Control, alt, delete: Patriarchal populist attacks on international women’s rights
Sanders, Rebecca
Control, alt, delete: Patriarchal populist attacks on international women’s rights - 2025.
6
Patriarchal populist leaders have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women’s and girls’equality and health. Through textual analysis and background interviews with activists, the article identifies and delineates the significance of this “norm spoiling” strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. It finds that women’s rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language : controlling what women’s rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States’ “global gag rule” ; altering the meaning of women’s rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom ; and deleting foundational words, such as “gender” and “sexual and reproductive health and rights”, from international agreements. The role of language in today’s patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders’speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women’s rights.
Control, alt, delete: Patriarchal populist attacks on international women’s rights - 2025.
6
Patriarchal populist leaders have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women’s and girls’equality and health. Through textual analysis and background interviews with activists, the article identifies and delineates the significance of this “norm spoiling” strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. It finds that women’s rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language : controlling what women’s rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States’ “global gag rule” ; altering the meaning of women’s rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom ; and deleting foundational words, such as “gender” and “sexual and reproductive health and rights”, from international agreements. The role of language in today’s patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders’speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women’s rights.
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