Vol. 6, no. 2 (2016), 187-204 | DOI: 10.18352/rg.

10156

Against the Heresy of Immanence: Vatican’s

‘Gender’ as a New Rhetorical Device Against the
Denaturalization of the Sexual Order
Sara Garbagnoli*

Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, the Vatican contests the concept of gender as forged by feminists to
study social arrangements through which the sexual order is naturalised. This contestation
came with the distortion of the analyses and claims formulated by feminists and LGBTQ
scholars and social movements. This article understands the Vatican’s invention of
‘gender ideology’ as a new rhetorical device produced both to delegitimise feminist and
LGBTQ studies and struggles and to reaffirm that sexual norms transcend historical and
political arrangements. It also investigates how the transnationality of this discursive
construct relates to the specific features it has taken in two different national contexts –
France and Italy. The article is structured as follows: it first highlights the logic and
structure of the anti-gender discourse. Then, it analyses how the same argumentative
device is performed in anti-gender demonstrations. Finally, it scrutinises the rhetorical
and performative strategies through which anti-gender actors have formulated their
views and argues that ‘gender ideology’ can be understood as a political reaction against
the entry of minorities into the fields of politics and theory.

Keywords
Gender; feminism; theology of the woman; anthropology; homosexuality; Vatican.

Author affiliation
Sara Garbagnoli is a doctoral candidate at the Institut de Linguistique et Phonétique
Générales et Appliquées (ILPGA), Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle.

*Correspondence: 19 Rue des Bernardins, 75005 Paris, France.

E-mail: sara.garbagnoli@gmail.com
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (3.0)
Religion and Gender | ISSN: 1878-5417 | www.religionandgender.org | Uopen Journals
Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

Thus becoming an objet in theory

was the result of becoming a subject in history.
Colette Guillaumin, Women and theories about society:
the effects on theory of the anger of the oppressed (1995)

Catholic Social Doctrine: From Social to Sexual

Since 2009, the Cardinal Van Thuân International Observatory, instituted in 2004
to spread the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, has published an annual
report that includes a discussion of what it considers to be the issue of the year.
An analysis of some of the questions and arguments in these reports – for exam-
ple the ‘colonisation of human nature’ produced by gender, the juridical crisis
induced by ‘relativism’, and feminism as a new totalitarianism – highlights three
significant recent changes in the Vatican’s public discourse on the sexual order
(CVTIO 2012, 2013, 2014). First, the core of the social doctrine has shifted from
economy to what the Vatican calls anthropology, that is, to sexuality, given that,
in the Vatican’s terms, anthropology refers to the nature of the human person
as intrinsically sexuated (Benedict XVI 2008 and 2009a).
Second, the meaning and the centrality Joseph Ratzinger gave to the Thomistic
notion of lex naturalis – in which the definition of natural moral law is prob-
lematically entangled with the laws of nature as studied by natural sciences
(Fassin 2010; Fillod 2014) – has produced a shift in the Vatican’s position on the
relationships between theology, natural sciences, and social sciences. Theology
and natural sciences are understood as two different languages that express the
same meaning: the precepts of natural law defining the structure of reality as
created by God and known by human beings through the faculty of the reason.
In ­Ratzinger’s view, natural law concerns the nature of the human person as such
and its foundation is the ontological complementarity between men and women,
which becomes a synonym of ‘humanity’ in the Vatican’s discourse. In this view
the production of men and women as two different and complementary natural
groups is determined both by anthropology and biology, and hence the Vatican
simultaneously draws upon theology and biology to reaffirm the transcendent
nature of the sexual order.1 When social sciences, and notably feminist, LGBTQ,
gender, and sexuality studies, challenge this ‘immutable basis of anthropology’
(Ratzinger 2004), these are subsequently defined as an ideology that threatens
the ‘order of creation’ and the stability of social reproduction (Benedict XVI 2008).
Third, the social doctrine of the Catholic Church has progressively become the
central tool to fuel what Pope John-Paul II has called a new form of evangeliza-
tion. Its main purpose is to counter what the Vatican perceives as an increasingly
aggressive and relativist secularist culture epitomized by ‘gender’. This explains
why, since its foundation in 2010, the Vatican has placed the counteroffensive
against gender at the core of the pastoral challenges of the Pontifical Council

1
For examples of these two different registers of intervention – theological and
scientific – employed by Vatican’s experts, see the biblical references in Margron’s
intervention (Fassin and Margron 2011) and the scientific sources used by Jutta Burggraf
(PCF 2005: 575–583). Odile Fillod has demonstrated Burggraf’s misuse of scientific
arguments and sources (Fillod 2014).
188 Religion and Gender vol. 6, no. 2 (2016), pp. 187–204
Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

for Promoting New Evangelization. This counteroffensive remains one of the

Vatican’s main pastoral challenges (Synod of Bishops 2014).
How can we account for this change in the social doctrine of the Catholic
Church? What is at stake in what the Vatican has constituted since the beginning
of 2000 as a ‘controversy on gender’ (Pontifical Council for the Family 2011)?
How can one explain the political salience of this anti-gender discourse in public
discourses ten years after the Vatican invented it? To explore such questions, I
proceed with a twofold analysis. In the first part of this article, I investigate the
origins, the logics, and the scope of ‘gender ideology’ as a new rhetorical device
created by the Vatican to contest the denaturalization of the sexual order that
ensued from the claims, analysis, and theories of sexual minorities’ movements.
In the second part, I examine how this argumentative construction travelled
from the Vatican’s texts to the so-called anti-gender demonstrations in France
and Italy, and I assess their political purpose.

‘Gender’ According to the Vatican, from Beijing to Paris:

When a Label Becomes a Rallying Cry
The Emergence of the ‘New Feminism’ vs. ‘Gender Feminists’ Cleavage
Since its emergence in the mid-90s, the Vatican’s anti-gender discourse was cre-
ated in reaction to the denaturalization of the sexual order produced by feminist
theorists and activists. Although not all meanings of the term gender are equally
disruptive – a point upon which the Vatican and many feminists agree (Mathieu
1991; PCF 2005; Scott 2013) – the Vatican has chosen ‘gender’ as the emblem, the
metonymy, and the keystone of theories that affirm that masculinity and feminin-
ity are social constructions, or, worse, as in feminist materialist analysis, that men
and women are not natural groups but social antagonist classes (Delphy 2001;
Wittig 1992). According to the Vatican, this deconstruction of the sexual order
destroys the social order. In fostering the belief that a fluid and polymorphous
sexuality would be the origin of individual identity, gender would lead to the
‘self-destruction of humankind’ (Benedict XVI 2009b). This nightmarish vision of
gender, which reformulates catastrophist topics typical of homophobic rhetoric,
was elaborated after the U.N. International Conference on Population and Devel-
opment in Cairo in 1994 and during the Fourth World Conference on Women
in ­Beijing the following year (Case 2011). The Vatican understood the issues dis-
cussed during these meetings – the centrality of reproductive and health rights as
well as women’s empowerment and gender equality – as the warning signals of
this ideology’s growing influence on international institutions (Buss 1998, 2004).
Since then, the Vatican refers to ‘gender feminists’ to identify those scholars or
activists adopting an ‘ideological perspective’ affirming that sex norms are socially
constructed and naturalized (O’Leary 1997).2

2
Coined by Christina Hoff Sommers in a pamphlet published with the support of
conservative U.S. think tanks in 1994, the expression ‘gender feminists’ was popularised
since 1995 in anti-abortion milieux by the essayist Dale O’Leary. The same year, O’Leary
presented her analysis to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

But 1995 was not only the year of the condemnation of so-called gender
feminists. A few months before Beijing, Pope John-Paul II called for the cre-
ation of a ‘new feminism’ that has to ‘acknowledge and affirm the true genius
of women in every aspect of life in society’ and to promote ‘woman’s dignity’
(John Paul II 1995). This new feminism is grounded in a system of different and
complementary dispositions – which the Vatican calls ‘masculine’ and ‘femi-
nine genius’ – that links two groups which are understood as natural ones.
This system is taken to reflect ‘the natural order’ which is already written upon
differently ‘sexuated bodies’. Hence, sex is considered as the natural origin
of different and supposed complementary places that men and women hold
within social structure.
Although this ‘gender feminism’ vs. ‘new feminism’ cleavage is new in its
specific terms, meaning, and political relevance, it prolongs an older distinc-
tion between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feminism already established by the Vatican
and dating back to the post-WWII period. From the papacy of Pius XII (1939–
1958) to John Paul II (1978–2005), the Vatican produced a radical renewal of
its discourse on women’s nature in response to feminist movements and the
social, political, and juridical changes they fostered. In this new view, men
and women are seen as ‘equal in dignity’ but different and complementary
in nature. This ‘equality within difference’ argument gradually replaced the
Vatican’s previous vision on women’s submission to men. Consequently, the
Vatican started distinguishing and opposing ‘true’ and ‘false emancipation’
(Pius XII), as well as ‘authentic’ and ‘intemperate’ feminism (Paul VI). The for-
mer celebrates the ontological difference between the sexes and their harmo-
nious complementarity; the latter analyses sex relationships in antagonistic
terms. As Denise Couture argues, the ‘differentialist symmetrization’ of the
sexes operated by the Vatican when adopting the ‘equality in dignity’ argu-
ment has to be understood as a deep reformulation of its previous discourse
on the asymmetry between the sexes (Couture 2012). It points to a rhetorical
shift John Paul II achieved with his ‘theology of the woman’ which, inspired
by Edith Stein’s thought, understands human nature as intrinsically binary and
the social order as based on this ontological dichotomy (Snyder 1999). This sup-
posed irrevocable and inescapable division, moreover, manifests itself in bod-
ies and souls: in anatomical differences between men and women and in their
complementary dispositions (Stein 2008). Since women’s destiny and habits
would be inscribed in women’s anatomy, this new view supports a long-estab-
lished belief according to which maternity is understood as women’s natural
vocation and mission (John Paul II 1988). During John Paul II’s papacy, while
Karol Wojtyła was promoting the emergence of a ‘new feminism’ and sup-
porting the achievement of a ‘true theology of the woman’, the Prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, carried
on the fight against ‘bad’ feminisms, and notably their conceptual foundation
in the notion of oppression and their political target of eradicating sexual dif-
ference. Already in 1985, ten years before the Beijing Conference, Ratzinger
stigmatized ‘the “trivialization” of sexual specificity making every role inter-
changeable between man and woman’ that ‘radical feminism’ produces (Ratz-
inger 1985). The denial of sexual difference as the ontological ground of what
is human goes against ‘the language of nature and of the moral’ and produces
the eradication of sexuality from ‘anthropology’ (Ratzinger 1985). This argu-
ment will become one of the main tenets of the anti-gender rhetoric to come.

190 Religion and Gender vol. 6, no. 2 (2016), pp. 187–204

Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

In sum, the opposition to ‘gender feminism’ and the elaboration of a ‘new

feminism’ as they emerged in the mid-1990s need to be considered together.
They are complementary discursive patterns within the same rhetorical device,
which is the outcome of a process of conceptual re-elaboration whose purpose
was to reaffirm the transcendent nature of the sexual order as a ‘truth of rea-
son’ that legislators and politicians have to respect.

