GENDER IDEOLOGY: AN ANALYSIS OF ITS DISPUTED MEANINGSAbstract
In the last few years, a number of genealogical studies have been published about recent historical processes that enabled the emergence of the discourse on “gender ideology” as a “weapon in the culture war.” As some of these studies suggest, what is at stake is an alternative project of knowledge and truth production. Little or no attention, however, has been given to the meanings of gender ideology internal to feminist and gender theories. Rejecting the idea that gender ideology can be reduced to a straw man produced by a conservative agenda, I propose a brief history of ideas associated with the concept, foregrounding the work of sociologist Viola Klein, whose reflections on the sociology of knowledge represent one of the first academic investigations of gender ideology. In illustrating the plethora of meanings associated with the concept, I argue that they converge towards a radical negation of the anti-gender discourse of the global right.
Keywords: Gender ideology; global right; sociology of knowledge; Viola Klein; agnotology.