Reactionary Feminism in The Global South: Conservative Women's Movements Redefining Gender Politics

This doctoral research paper examines the emergence and political significance of reactionary feminism, a conceptual category denoting organised women’s movements that deploy feminist language, solidarity frameworks, and identity politics in service of socially conservative agendas across three Global South contexts: India, Brazil, and Nigeria. While mainstream feminist scholarship has primarily mapped women’s activism on a progressive-to-radical spectrum, this study interrogates the growing phenomenon of conservative women who actively mobilise against gender-progressive policies while simultaneously claiming feminist or proto-feminist identities. Drawing on a qualitative design integrating comparative case analysis, critical discourse analysis (CDA) of movement texts and social media communication, the paper advances three principal arguments. First, reactionary feminism is not a monolithic or externally imported phenomenon but emerges from specific postcolonial configurations of religious nationalism, neoliberal governance, and gendered citizenship. Second, these movements exhibit sophisticated strategic agency, appropriating the epistemic authority of feminist discourse to delegitimise progressive feminist demands. Third, existing theoretical frameworks, including liberal feminism, postcolonial feminism, and right-wing populism literature, are individually insufficient to account for this phenomenon, necessitating a new analytical framework termed ‘sovereign feminism.’ The paper contributes to debates on gender and democratisation, right-wing populism in the Global South, and the contested boundaries of feminist politics.