‘Gender’ as ‘Ideological Colonization’: the Invention of a New Discursive

Device
When the Beijing Conference took place in 1995 and both the cultural ‘war’
against gender and the promotion of ‘new feminism’ were launched, the
Vatican had already elaborated its discourse on the sexual order based on
the idea of the complementarity between the sexes as humanity’s natural
ground. This explains why the Vatican reacted immediately to the ­Beijing
Platform for Action in which the term gender was used, even if put into
inverted commas as the Vatican’s Permanent Delegation at the U.N. requested
and obtained. Since then, the Vatican’s reaction against gender has been
deployed by means of a double strategy. On the one hand, the Vatican has
elaborated a new definition of gender seeking to renaturalize the concept.
Gender is considered to be acceptable when it is defined as ‘grounded in
biological sexual identity, male or female’ (Holy See’s Delegation 1995; PCF
2005). On the other hand, the Vatican has developed a new rhetorical device
to oppose gender when it is used as a denaturalizing analytical category
and, more broadly, to delegitimize analyses and claims affirming the imma-
nence of the sexual order.
Conceived by Pontifical Councils’ consulters and experts chosen by the Vatican
among scholars teaching in Catholic Universities and Academies, this construct
makes use of two syntagmas – ‘gender ideology’ and ‘gender theory’ – in which
the terms ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’ are programmatically used as synonyms. In this
view, theories and analysis produced by gender studies scholars to denaturalize
the sexual order are considered as not scientific and represent a ‘conceptual
storm’ that breaks the connection between reality and language (PCF 2005).
Relying on a theory of language in which words should reflect the structures
defining what is real, true, and moral, such as the complementarity between
the sexes, the Vatican produced a ‘sacred philology’ in order to generate ‘lin-
guistic clarification’ (PCF 2005). This concern, which the Vatican understands as
both philological and anthropological, resulted in an encyclopaedic dictionary
published in 2003 under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
The Lexicon: Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family Life and Ethical
Questions consists of more or less a hundred articles on sexual and bioethical
issues, written by more than seventy authors. The entire project was supervised
by the President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez
Trujillo, who is known as a fervent critic of what he calls ‘contraceptive colo-
nialism’. The interrelated opposition to gender and the condemnation of the
‘culture of the death’ are key issues of the book.
Since the Lexicon, the Vatican’s experts use ‘gender ideology’ and ‘gender the-
ory’ as labels to identify analyses and claims affirming that sexual norms are his-
torically determined. ‘Gender ideology’ differs from more traditional discursive

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

repertoires affirming the transcendence of the sexual order through its explicit
target of a feminist concept, the mix of the arguments adopted (gender as the
Trojan horse of ‘ideological colonization’ denying a biological truth and pro-
duced by a powerful lobby), and its goals. More precisely, this rhetorical device
seeks to serve three main purposes. It constitutes a single and frightening enemy,
it assemblies religious and non-religious actors to form a large front of mobiliza-
tion in the name of the defence of ‘what is human’ and, finally, it produces moral
panic in the public sphere that subsequently allows to influence legislators and
block juridical and social reforms on sexual and reproductive health and rights
and LGBTQ issues.
In order to create a single enemy, Vatican’s notion of gender is designed to
refer to three different but interwoven historical processes affirming that the
sexual order is not transcendent. First, it reacts to the emergence of feminist
and LGBTQ studies analysing the social arrangements through which sexual
norms are naturalized (Guillaumin 1995). Here the Vatican uses ‘gender’ to refer
to a combination and deformation of different and often antagonist theories,
which moreover do not necessarily refer to the term gender. The main authors
it refers to are Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich, Monica
(sic) Wittig and notably Judith Butler, considered as ‘the Papesse of gender’.
Second, it responds to the claims of feminist and LGBTQ movements fighting
against the system of arrangements oppressing women and non-straight people
(Eleftheriadis 2015). Finally, it opposes the legal reforms and public policies aim-
ing at reducing discriminations against women or LGBTQ people. By lumping
together heterogeneous social agents, such as scholars, activists, and politicians,
who differ not only in their field of action but also in terms of resources, analy-
ses, and strategies, ‘gender ideology’ constructs its adversary as homogeneous.
This enemy, moreover, is also a dangerous and thrilling one (Case 2011). These
processes of homogenization and anathemization have significant effects, also
upon the field of gender and sexuality studies. In countries where this rheto-
ric has been successful, it polarises the field of studies by triggering a defence
strategy among some scholars who seek to soften or deny the radical project of
denaturalizing the sexual order that lies at the heart of radical feminist theories
and queer studies.
‘Gender ideology’ is produced by means of what linguists call the techniques
of deforming the enemy’s position (Périès 1997). That is to say, it is formulated
on the basis of distorting and homogenizing the multiple theories, analytical
tools, and insights that have come out of gender and sexuality studies or femi-
nist and LGBTQ movements. As this deformation weaves together both accu-
rate and inaccurate elements and claims about gender, this rhetorical device
operates as a protean and very adaptable discourse to which it is difficult to
respond. Three main effects derive from this specific modus operandi. First,
even if gender studies scholars or feminist and LGBTQ activists do not recognize
themselves in the distortion made of their own analyses and claims and reject it
as misleading, the anti-gender discourse may succeed in impressing legislators
and policy makers and weakening the social legitimacy of the actors it targets.
Second, the disarray produced by the term ‘gender’ as constituted by the Vati-
can, amplified the equivocity of the concept. When used in the field of gen-
der and sexuality studies, gender has different meanings referring to different
theories of the sexual order (Mathieu 1991) and it does not necessary have the

