Authors

Discussion

This article investigates the potential of antigenderism for providing Russia with soft power in Western Europe, taking Norway as an example. “Soft power” has mainly been discussed in relation to the spread of culturally liberal ideas but, as Keating and Kaczmarska (2019, p. 2) argue, ‘rejecting the potential attractiveness of illiberal values closes off an important avenue to understand potential challenges to contemporary international order’. Building on their article on Russia’s potential for ‘illiberal soft power’, we look for similarities between certain discourses on sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) in Norway and Russia, and for positive framings of Russian policies in Norwegian discourse in the period 06.12.2020 – 06.12.2021. We find that both Norwegian and Russian media contain discourses where the freedom to be conservative, and children’s safety, are constructed as under attack from ‘gender ideology.’ This discursive overlap gives Russia some soft power potential over antigenderist milieus in Norway, but the potential appeared weakly realized in practice as the Norwegian texts contained few explicitly appreciative references to Russian gender policy.