Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 27, Issue 4, 2024

The present article attempts towards theorising Strategic White Womanhood in the Dutch context, borrowing from and building on existing intersectional and critical-race frameworks addressing racism within and outside the Netherlands. It asserts that strategic white womanhood constitutes a tangible identity category that holds immense power due to the curious intersection of race and gender. The analysis utilises a variety of ethnographic methods, including participant observations and semi-structured interviews to identify a set of strategies deployed by white women to invoke innocence and avoid accountability in encountering the racialised other. These strategies include white fragility, white tears, white fear, white feminist racism, and colour-blindness. It argues that recognising said strategies is a step towards becoming critically conscious of mechanisms in place that enable the evasion of responsibility and undermine our collective potential for anti-racist solidarity building.

Anti-gender mobilisations are widely studied in Europe showing a rise in violence against women, LGBTQ+ persons and racialised people. Belgium, however, is often overlooked in this body of research. Previous studies on the Belgian case focused mainly on Catholic resistance against abortion as well as LGBTQ+ rights and identities, concluding that anti-gender mobilizations have not been influential. This paper intends to expand this knowledge by turning the lens on more recent mobilisations in Belgian public debates. It shows that abortion is no longer a central issue in resistances against gender equality. Instead, I will argue that currently transgender issues are central to anti-gender activism. By focussing on an aetiology of trans identities and gender dysphoria, anti-trans actors aim to restrict access to gender-affirming health care. Furthermore, these anti-trans mobilizations not limited to religious inspirations but are now (re)produced by a wide array of actors including humanists, academics, doctors, and politicians.