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

same meaning when used by jurists or politicians. Hence the syntagma ‘gender
theory’ and ‘gender ideology’, as they began circulating in public discourses
and media, produced a proliferation of discourses on gender characterized by a
form of structural ‘inter-incomprehension’ (Maingueneau 1983). Third, ‘gender
ideology’ seeks to legitimize the anti-gender rhetoric as a rational and scientific
discourse defending ‘what is human’.
The main success obtained by this discursive device is the eruption of the gen-
der vs. anti-gender cleavage in the public space and its progressive crystalliza-
tion. This does not only mean that ‘anti-gender’ rhetoric succeeded in positing
a symmetry between two non-equivalent discourses and groups,3 but also that
each pole of this divide tends to be understood on the Vatican’s terms (Husson
2015). The existence of an ‘anti-gender’ front produces a belief in the existence
of a ‘pro-gender’ front. This political offensive against the denaturalization of
sexual norms, moreover, occurs under the sign of an intellectual controversy
over ‘humanity’. The Vatican sought to reinvent its discourse on the transcen-
dent character of the sexual order, given that its traditional arguments on sex
groups ceased to be socially audible and politically efficient as feminists and
LGBTQ struggles and theories reshaped the terms of debate. Hence the Vati-
can’s reformulation is not just a euphemized version of the previous position
in which different forms of linguistic smoothing would have been put in place.
The invention of ‘gender ideology’ specifically targets the theoretical revolution
produced by sexual minorities, that is, the concepts they have been forging in
order to render visible and thinkable the social origins of the oppression that
they bear (Guillaumin 1995: 166–169; Wittig 1992).
The denaturalization of the sexual order – the ‘denaturation’ to use the
Vatican’s terms – fostered by these concepts and analysis implies that, despite
the seriousness of ‘the drama of poverty’, the opposition to this ‘dangerous
ideology’ is inserted at the very core of the Church’s social doctrine. Indeed,
the last three annual reports on Catholic social doctrine focus entirely on ‘gen-
der’ as a form of ‘colonization of human nature’ and express the urgency to
contest its spread in the political field (CVTIO 2012). While the reports repro-
duce the same topics developed in the Lexicon, the perspective shifts from an
analytical concern to a political one. The risk of the subversion of the ‘order of
the creation’ produced by gender demands a public implication of the Catho-
lic Church in order to promote a ‘human ecology protecting the nature of
the human being as man and woman from its self-destruction’ (Benedict XVI
2009a). Presenting itself as ‘the expert in humanity’ (Ratzinger 2004), the Vati-
can positions itself as a political actor taking part in sexual controversies in the
name of ‘what is human’ and a reference point not only for Catholics but for
‘all people of good will’. A note on biopolitics edited in February 2009 by the
S.I.R. (Religious Information Service) affirms the ‘full engagement of the Vati-
can to directly participate in the contemporary debate on the development of
the civilization laying its roots in the anthropological question’ and exhorts
Catholics to ‘react to this attack against life and family’. The label ‘gender’ has
become a political rallying cry.

On the misuse of science see Fillod (2014), on the connexion with far-right see
3

De Guerre (2016).

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

Performing Anti-gender Discourse in the Streets of Italy and

France
‘Gender Ideology’ in Italy before the French Marriage-for-All Debate: A
Useless Category of Mobilization
Between the Lexicon’s introduction of anti-gender rhetoric (2003) and the
French debate on same-sex marriage in which this discourse was successfully
performed in street demonstrations (2013), ‘gender ideology’ had already circu-
lated in several Catholic countries such as Spain, Slovenia or Croatia (Kovats and
Poim 2015; Kuhar 2015; Paternotte 2015; Paternotte et al. 2016). Unsurprisingly,
due to the strong interference of the Vatican in the Italian political field, Italy
was one of these first countries. Still it was only after the success of the French
anti-gender demonstrations that ‘gender ideology’ became a useful political
category used by different groups and activists to block social and legal reforms
that affected LGBTQ people.4
Prior to 2013, the propagation of ‘gender ideology’ in the public space, which
began after the publication of the Lexicon,5 did not receive much resonance
in Italian society at large. It did operate in three different ways: as an alluring
label for non-Catholic intellectuals supporting the idea that sexual difference is
the ground of social relationships, as a new rhetorical device for actors already
supporting the Vatican’s views in the political field, and as the main signifier
shaping a new form of Catholic activism. The syntagma ‘gender ideology’ was
initially used in Catholic newspapers and websites, but soon it was also used by
non-Catholic essayists such as the ‘devout atheist’ Giuliano Ferrara or the sexual
difference feminist Luisa Muraro. In 2004, both reacted to Cardinal Ratzinger’s
Letter on the collaboration between man and woman by praising Ratzinger’s
critique of ‘gender feminism’ and defending the pre-eminence of sexual dif-
ference.6 In 2006 the Italian translation of Dale O’Leary’s The Gender Agenda
brought ‘anti-gender’ rhetoric to the Library of the Italian Senate, where the
book was presented by two main right-wing MP defenders of the ‘natural fam-
ily’: Paola Binetti, a numerary member of Opus Dei, and Luca Volonté, a former
leader of the movement Communion and Liberation and the founder in 2007 of
the European conservative foundation Novae Terrae.
A second front spreading ‘anti-gender’ rhetoric came from the Catholic asso-
ciation Scienza e Vita (Science and Life). Founded in 2005 following a successful

4
Due to the influence of the Catholic hierarchy on the Italian political agenda, the
Italian Parliament has remained impermeable to the main claims expressed by LGBT
movement and people during the last two decades (Winkler and Strazio 2015).
5
In its first edition, the book counted more than fifteen Italian authors, who were
all very active political actors in the Italian public space. Among them Cardinals
Carlo Caffarra, Angelo Scola and Elio Sgreccia, who belong to the group of the more
intransigent prelates, Carlo Casini, the founder of the anti-abortion Movimento per la
Vita (Movement for Life) and Francesco D’Agostino, the president of the Unione Giuristi
Cattolici Italiani (Union of the Italian Catholic Jurists).
6
Giuliano Ferrara, ‘La differenza tra i sessi esiste (grazie al Cielo), e Ratzinger la spiega
in una lettera ai vescovi’, Il Foglio 31th July 2004; Luisa Muraro, ‘Se il Cardinale Ratzinger
fosse un mio studente’, Il Manifesto, 7th August 2004.

