This open access book examines the entanglement of authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and anti-gender politics through an in-depth analysis of Turkey under the rule of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). It argues that anti-gender politics is not a peripheral backlash against women's and LGBTI+ rights, but a central governing strategy that actively reshapes democratic institutions, political legitimacy, and citizenship. By mobilizing opposition to “gender ideology,” authoritarian actors construct moralized political imaginaries that legitimize exclusion, hierarchy, and repression in the name of protecting the nation, family, and children. The book conceptualizes this process as moralized authoritarian rule, in which political authority is justified through moral binaries of good and evil and sacralized social anchors such as the heterosexual family. The analysis foregrounds the Islam–gender nexus as a key site where religion, nationalism, and gender converge to produce exclusionary forms of belonging and legitimation. Moving beyond state-centric accounts, the book introduces the concept of an Islamist anti-gender power bloc to show how state institutions and Islamist mobilizations co-produce authoritarian gender politics at discursive, organizational, and policy levels. In addition to mapping authoritarian consolidation, the book examines feminist counter-movements, highlighting their creative repertoires of resistance, affective resilience, and coalition-building under conditions of democratic erosion. By theorizing anti-gender politics within an authoritarian context shaped by Islamist nationalism, the book advances a globally relevant framework for understanding how gendered moral projects actively sustain power and legitimacy in contemporary authoritarian regimes, and how feminist counter-forces contest them, opening alternative democratic imaginaries.


The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a standard CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective