Description
In recent years, attacks on the ‘rise of gender ideology’ as a sociopolitical force, on gender studies as an academic field, and on individuals – whether they be scholars, activists or policy makers – seen to be their embodied representatives, have grown in scope and intensity as well as in their geographical reach and transnational connectivity. Prominent examples include the banning of gender studies in Hungary; gender panics deployed against the peace agreement in Colombia; and assaults on feminists campaigning against sexual violence in India and Pakistan. These attacks have deleterious effects on the bodily, psychic, and economic security of women and the non-conforming sexual and gender subjects who are denied basic rights and dignity and access to healthcare, and are made even more vulnerable to physical violation. They undermine fields of study that social justice movements have fought hard to establish. They cause, in other words, harm that is both symbolic and material; that is epistemic and bodily felt. This panel understands such anti-gender attacks as a formation in need of urgent analytical and political attention and interrogates them from a specifically transnational feminist perspective. The papers on this panel interrogate: How do anti-gender mobilisations work as political formations? What animates their claims? How can they be resisted?