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

campaign against ART legislation, its scope and its modus operandi are differ-
ent from those of the Movimento per la Vita, the oldest Italian anti-abortion
association. In 2007, it published a special issue on ‘gender ideology’ and the
following year it organized a congress to ‘unveil its dangers’ (De Guerre 2016).
The articles – including the translations of two papers by French essayists Xavier
Lacroix and Jacques Arènes – covered all the tenets of the anti-gender discourse:
gender as a danger menacing human nature, the genetics of sexual difference,
the theology of the woman, new feminism, and human ecology.
In 2007, a rally called Family Day was organized in Rome under the auspices of
the Italian Conference of Bishops against a governmental bill that would have
granted a limited form of legal protection for same-sex couples (the Di.Co. bill).
The Forum delle Associazioni Familiari (Forum of Family Associations), financed
by the CEI, ran the initiative. Given the actors, the rhetoric (the defence of ‘the
natural family’, sex and sexuality as ‘the alphabet of the human’, ‘the right
of the children to have a mother and a father’), and its political success (the
Di.Co. bill was blocked), the Family Day constituted a remarkable antecedent of
‘anti-gender’ mobilizations. Only the explicit reference to gender as the main
enemy was missing. We might speculate that the specificities of the Italian con-
text explain the temporality of the use of the syntagma ‘gender ideology’. This
includes the hegemony of sexual difference thinking and the fact that gender
and sexuality studies are hardly institutionalized in academia (Di Cori 2013).
In other words, introducing the expression would have been obscure and use-
less, contrary to what happened in 2013 when ‘gender’ had become something
‘real’, that is the dangerous adversary against which French anti-gender demon-
strators had taken the street.

‘Gender Theory’ Takes to the Streets of France: Defending the Human,

Protecting the Children
If the anti-gender discursive strategy was disseminated in the French political
field since the mid-2000s (Carnac 2014), the syntagma ‘gender theory’ became
an effective political category of mobilization during the same-sex marriage
controversy (Béraud and Portier 2015). Opponents used this expression as the
banner under which they coordinated their protest, and succeeded in produc-
ing what the discursive device has not achieved yet: the emergence of ‘gender’
(as defined by the Vatican) as a new category of perception. We may argue
that the formal properties of this discursive device – a Catholic discourse under
cover, a floating polemical signifier targeting and federating different actors,
an anathema capable of producing a moral panic – had been successful factors
in France due to the peculiarities of its history. On the one hand, in a political
context in which the notion of laïcité is constitutionalized and plays a pivotal
role in the national narrative, an argument referring to anthropology and biol-
ogy was not as discredited as an openly religious one might have been. On the
other hand, a secular reasoning reaffirming sexual difference as a pre-condition
of all forms of societies resonated smoothly with lacanian or structuralist theo-
ries which share this presupposition and remain very influential in the French
public debate (Robcis 2013).
In 2011, the expressions ‘gender theory’ and ‘sexual gender theory’ entered
the French Parliament: they both figured in official letters that dozens of

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

right-wing MPs sent to the Minister of Education asking for the withdrawal
of biology textbooks supposedly introducing this ‘dangerous theory’ in high
schools (Fillod 2014). This controversy was accompanied by a broader political
mobilization fuelled by Catholic experts and concerned citizens sending letters
to MPs, signing petitions, and animating discussions in the blogosphere to sup-
port this claim (Tricou 2016). Hence, the syntagma ‘gender theory’ was both
adopted by conservative MPs (including Christine Boutin), and spread by the
‘moral entrepreneurs’ such as Tony Anatrella, Elisabeth Montfort or Jacques
Arènes (Béraud and Portier 2015). Boutin, who in 1999 had brandished a Bible
inside the National Assembly provoking a political outcry, abandoned the reli-
gious register and fully adopted the anti-gender rhetoric.
Hence, in 2011 same-sex marriage had become an ‘anthropological issue’.
This symptomatic change, along with the broad influence of this discursive
device far beyond religious circles, testified to two main shifts that occurred in
the French national narrative on the sexual order since the PaCS debate. On the
one hand, the reference to anthropology and biology produces a naturalistic
argument able to assembly different actors naturalizing the sexual order and,
more broadly, the social order. On the other hand, even if the anti-gender front
presented the same-sex marriage debate as a ‘controversy on what is human’,
references to Catholicism already played a different role. This may be explained
as the outcome of a deflection that occurred to the notion of laicité itself during
the past decade (Fassin 2011). Since the beginning of Sarkozy’s presidency, the
notion of positive secularism (laïcité positive), as supported by Benedict XVI, has
been circulating in the French public sphere. It postulates that Catholic coun-
tries do not have to ‘cut their Christian roots’ because it ‘would mean to lose
meaning and to weaken the cement of national identity’. This new version of
French secularism produces differential responses of political institutions to dif-
ferent religious expressions in the public space, as anti-gender demonstrations
will show.
After the quarrel about handbooks during which the reference to ‘gender
theory’ began to spread in public discourse, the debate on same-sex marriage
(Autumn 2012–Spring 2013) represented the climax of the anti-gender rhetoric.
The syntagma ‘gender theory’ functioned both as the label by which the oppo-
nents of the law identified their adversaries and as a category of political mobi-
lization. The detractors of same-sex marriage apprehended same-sex marriage
as the consequence of ‘gender theory’. The banner opening one of the first
‘anti-gender’ demonstrations bore the slogan ‘ “marriage pour tous” = théorie
du gender pour tous’ (‘Marriage for all’ = gender theory for all).
This political controversy was re-launched by the French episcopacy in con-
trast to previous decades when the episcopacy had a more discrete presence
(Béraud and Portier 2015). The Vatican and the French Conference of Bish-
ops supplied both rhetoric and organizational resources to the protesters.
Anti-gender demonstrations were run by different groups that did not define
themselves as political or religious, yet all groups were related in one way
or the other to the Vatican’s structures or Catholic associations and move-
ments. The most important one was La Manif pour tous (LMPT), which, since
its creation in September 2012, claimed autonomy from political parties and
religious structures, yet remained connected to French Conference of Bish-
ops. Anti-gender protests also encompassed the creation of smaller groups

