Narratives of Catholic women against ‘Gender ideology’ in Italian schools: defending childhood, struggling with pluralism

The role of the Vatican in the mobilization against the so-called gender ideology is structural and well established in the public arena, in Italy as in Europe. However, signs of a growing ambivalence in its attitude towards the protest have lately emerged, for example in relation to the visibility of far-right movements and aggressively right-wing parties within the movement. The paper investigates the same ambivalence among Italian Catholics groups and networks involved in the anti-gender fight. The analysis is based on 17 interviews with Catholic mothers and/or teachers who attended anti-gender conferences in 2015 and expressed their willingness to engage in school surveillance in order to prevent allegedly pro-gender activities. Results show a broad convergence towards the idea that the ‘ideology of gender’ exists and represents a serious danger for children. At the same time, interviewees express different political and cultural stances in relation to their protest. The dissimilarity detected in anti-gender narratives shed some lights on the different ways Italian Catholic activists try to oppose, manage, or solve issues related to state secularization and sexual pluralism.