How do emotions fuel anti-gender movements, and how can they fuel resistance too?

What makes fear so politically powerful — and what happens when joy becomes a strategy of resistance?

In this episode of Dialogues for Resistance, we explore how anti-gender movements mobilise emotions to shape public life. These campaigns do not rely on arguments alone: they manufacture moral panic, recruit fear and outrage, and turn children, families, and the nation into emotional symbols of threat. The result is not abstract. It affects how feminist, queer, trans, and racialised communities move through everyday life — producing vigilance, exhaustion, and shrinking spaces of freedom.

But emotions do not belong only to reactionary politics. Joy, care, humour, anger, creativity, and collective resilience can also sustain resistance. They help communities refuse silence, survive hostility, and keep feminist and queer futures imaginable.

Join us as we ask how emotions fuel anti-gender politics — and how they can also nourish solidarity, courage, and the desire to live otherwise.

Keyword: affect, feelings, media panics, manipulation, anger, fear, love, care

Episode Citation: Kulpa, R., & Zabrzewska, A. (2026). Vulnerabilities: Weak Resistances and Precarity (S01E03). Podcasting Social Justice: Dialogues for Resistances (Podcast Series). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22048336

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CITING THE PODCAST SERIES:

Kulpa, R., & Zabrzewska, A. (2026). Podcasting Social Justice: Dialogues for Resistances (Podcast Series). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21676257