and intellectuals in Argentina was opposed to the concept of ‘gender’ and, consequently, against the theory and approach of feminism and LGBTI movements. Their ideas were in line with the aforementioned analytical approach developed by Korolczuk and Graff (2018), in which the concept of ‘gender ideology’ includes three basic ideas: the existence of a natural sexual order, the neo-Marxist threat to that sexual order and the global conspiracy promoted by that ideology. These three elements appear in texts developed by Argentine neo-conservative activism in 1995. This neo-conservative intellectual output in Argentina, and mainly in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, became well-known on a global scale.

Conclusions

The intellectual production of Argentine neo-conservatives in the mid-1990s has not been explored. However, several of the ideas developed in this part of the world fully coincide with those produced in the global North, where scholars have tracked the origins of ‘gender ideology’. In exactly the same year, in reaction to the same global juncture (Cairo and Beijing conferences), Argentine and American neo-conservatism produced a matching collection of analyses. This does not mean that their intellectual proposals were strictly coherent, or accurate in their interpretations of theories and policies. The present concept of ‘gender ideology’ emerged from a rather lax and biased interpretation of the feminist theory and LGBTI agenda in the last 60 years (Baden and Goetz, 1997). As a result, important feminist and LGBTI intellectuals were urged to respond to the controversy surrounding the concept of ‘gender ideology’. Judith Butler wrote a text in response to the verbal attacks in public she suffered in her visit to Brazil in 2017. The neo-conservatives reproached her for being a ‘gender ideologist’. ⁸ In addition to re-explaining her theoretical perspective on gender and differentiating it from an ‘ideology’, she responded directly to the statements of neo-conservative intellectuals such as Jorge Scala, claiming that his ideas were nothing more than a ‘caricature’ seeking to frame gender theory as a moral threat. ⁹

Nevertheless, the purpose of this work has not been to confirm the truthfulness or falseness of each neo-conservative idea, but to highlight the geopolitics of that intellectual production. By presenting numerous neo-conservative ideas which originated in the global South, we can understand the complex nature of their geopolitics. Undoubtedly, there are many neo-conservative strategies developed in the United States and Europe which have been exported to the global South. However, one must consider the way in which local neo-conservatives have played a fundamental role in the production of the globally proliferating hate speeches against women’s rights, gender equality and LGBTI rights. Learning about the central concepts of the historical and intellectual background to neo-conservative activism is essential to understand the sources that allow the circulation of ideas and messages that may prevent some people from having a proper existence in the future.