| Sumario: | Kerala, a Southern Indian state, has recently witnessed a new wave of religious and political opposition against 'gender politics', a term increasingly used to criticize progressive changes concerning gender and sexuality. This article positions the ongoing discursive shift around 'gender' in Kerala's public sphere as a distinctive anti-gender mobilization, emerging partly through ideological reliance on Western anti-gender movements and partly diverging from them. Through a critical discourse analysis of major events from the past 6 years, this paper traces the manufacturing of anti-gender mobilization in Kerala and its role as a new (pseudo)intellectual framework and vocabulary of social conservatism, emphasizing how trans-queer bodies and gender-just initiatives in educational spaces have become sites of 'gender debates'. Texts produced around these occurrences are analysed alongside insights from interviews with queer-trans student activists. By examining the ongoing interaction between numerous local and global agents of anti-gender politics, which surprisingly align with both fascist and anti-fascist, liberal and illiberal, secular and religious formations in Kerala, this paper suggests the necessity of rethinking the geo-political nuances involved in imagining liberatory political discourse.
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