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This indispensable survey of the European resistance to LGBTQ causes, marriage equality, women’s reproductive rights, and gender equality has grouped these issues under the rubrics “gender ideology,” “gender theory,” or simply “gender,” which are used variously by the authors of the chapters on each European country. These terms are not used as friendly descriptors but rather as negative signifiers in the discourse of opposition movements to these political and social causes. They serve as the “symbolic glue” (13) to identify the group of issues these movements loathe and also as “empty signifiers” (23, 31) that have no single meaning but to which new or emergent dangers may be added without contradiction. A list of those issues is long and growing longer, including the academic field of gender studies, sex education in the schools, same-sex or single adoption, surrogacy, and transgender identity. Twelve European countries are profiled here, and there is an introduction and a concluding comparative perspective by the editors that will help the reader understand the context of each national opposition movement and the relations among them.
All these nation-based developments have long-term origins, but these are mentioned only in passing. The emphasis in each chapter is on the period since the midnineties, on the occasion of the first international conferences in Cairo and Beijing that advocated gender equality and reproductive rights, and especially on the period since 2006 as European legal projects on marriage equality, homosexual and reproductive rights, and antidiscrimination campaigns have triggered vigorous reactions. The timing, strength, personnel, and themes of these resistance movements have varied from...