Penelope’s Web : Institutional resistance against gender equality and LGBTI rights in Italy, 1995-2021

Compared to other historical periods, the last three decades have been characterized by a considerable legislative effort for gender and sexual equality. At the same time, gender equality remains a deeply contested political goal and progress has been patchy and confronted with resistance. These dynamics are the object of this thesis, which looks at the ways gender and sexuality legislations end up being toothless or fail to materialize altogether. The thesis asks how policies for gender+ equality are resisted in the institutional sphere; and which factors contribute to the failure of gender+ equality policies. I propose a conceptualization of loud and quiet forms of resistance to gender+ equality policies, bringing together interdisciplinary approaches from policy studies, feminist institutionalism and social movement studies. Empirically, I focus on the paradigmatic case of Italy, a country characterized by a slow process of liberalization compared to other post-industrial democracies, influenced by an entrenched conservative legacy and a renewed backlash against gender equality. Under these structural conditions, inclusionary policy efforts have often been ill-fated, and different forms of resistance are likely to occur. The empirical analysis consists of three in-depth case studies of policy failure, concerning gender representation and LGBTI hate crimes policy, both of which are understood as attempts at expanding gender and sexual equality in the domain of citizenship. An analysis of the implementation of non-quota gender representation policies shows that one form of resistance consists in turning gender equality policies into purely symbolic interventions. This analysis also reveals parties as important actors resisting changes to their gendered internal structures; and bureaucratic actors as responsible for policy inertia. A second case study, digging deeper into the dynamics of the policy formulation phase, highlights the importance of historical legacies and constellations of oppositional and supportive actors in determining these poor policy output. These findings are then complemented with another case study of policy adoption phase, this one focalising on discursive resistance to LGBTI hate crimes policy. Here, the analysis situates resistance in the strategic interactions between supporters and opponents, and the frames by which they articulate their positions. Taken together, these perspectives reveal the multidimensionality of resistance, showing how both loud and quiet forms of opposition at different stages of the policy process led to the failure of gender and sexual equality policies. The thesis also highlights commonalities in the set of actors resisting gender+ equality across different policy areas. In this way, the dissertation seeks to contribute to debates on varieties of opposition to gender equality policies and the gendering of institutions, as well the literature on the institutional impact of anti-gender movements. At the methodological level, the thesis draws on a mixed methods design, including documentary analysis, frame analyses of parliamentary debates, semistructured interviews and dictionary-based quantitative text analysis.