ZEUGS NEWS 2020

New ZEUGS-Publication is released!

In the course of the analyses of the European election campaign 2019, the ZEUGS research project Practice and Discourse of the Authoritarian in Europe has been published in Femina Politica. The following article by Gabriele Wilde and Henrike Bloemen deals with the effects on democratic gender relations.

Wilde, Gabriele; Bloemen, Henrike (2019): Genderdiskurse im bundesdeutschen Europawahlkampf 2019: Zwischen feministischdemokratischem Aufbruch und rechtsautoritärer Aushöhlung. In: Femina Politica. Zeitschrift für Feministische Politikwissenschaft. 2/2019. 28. Jg. S. 150–154.

Analyses of the european election 2019!

"(T)he very big rightward shift did not happen" Spiegel Online writes on the morning after the European elections; Zeit Online also headlines: "Greens and Liberals win - no more right-wing shift in Europe". But is the optimistic assessment for "a Europe of equal rights" (Bündnis90/Grüne) and against a right-wing authoritarian "erosion of democratic (gender) relations" really justified?

Doubts arise above all with a feminist poststructuralist understanding of democracy, as Gabriele Wilde and Henrike Bloemen of ZEUGS point out. The problem is not so much the current distribution of seats in European party families, but rather the gender discourse in national societies, which is represented in the new balance of power in the European Parliament. What is at stake is a symbolic political public sphere in which conflicts can be addressed and questioned.

The ZEUGS analyses of the German European election campaign on the basis of the programs and campaigns show how the authoritarian-populist discourse with a decided reference to the differential category of gender once again narrows this public-political space and consolidates the opposition of private and public.

Gabriele Wilde and Henrike Bloemen presented initial results in the lecture "The Construction of Gender. Discursive Practices in Campaigns for the European Elections 2019" at the European Conference on Politics & Gender (ECPG) at the Universiteit van Amsterdam on July 4, 2019.

Interdisciplinary ZEUGS Lecture series in the summer semester 2019!

Authoritarian policies in the form of right-wing populism and extremism are increasingly establishing themselves as a global form of governance and far-reaching governance rationality, and they are increasingly challenging modern democracies. Discourses and practices of exclusion and contempt for humanity are the consequences of successful mobilization on the edges of and against democracy. Even though the dangers for modern democracies of restricting abortion, asylum and immigration laws and a general dismantling of rule-of-law principles are obvious, the threats to global democratic conditions and the political stability of Western societies are difficult to foresee and pose new challenges to both politics and science.

This is especially true for social gender relations, because authoritarian discourses and practices have a particular influence on the construction of gender roles and gender power relations. However, there has been little systematic analysis of the role and functions of women in this context, of how authoritarian political and social designs attack social plurality, difference, and diversity, and of the constitutive role of mobilization against gender and supposed 'gender ideology'.

The aim of this lecture series is therefore to take up this research desideratum and to ask from an interdisciplinary perspective to what extent authoritarian discourses and practices attack and change democratic gender relations and thus represent a fundamental attack on democracy.

The poster of the interdisciplinary ZEUGS lecture series can be viewed here.