“These fascists are stopped with rights!”: Feminist democratic responses to anti-gender opposition in Parliament

The resurgence of far-right politics in Europe has intensified political violence against feminists, women, racialized and LGBTQI+ people, and other marginalized subjects in parliaments, threatening democracy and equality. Feminist institutional responses frame far-right anti-gender politics as manifestations of fascist legacies, challenge the normalization of far-right ideologies in liberal democracies, and pinpoint the democratising role of feminist politics. Drawing on parliamentary debates and interviews from the Spanish and Catalan parliaments, the paper shows how feminist institutional responses explicitly expose far-right violence by invoking ‘fascism’ and ‘antifascism’, associating the former with illiberalism, violence, and right-stripping and the latter with the defense of fundamental rights and social justice.