This paper analyses antifeminist public discourse in interwar Poland through the case of the Sadowska affair (1923–1925), a widely publicised scandal targeting Dr. Zofia Sadowska, a physician, feminist activist, and publicly visible professional woman. Accused in the press of lesbian relationships and moral corruption, Sadowska became the focus of an intense media campaign that transformed her from a political and professional actor into a sensationalised public figure. The paper argues that antifeminism in this case operated not only as moral condemnation but as a mass-cultural spectacle. Newspapers, satirical journals, writers, and cabaret culture actively participated in the scandal, turning it into a form of entertainment and celebrity discourse. This spectacularisation helped normalise misogynist and antifeminist narratives by framing women’s emancipation as social danger, ridicule, and moral crisis. Methodologically, the paper combines qualitative discourse analysis with media-history tools (genre analysis, framing, and intertextual mapping across news, satire and performance). I trace three recurring discursive moves: (1) feminisation-as-threat (women’s autonomy and feminist organising framed as contagion); (2) sexualisation-as-governance, where newspapers styled themselves as vigilant moral police acting “in the public interest”; and (3) spectacle-as-depoliticisation, where democratic debate is displaced by scandal talk, laughter and celebrity gossip. Satirical outlets helped cement Sadowska as a “model” of the lesbian figure - simultaneously comic and demonic - making misogyny and antifeminism pleasurable to consume. By situating the Sadowska affair within the broader context of interwar democratic instability, the paper interprets antifeminist scandal politics as a symptom of democratic stress, in which sensationalist public discourse displaced deliberation and legitimised exclusionary and authoritarian modes of regulating gender and sexuality.

In the public spheres of many post-socialist countries, there is an important legacy of human rights discourse descending from the 1960s and 1980s. In this discourse, Soviet pressure and occupation were criticised not in national terms, but in terms of neglected human rights and forced separation from Europe and Western countries. These countries were divided and united by a post-Enlightenment and post-Hegelian propinquity to individualism and universalism, which was reflected in each people's values, civil responsibility, and basic guarantees. In post-World War II Europe, this discursive situation was based on the dramatic crisis of nationalist rhetoric and fragmented cosmopolitanism in Soviet discourse, such as unconditional peace (though only on paper, as evidenced by the cases of Hungary and Czechoslovakia), labour rights, social guarantees, and antifascism. Given the obvious hypocrisy of this Soviet rhetoric, the discourse of dissent in defence of human rights and the cosmopolitanist requirement for open national borders emerged — and finally appeared successful as public rhetoric after the collapse of the USSR. Today, with the undermining of the 'United World' order by populist movements and politicians, including Putin and Trump, as well as in the context of the ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine and the generational shift, the defence of human rights appears to be receiving less attention in the public sphere. This provides further encouragement for right-wing populists who stir up nostalgia and hide imperialist military expansionism under the guise of 'counteracting nationalism'. In this situation, it is important to reconsider the rhetoric of human rights as a sustainable and previously successful discourse of democracy, instead of its 19th-century beginnings rooted in the Romanticist image of national communities, and of citizenship as responsibility-based public engagement. In my paper, I will examine these logics and tendencies underlying the discursive and conceptual analysis of public representation, as well as conducting in-depth interviews with activists in contemporary Ukraine. In particular, I will focus on framing such concepts as human rights and identity. Although these concepts were previously separated in dissident discourses of human rights under socialism, as well as in classic Habermasian theories, they now appear to be rhetorically united (either as acceleration or deep antagonism) in the context of war.

In my presentation, based on the recently published survey, I would like to concentrate on how a peculiar kind of antigender movement influences queer women in Russia. In the case of contemporary Russia, the context of the full-scale war against Ukraine, which steadily influences more and more sides of social life, transforms roles and practices of hegemonic masculinity and puts antigender movements in the position of collaborators of state violence against civil resistance and dissent. In addition to this, the context of the war enhances the readiness of antigender activists to resort to violence and aggression, because their victims become associated with the image of the enemy and with a perceived threat of conquest. I will present the results of qualitative and quantitative research demonstrating how far, and in which social areas, the state’s connivance with the antigender sentiments of far-right activists influences the everyday lives of queer women in Russia. Last but not least, I will demonstrate how the radicalization of activists with far-right and antigender convictions in Russia dissolves some of the differences in the reasons for vulnerability common to transgender and cisgender queer women. Both groups start to be perceived as both “not male” individuals and as those infringing upon the patriarchal gender order. Consequently, both cisgender and transgender queer women in Russia find themselves in a situation of constant secrecy, frequently associated with experiences of violence or discrimination based on exclusion and derogation as “not normal women.” This observation, and the comparison with the situation in Russia, seems to be of additional importance in the context of conservative public narratives in European countries that attempt to negate the category of gender and to oppose women’s rights to queer rights, as well as cisgender women to transgender women as vulnerable groups.

Opposition to women’s and LGBTQI+ rights has become a key site of global de-democratisation, with anti-gender movements mobilizing across borders to contest liberal norms and rights. While research has shown that these actors articulate strikingly similar positions across national contexts, it remains insufficiently understood how such similarity translates into shared transnational action. This study examines how anti-gender movements collectively generate transnational visibility on social media by analyzing ten years of Twitter/X communication from 148 anti-gender social movement organizations (SMOs) in Croatia, Germany, France, Italy, and Poland. Using discourse network analysis and drawing on concepts of networked framing and discourse coalitions, the study examines how shared hashtag practices connect actors, frames, and issues across national contexts. The findings show that anti-gender movements co-create visibility through a threefold pattern, including the continuous dissemination of ideological narratives, the episodic activation of campaigns, and the strategic extension of anti-gender frames into broader political and cultural debates. These practices enable actors to jointly spread anti-gender frames across multiple publics while also adapting to divergent political contexts. Overall, the study advances understandings of contemporary de-democratization processes by showing how anti-gender actors collectively advance their agenda transnationally through networked social media practices without requiring formal coordination.