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

– such as the Hommen, the Antigones, the Veilleurs (Vigils) – that contrib-
uted to the constitution of the anti-gender cause with spectacular actions and
performances. Far-right, traditionalist or integralist Catholic groups, headed
by Institut Civitas, closely associated to the Society of St. Pius X, marched
autonomously from LMPT and organized prayers in the streets. These prayers,
notably, did not cause the same political scandal as did Muslim prayers in the
streets of Paris in 2011. In March 2013, criticism of the mildness of the political
strategies of LMPT gave rise to the new collective Printemps français (French
Spring) – a name coined to allude to the recent Arab Spring – in which identi-
tarian and far-right groups were deeply involved. Anti-gender rhetoric could
bypass all these political cleavages and splits: ‘gender’ operated as the com-
mon ground assembling these different forms of the protest, whose more
radicalized expressions worried the majority of the French episcopacy (Béraud
and Portier 2015).
How did the anti-gender protests translate and express anti-gender dis-
course? Which strategies of self-presentation did the protesters rely on to
embody anti-gender discursive devices? What was the outcome of this trans-
mutation of a rhetorical tool into embodied action? This strategy testifies to a
change of discursive repertoire. Rather than claiming the inferiority of LGBTQ
people, it shifts to the notion of ‘natural family’ understood as the bedrock of
humanity. Following this logic, if the ‘natural family’ exists and it is the conju-
gal heterosexual one, the child becomes the innocent victim of the hedonism
and egoism of LGBTQ individuals. ‘Protect the children’ was the slogan written
across Hommen’s naked torsos, images of frightened infants and children losing
their origins were widely invoked during the demonstrations, together with
slogans affirming ‘children’s right to have a father and mother’ and access to
‘their biological truth’. In alignment with this view, kinship was both biologized,
that is presented as the outcome of female and male gonads, and sacralized,
that is considered as a non-debatable issue (Borrillo 2014; Fassin 2014). Thus
‘gender ideology’ might be understood as a discursive device produced under
constraint, i.e., as a linguistic compromise between a certain intention and the
possibility of making it explicit considering what is socially audible in a given
political context.
Anti-gender demonstrations formally seize and restyle the adversary lan-
guage (colours, music, graphics, design, gestures, actions, references). This
strategy of semiotic re-appropriation had already begun by the end of the
1990s, with the World Youth Days and the demonstration organized by
Génération anti-PACS. Using nudity with slogans written on the body and the
enactment of performances, groups such as Hommen or the Veilleurs borrow
from the repertoire of groups such as Act-up or Femen. This re-appropria-
tion of the adversary’s codes testifies to a change in power relations between
LGBTQ groups and their opponents. At the same time, it comes with a rhetori-
cal strategy that aims to deny the existence of (hetero)sexist oppression. In
reversing the argument of oppression, anti-gender actors foster the idea that
dominant groups are ‘the real oppressed’. The invention and the use of terms
such as ‘familyphobia’ and ‘heterophobia’ were quintessential for this kind of
strategy.
The anti-gender rhetoric has also been enriched with the traditional work-
ers’ movement argument that distinguishes and opposes sexual questions to
economic issues. More broadly, the iconography picked up graphics and slogans

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

used by left-wing movements or parties, such as slogans of the left wing party
Front de Gauche during the last Presidential and European Elections. This
allowed anti-gender demonstrators to present themselves as ‘common peo-
ple’, who fight for their economic livelihood against a privileged élite whose
only concerns would be sexual issues. They also depict themselves as the true
revolutionaries opposed to ‘gay conformism’ and ‘gender dictatorship’. This
was supported by graphics and design referring to revolutionary movements
and moments, and notably those of May 68, the Arab Spring, or appropriated
heroes of the French resistance such as Jean Moulin or the General Charles de
Gaulle. Anti-gender demonstrators finally presented themselves as non-violent
against the violence of the State. They referred to Gandhi and depicted Presi-
dent François Hollande and the Prime Minister Manuel Valls with features of
dictators such as Hitler and Stalin.
All these rhetorical and praxeological strategies of self-presentation per-
formed by different groups of protesters enacted the Vatican’s definition of
gender as a ‘totalitarian ideology’. As it was performed during demonstra-
tions, chanted like a mantra, depicted as the main enemy on the posters and
uncritically re-used by media, the syntagma ‘gender theory’ became not only
a category of action for thousands of demonstrators, but also a new category
of perception. Anti-gender demonstrations thus operated as performances of
‘gender ideology’ producing performative effects: the syntagma ‘gender the-
ory’ has operated as a performative utterance that transforms the social reality
it supposedly describes.
The anti-gender movement succeeded in producing major political effects.
The introduction of the same-sex marriage law was strongly criticized by the
LGBTQ movement for its limited scope (Borrillo 2014), the project of a new law
concerning LGBTQ parenting was postponed, the term gender was removed
in ministerial documents and an experimental scholastic program against gen-
der stereotypes was interrupted. These political achievements produced strong
ripples in other European countries (Paternotte 2015).

