"Gender ideology” and the discursive infrastructure of a transnational conspiracy narrative

The formula “gender ideology” has recently gained political traction in several countries. This chapter investigates its conspiracist discursive infrastructure by probing two corpora of far-right media from Brazil and the US. Analysis indicates that “gender ideology” is framed within semantic realms of manipulation, puppeteering, falseness, and danger. It also suggests that anti-gender rhetoric acts as an all-encompassing narrative whereby a cohort of inchoate but ideologically interlinked conspiracy theories are lumped together in a seemingly coherent whole. Comparing datasets from two countries empirically illustrates howanti-gender rhetoric crosses transnational borders and adapts to local specifics along the way.