Essay: “Anti-Gender Discourse and the ‘Dictatorship of Tolerance’: Insights from Ukraine, Slovenia, and Croatia”

The concept of tolerance, with its increasingly symbolic as well as problematic uses in EU policy and law, has received a new centrality in anti-gender rhetorics. This chapter focuses on anti-gender discourse from the perspective of these competing uses, abuses, and resignifications of what has become the universal ‘Western’ vocabulary for promoting equality and social inclusion. We present a critical discourse analysis of the ‘official rhetoric’ of anti-gender organizations in three post-socialist countries: Croatia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. The analysis shows how tolerance emerges as a fluid signifier that easily attaches to different local and current political concerns, thus susceptible to exploitation in right-wing discourse. Overall, while many similarities pertaining to the globally circulating discourses of anti-genderism are observed, we also note some distinct aspects of the rhetoric as grounded in local memory politics and current events.