The Italian Adaptation of the French Lesson: A Bastion of Human

Civilization Against an Anthropological Revolution
Since the summer of 2013, a vast anti-gender campaign has been taking place
in Italy and within a few months gender became a salient political category. The
success of French anti-gender mobilizations encouraged Catholic associations
to fully adopt the anti-gender rhetoric. The Italian anti-gender movement, in
other words, was created by copying and pasting the logos, the names, and the
style of the main anti-gender French protests. New groups were created as the
equivalent of French ones: La Manif pour tous – Italia (LMPT-I), the Sentinelle in
Piedi (Standing Sentinels) and Hommen-Italy.
Still, behind the formal similarities and the sharing of their main target, that
is reaffirming the transcendent nature of the sexual order, the adjustment of
this rhetorical device to the specificities of the Italian context produced a differ-
ent repertoire of action, political alliances, and effects. In contrast to the French
LMPT, which is a collective gathering different groups, LMPT-I is a single organi-
zation whose main role has been to personify the leader of the Italian anti-gen-
der protest and to inscribe it in a transnational successful movement. In addition

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

to LMPT-I, a plethora of legal subjects (committees and boards) were consti-

tuted to spread anti-gender discourse using non-religious arguments (mainly
the protection of the children and the defence of human ecology), all of them
pointing back to a few individuals associated with the Vatican and the Italian
Conference of Bishops or to family and anti-abortion associations (De Guerre
2016). These committees connect the main actors fuelling the anti-­ gender
­Italian movement: they include three anti-abortion movements (Scienza e Vita,
Giuristi per la Vita and Notizie Pro-Vita) and a traditionalist Catholic association,
Alleanza Cattolica (Catholic Alliance). These organizations used the anti-gender
cause as a new opportunity to promote their purpose by inscribing it in a wider
framework, that is the defence of human nature against the ‘anthropological
revolution’ produced by what these activists call ‘gender’ (Avanza 2015). Gen-
der succeeded in operating as a rallying cry federating a wide range of differ-
ent Catholic groups – from the Forum delle Associazioni Familiari to neo-fascist
groups such as Forza Nuova – in order to fuel a moral panic and to block legal
and social reforms concerning sexual and reproductive health and rights and
LGBTQ rights.
Italian protesters used the same references as those developed by the Vati-
can and employed in France, yet adapted them to a context in which gender is
ignored as a concept and as such more easy to demonize. Gender is the enemy
coming from abroad menacing Italian national identity. Not only does gender
amount to ‘ideological colonization’, it also becomes both the symbol of what
is ‘transhuman’ and the metonymy of the secular and capitalist West threaten-
ing Catholic values that should constitute a ground for European identities. In
opposing this ‘anthropological revolution’, Italy is presented by the anti-gen-
der protesters as ‘the lighthouse’ and ‘the bastion of human civilization’ which
should become the reference for all European countries.
Moreover, given the peculiarities of the Italian context, the references to
homophobia and feminist scholarship play out differently. In France, where
anti-homophobia legislation has been in place since 2004, demonstra-
tors formally declare themselves as non-homophobic. In Italy, where anti-­
discrimination law on the basis of sexual orientation is lacking, anti-gender
demonstrators reject the pertinence of anti-homophobia. As for feminism,
sexual difference thinking has strongly influenced the Italian feminist move-
ment, and hence the anti-gender campaign is focused on a feminism that is
perceived as coming from abroad. The term gender is most often used in Eng-
lish, thus reactivating the topos claiming that it would be a non-translatable
term. Italian feminism may even be presented as Catholic Church’s ally against
gender (Galeotti 2009).
Demonstrators performed similar strategies of self-presentation as the
French: they presented themselves as peaceful citizens and victims of a ‘totali-
tarian ideology’ seeking to destroy human nature. As in France, the register of
the interventions invokes both ‘reality’ and biology. Their repertoire of action
included conferences, street vigils, and Family Day rallies. All these actions were
coordinated by anti-abortion associations and traditionalist groups mobilising
by means of two distinct registers of intervention. The first, one of expertise for
the conferences and the second, the concern of common citizens responding
to what they consider a democratic urgency by means of vigils and demon-
strations. Conferences are supposed to inform lay people about gender and its

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

purported offences to children. Several times per week, they gather experts,
such as doctors and lawyers, and witnesses, such as ex-gays or ex-lesbians, in
order to spread pseudo-scientific arguments that borrow from theories of
reparative therapy (Avanza 2015). Street vigils are organized by the Sentinelle
in piedi. They stand in front of a town hall or court of justice silently absorbed
in reading a book they have in their hands. Their refusal to speak is meant to
be a warning of the threats to freedom of speech and diversity of thinking that
‘LGBT lobbies’ would enact. The Sentinelle present their actions as a form of
non-violent resistance inspired by Gandhi. Hundreds of vigils have been orga-
nized since the Fall of 2013 and their success overtook the one of their French
counterpart to the extent that the French groups renamed themselves Senti-
nelles to align with the Italian groups, to capitalize upon their achievements,
and create a clearly recognisable transnational movement. Although they claim
to be apolitical, journalists established a connection with Alleanza Cattolica,
which is in turn linked to the international organization of traditional Catholics
called Tradition, Family and Property.
Finally, the main anti-gender actors convened two new Family Days in June
2015 and in January 2016. These new rallies targeted ‘gender theory as an ideo-
logical colonization’ and the adoption of a new law on civil unions under dis-
cussion in Parliament. The Episcopacy only partially endorsed these two new
Family Days, as some Bishops preferred to avoid frontal opposition to political
authorities. This divide was mirrored within movements and associations: while
more radical movements considered the demonstrations as an effective way to
influence parliament, the leaders of movements such as Communion and Lib-
eration, Rinnovamento dello Spirito, and the Forum delle Associazioni Familiari
preferred to exercise more prudent forms of influence.
Thanks to the strong mobilization of Catholic associations, in just a few
months ‘gender ideology’ succeeded in becoming a salient political category.
The ‘anti-gender’ movement has achieved important political successes: the
implementation in schools of a strategy against homophobia and transphobia
was blocked in 2014 a few days after the President of the CEI expressed his oppo-
sition against ‘the dictatorship of gender that is transforming public schools
in re-education camps and indoctrination’; the discussion of the bill on hate
crimes related to sexual orientation and gender identity has been abandoned
and in February 2016 the Italian Senate passed a watered-down bill recognising
same-sex civil unions. The Home Affairs Minister, Angelino Alfano, declared that
the opponents to the bill succeeded in ‘preventing a revolution against nature
and anthropological’ (sic). Moreover, several town halls adopted deliberations
to oppose ‘gender ideology’, ‘anti-gender’ slogans have been broadcasted by
led-signposts at crossroads and in few bookstores new shelves appeared clas-
sifying books under the category ‘gender ideology’. In these bookstores Judith
­Butler’s books face the books by anti-gender authors, as if they were different
but equivalent intellectual positions.
This success is related to how the ‘gender ideology’ rhetoric has been con-
structed: a Catholic transnational discourse deploying as an ‘anthropological’
and scientific point of view on ‘what is human’. But it also speaks to its capacity
to create a moral panic in a country where the Vatican still exercises a huge polit-
ical and cultural influence, where sexual difference theories are persuasive and
where family policies are lacking. The Italian welfare regime is characterized by

