This article analyzes the gender order in contemporary South Africa by tracing the political, ideological, and material tensions shaping current struggles over gender justice. We treat gender as a historically situated and relational structure of power, formed through race, class, sexuality, nation, and the coloniality of being and knowing. Although the democratic transition established a strong institutional commitment to equality, structural violence against women and queer people remains endemic, while Black women and gender-diverse communities continue to face economic exclusion and dispossession. Against this backdrop, political party manifestos increasingly use gender to signal stability, legitimacy, and order. Gender equality is presented as evidence of democratic progress, but is often emptied of transformative force. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of party manifestos from 2016 to 2024, read alongside scholarship on South Africa’s post-1994 gender order, we show how reactionary gender logics circulate through nationalist rhetoric, religious conservatism, traditionalist appeals, and technocratic managerialism. We argue that South Africa’s gender order is being ambivalently reconfigured as progressive and conservative projects coexist and emancipatory language is appropriated to stabilize hierarchy.