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In times of democratic uncertainty, shrinking civic space, and contracting political freedoms, debates on democratic resilience tend to focus primarily on governments, institutions, and political parties. Social movement studies have highlighted how democracy also depends on social and relational infrastructures that sustain participation, collective voice, and political agency beyond formal institutions. This panel brings together two fields—social movement studies and gender studies—to examine the role of gender-based networks in producing and maintaining these infrastructures.
Feminist, queer, and transfeminist networks are not only protest actors resisting political and cultural backlash. Recent scholarship has often focused on protest in moments of high visibility and mass mobilisation. Yet these networks also perform other crucial democratic functions, particularly when institutions, civil liberties, and civic spaces are under strain. Through practices of solidarity, care, coalition-building, knowledge and resource circulation, lived political memory, and the creation of inclusive spaces, these networks can maintain collective capacities and forms of participation even when visible protest declines or becomes increasingly constrained by restrictive laws.
The panel asks: What democratic functions do gender-based networks perform under conditions of democratic crisis? How do they sustain political participation and collective agency when civic space contracts? Under what conditions do these networks succeed—or fail—in functioning as democratic infrastructures?
By shifting attention from the resilience of democratic institutions to the social infrastructures of democracy from below, the panel highlights forms of political action that often remain less visible than mass mobilisation. It is particularly interested in periods of repression, demobilisation, or movement abeyance, when networks may preserve relationships, resources, political memory, and capacities for future mobilisation.
The panel welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions examining feminist, queer, transfeminist, and other gender-based networks across different political contexts. Relevant processes may include shrinking civic spaces, movement abeyance and remobilisation, antifascist activities, coalition-building, mutual care, online organising, and other practices through which democratic capacities are sustained, transformed, and preserved. Methodologically, the panel embraces pluralism and welcomes qualitative and quantitative approaches, comparative and single-case studies, ethnographic research and, in line with a growing interest in the social science, visual methods.