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

a paradox: the ‘natural family’ is symbolically sacralized in public discourse but

families are not sustained by the State. There is an extremely weak presence of
public policies supporting families and a strong presence of Catholic institutions
(co-financed with public funds dealing with education and health). So what is
at stake for the Vatican is its capacity of remaining the authority concerning the
sexual order and a powerful supplier of services to Italian families.

Conclusion: ‘Gender Ideology’ as a Political Reaction to a

Political and Epistemological Revolution
In this article, I study ‘gender ideology’ as a new rhetorical device that seeks to
establish that sexual norms are neither historical nor political. By analysing the
structure of the anti-gender discourse and how it has been reformulated and
performed in demonstrations in France and Italy, I suggest that the political suc-
cesses achieved by anti-gender campaigns should be understood as the combi-
nation of two elements: the specificities of the anti-gender device itself and the
characteristics of the national contexts where it was deployed. The strength of
‘gender ideology’ as a discursive device lies in its form (a Catholic discourse pre-
sented as an anthropological evidence on human nature), its impressive rhetoric
(notably the use of the notion of victimhood), and its plasticity. Constructed
in a transnational manner, ‘gender ideology’ is an empty signifier capable of
adjusting to different national contexts and different sexual issues (gender and
sexuality studies, same-sex marriage, LGBT parenting, school or legal reforms,
sexual reproductive health and rights). Different actors who support the belief
that sexual norms transcend history have deployed this rhetorical construction,
and have successfully adapted it to different national contexts, thus creating an
transnational circulation of arguments and actions sustained by complex forms
of intertextuality and connections. Articulated in texts and performed and ritu-
alized in street demonstrations, this struggle against the denaturalization of
the sexual order operated as an instituting act producing what it enunciates
(Bourdieu 2001). ‘Gender ideology’ now exists in the French and the Italian con-
text as a category of perception, mobilization, and action.
This rhetorical device acts efficaciously because it reaffirms in a new man-
ner that the sexual order transcends history. This belief, far from being specific
to the Catholic Church, is largely shared by many social actors. Thanks to the
strength of the arrangements naturalizing sexual norms, sex and sexuality tend
to be socially perceived as natural facts. ‘Gender ideology’ has the power to cre-
ate a moral panic because it concerns what is deeply believed and inscribed in
our categories of perception, appreciation, and action as natural. As Christine
Delphy writes, without the system of gender we lose our points of reference
and ‘humankind itself seems to be in danger’ (Delphy 2001: 31). In this sense,
she argues, gender, that is the system producing men and women as two com-
plementary natural groups, operates as a cosmology: a world without gender
seems unthinkable. So those feminist or LGBT theories and claims contrasting
the idea that sexes are natural and complementary groups destabilize a deeply
rooted belief.
The Vatican has chosen to demonize the concept of gender as the symbol of
these analyses and those struggles undermining the belief in the naturalness of

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Garbagnoli: Against the Heresy of Immanence

the sexual order. What upsets the Catholic Church is not gender in itself – g
­ ender
may be used in a naturalistic and normative way as a synonym for ‘women’ con-
sidered as a ‘natural group’ –, but gender as a critical concept denaturalizing
sexual order (Scott 2013).7 Since their emergence in the 1970s, sexual minori-
ties’ theories and claims have contributed to produce a radical critique of the
doxa interpreting social facts as if they were natural kinds: the regime of the
sexual order, the nature of sex groups, the sexual division of work. As Colette
Guillaumin argues, the introduction of the denaturalization of the sexual order
into the intellectual field has not led to a refinement of knowledge, but rather
overturned the perspective (Guillaumin 1995). Guillaumin’s analysis does not
seek to account for the heterogeneity, the differences, and the tensions that
characterize the theories produced in gender and sexuality studies. It aims at
highlighting the epistemological revolution that came along with minoritarian
knowledge entering politics and the academy. As she wrote in Racism, Sexism,
Power and Ideology, ‘from oppressed peoples comes the radical contention that
the world can be thought of in terms of essences. From them comes the knowl-
edge that nothing happens that is not historical, that nothing is ever impervi-
ous to change, that no one is the bearer (or expression) of a ‘being’ or of an
eternal fate, and, ultimately, that practice makes this history’ (Guillaumin 1995:
168). In this vein, the invention of ‘gender ideology’ may be understood as a
new political reaction to this political and theoretical revolution producing ‘the
knowledge that social groups are the results of relationships and not just the
“elements” of those relationships’ (Guillaumin 1995). The successes of anti-gen-
der movements prove that this revolution is far from being achieved and needs
to be tenaciously carried forward.

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